Submitted by Evelyn C. McDonald
Arts & Culture Reporter
February 24, 2016 11:00 a.m.
Saturday was one of those sunny but cool days February sometimes treats us to before slapping us with a freeze warning. It was a great day for the Book Festival Author Expo/Readers Extravaganza at the Fernandina Beach Middle School. The Festival Extravaganza is free each year. It offers the opportunity to hear authors talk about their craft and to tour the tables of authors promoting their books. Children and parents can attend book readings or engage in creative crafts.
The author expo featured authors in all sorts of genres. Travel, poetry, non-fiction, fiction, history – you name it and they were there. From having been associated with the Book Festival for the past few years, I saw a number of writers with familiar names. These are authors that have supported the festival for years. And I even saw two writers I know personally.
Berta Arias had her book, Mango Rain. Some of you may know Berta as she teaches short courses in Spanish that have been very popular here for the Center For Lifelong Learning. The book grew out of a meeting with cousins in Cuba that she had not seen since she was very young. Berta said that she keeps picking up threads in the first book that either extend back into the past or foreshadow the future so she is working on both a sequel and a prequel.
The other writer was Nola Perez who was there with her poetry and memoirs. I was taken with the title of one of her memoirs. Gotta love a book that’s called Cruising With The Kir Queen: My Brussels Journal. For those of you who don’t know, Kir is a French concoction that pairs dry white wine with Cassis. Trust me on this; it turns an ordinary breakfast into brunch.
I went to three breakout sessions to hear Greg Iles, Michael Wiley, and Steve Berry talk about their approach to writing and the type of novels they like to write. Greg Iles writes big novels, such as Natchez Burning, first of a trilogy about crime and passion in a Southern setting. Michael Wiley has the distinction of writing hard boiled crime fiction and teaching English Romantic poets at the University of North Florida. Steve Berry has been a friend of the festival almost since its beginnings. He talked about this forthcoming Cotton Malone novel, a series he began with The Templar Legacy, many novels ago.
The expo was sponsored by Online Binding and the Mystery Writers of America, Florida Chapter. Once again, the Book Festival Board knocked themselves out to put on a great day.
Evelyn McDonald moved to Fernandina Beach from the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. in 2006. She is a chair of Arts & Culture Nassau, a city commission charged with support of the arts in Nassau County. She serves on FSCJ’s Curriculum Committee for the Center for Lifelong Learning. She is also the chair of the Dean’s Council for the Carpenter Library at the UNF. Ms. McDonald has MS in Technology Management from the University of Maryland’s University College and a BA in Spanish from the University of Michigan.