West Virginia Book Festival Announces Featured Authors for 2023

The 2023 West Virginia Book Festival will be held at the Charleston Coliseum and Convention Center on Saturday, October 21. It will feature presentations from bestselling national authors, local and regional authors, writing workshops, family activities, a literary marketplace, and the annual Used Book Sale. All events and programs are free and open to the public.

This year’s featured speakers will be New York Times bestselling fantasy author R.F. Kuang, mystery novelist William Kent Krueger, novelist Mary Kay Andrews, children’s author Sherri Duskey Rinker, and West Virginia author Neema Avashia.

Rebecca F. Kuang is the award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy and Babel: An Arcane History, as well as her latest novel Yellowface.  Kuang won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer in 2019 and has been nominated for Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy awards.

William Kent Krueger writes the Cork O’Connor mystery series set in the north woods of Minnesota. His work has received a number of awards, including the Minnesota Book Award, the Loft-McKnight Fiction Award, the Anthony Award, the Barry Award, the Dilys Award, and the Friends of American Writers Prize. His last nine novels were all New York Times bestsellers.  Ordinary Grace, his stand-alone novel published in 2013, received the Edgar Award given by the Mystery Writers of America in recognition for the best novel published in that year.

Mary Kay Andrews is the New York Times bestselling author of The Beach House Cookbook and more than twenty novels, including The Weekenders, Ladies' Night, Spring Fever, Summer Rental, The Fixer Upper, Deep Dish, Blue Christmas, Savannah Breeze, Hissy Fit, Little Bitty Lies, and Savannah Blues. A former journalist for The Atlanta Journal Constitution, she lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Sherri Duskey Rinker is the #1 New York Times bestselling children’s author of Steam Train, Dream Train and the Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site series. She is also the author of Revver the Speedway Squirrel and its sequel, a brand-new picture book series that kicks off with Roto and Roy: Helicopter Heroes, and a nonfiction picture book biography Big Machines: The Story of Virginia Lee Burton, which received starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist.

Neema Avashia was born and raised in southern West Virginia to parents who immigrated to the United States. A queer Asian American teacher and writer, Avashia fits few Appalachian stereotypes. But the lessons she learned in childhood about race and class, gender and sexuality continue to inform the way she moves through the world today: how she loves, how she teaches, how she advocates, how she struggles.

Preceding the Book Festival on Thursday, October 19, the West Virginia Humanities Council will present the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. This year’s distinguished speaker is author, journalist, and tech humanist Cory Doctorow. Doctorow, a 2020 inductee into the Canadian Science Fiction Hall of Fame, is the author of over two dozen books. His new finance crime technothriller Red Team Blues releases in April 2023; and a new work of nonfiction, The Internet Con, will release in September 2023.

The West Virginia Book Festival is made possible by its charter presenters, The Kanawha County Public Library, The Library Foundation of Kanawha County, Inc., The West Virginia Humanities Council and The Charleston Gazette-Mail. Sponsors for this year’s festival include West Virginia Public Broadcasting, The West Virginia Library Commission, The West Virginia Center for the Book, The Marshall University Foundation, The Friends of The Library, Truist West Virginia Foundation, H.B. Wehrle Foundation, and the Nelle Ratrie Chilton Charitable Trust.

For more information visit www.wvbookfestival.org.