130,000 people attended this year's Tucson Festival of Books

Tess Gerritsen traveled to Tucson from Maine, William Kent Krueger from Minnesota.

Then there is Sarah T. Dubb ... who lives less than a mile away and walked.

“I can’t tell you that going to the festival as a presenting author was a dream come true, because I never could have dreamt up such a thing,” she laughed last week. “To be a first-time author, to have an event like this right up the street from my house, and then to be part of it all ...

“Wow!”

Sometimes lost in the buzz surrounding America’s second-largest book festival is the fact it is still Tucson’s festival of books.

Thirty-five authors from the greater Tucson area appeared on festival stages last month. Several, such as Anne Hillerman, Jillian Cantor and Adam Rex, discussed recent bestsellers. Others, such as Dubb and Jessica Elisheva Emerson, came with highly decorated debuts.

All of them contributed to the uniquely Tucson experience that has become a festival trademark.

“Tucson is not only a city that reads, but it is also one that writes,” Executive Director Abra McAndrew said. “I’m not sure all our authors know that when they get here. Chances are they know it when they leave.”

Exhibit A: Sarah T. Dubb, a local librarian whose first novel, “Birding with Benefits,” was released last June. Set in Tucson, “Birding” quickly caught the eye of NPR and became a hit. Still, Dubb wasn’t sure how she’d be received at the book festival.

“Being a Tucson author who’s held several Tucson events, I wasn’t sure if attendees would be excited about seeing me or getting my book. I thought maybe I’d already met everyone who cared, but I was absolutely blown away by the beautiful spirit and generosity from the readers I met.”

The feeling was obviously mutual. “Birding” was one of the festival’s 10 top-selling books.

“It was so fun doing it all in my hometown,” Dubb said. “I was able to walk up to campus both mornings, see one of my kids performing on the mall, wave hello to friends as I scurried from place to place ... and I loved talking to other authors about Tucson.”

Despite a cold, windy Saturday morning, the 16th Tucson Festival of Books proved to be as popular as ever.

Officials at the University of Arizona estimated total attendance to be 130,000 people over the two-day weekend.

Dubb was one of 330 authors who presented on festival stages, and another 115 appeared in the Independent Author Pavilion.

Writers took part in 307 formal presentations, attracting audiences of more than 36,000 readers.

It will be weeks before a final accounting can be made, but it is not too soon to assess the weekend.

In a word, McAndrew said, it was “amazing.”

“One of our survey respondents said it was a ‘pinch me, how do they do it? experience,’ and I think a lot of people felt that way.”

As for the “How do they do it?” part, the answer is easy, the first-year director said.

“I knew the festival was volunteer-driven, but I didn’t really realize what that meant until I started to work here. A lot of our volunteers work on the festival year-round. They treat it like a full-time job. The level of dedication they have is just unbelievable.”

Hundreds of others volunteer their time on festival weekend and they, too, take their role seriously.

On March 14, the day before the festival began, dozens of festival authors were forced to alter their flights due to weather, delaying their arrival by hours.

“Some of our volunteer drivers stayed at the airport past midnight, refusing to abandon their authors,” McAndrew said. “Our volunteers are unbelievable.”

Even now, a month after the last books were placed back on the shelf, McAndrew is warmed by some of her memories from festival weekend.

“Jamie Quatro and Lee Hawkins both saw their high school teachers in the audience. I talked with authors who remembered coming here as kids, and authors who now bring their own kids. A lot of people have deeply personal reasons for loving the festival, and it’s great to hear their stories.”

Then there’s this:

“To think we brought 300-some authors here ... and it took all of them two or three years to write their books ... that’s 1,000 years of human thought they were able to share here in Tucson. How great is that?”

FOOTNOTES

• Lori Alexander, the Oro Valley author of a young-adult biography called “All in a Drop,” spent time between sessions with her 18-year-old daughter. “She grew up coming to the children’s area of the festival with me,” Alexander said. “Now that she’s an adult, she took me to a panel this time. We saw Rob Sheffield so we could hear about Taylor Swift. It was great!”
• Jessica Elisheva Emerson, the author of “Olive Days,” was reminded why Tucson is such a good place for creatives to make art. “I had the chance to meet Willy Vlautin, one of my idols. I was on two panels with luminary writers. I made a few literary friends-for-life. I’m finishing the first draft of my second novel, and I’m definitely hoping to be back to the festival soon.”
• Anne Hillerman, whose “Shadow of the Solstice” will be released April 22, appeared on a festival panel with Craig Johnson. He was the first winner of a competition named for Hillerman’s father: the Tony Hillerman/PEN USA Mystery Short Story Writing Contest in 2005. In the audience was Phoenix author Christina Estes, who won the Hillerman Prize for her then-unpublished novel, “Off the Air,” in 2020.
• Former Tucsonan Jamie Quatro was mid-thought when suddenly she stopped mid-sentence ... looking with wide-open eyes at a woman in the third row of a session Saturday morning at the festival. “Are you my high school English teacher Mrs. Callahan?!” she asked, incredulously. Indeed it was. Liz Callahan was one of Quatro’s first mentors at Sahuaro High on the east side.