The Miami Book Fair enters its 31st year with a new director and an expanded vision.
Tom Healy, the new director of Miami Book Fair International, in his library.
The annual Miami Book Fair International is already one of the largest literary gatherings in the country. Last year saw a 200,000-strong crowd fill Miami Dade College’s downtown campus for a week of events featuring a who’s who of authors. But Tom Healy, the fair’s new director, has a message for those eagerly anticipating this month’s 31st edition of the fair: You ain’t seen nothing yet.
“We want what happens in the book fair to have resonance and reach far beyond that one week in November,” explains Healy, previously chairman of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board at the US Department of State. “What we hope for, more than any change with the book fair, is that the Center for Literature and Writing is going to become a larger presence. Miami has always had a strong writers’ culture. Writers live here, they come and spend time here. Yet it’s the visual arts and the performing arts that people really know as having strong Miami institutional bases. We want the center to become the place that puts Miami on the literary map year-round.”
Miami Herald columnist, author, and humorist Dave Barry interviewing the late Nora Ephron at the 2006 Miami Book Fair, where she talked about her book I Feel Bad About My Neck.
Healy, who is also assuming directorship of the Center for Literature and Writing (the fair’s parent at Miami Dade College), was already a part-time Miami Beach resident and a key player in local cultural circles. But his background is hardly that of a staid arts administrator. Indeed, as a former gallery owner, a host of New York’s proudly louche “Wilde Boys” poetry salon, and not least, a celebrated poet in his own right, Healy’s appointment signals a renewed focus on the part of the college.
Still, not everything at the fair is changing. Mitchell Kaplan, the fair’s cofounder and beloved public face, is remaining chair of its board, and as intimately involved as ever. “We’re a really great team,” Healy reassures. The pair promise more center-run year-round events, with a particular emphasis on authors whose primary language is Spanish, Portuguese, or Creole—all with accompanying translations. The fair itself will see a huge injection of literary star power: The National Book Awards finalists and winners, announced at a Manhattan ceremony the day before the fair’s final weekend, will all jet down to Miami for featured readings. It’ll be like Oscar night for books, but with less black tie and far more tweed.
Equally impressive, Healy is planning these expansions without additional college funding. Instead, as with the grants from the Knight Foundation and American Airlines helping to bring the National Book Award winners to the fair, Healy says he’ll rely on the private sector. “Promoting books and literature is a lot cheaper than mounting a large art performance,” he chuckles. “Writers need a closet-size room, a laptop, and maybe a lightbulb. But whether you’re bringing Pulitzer Prize winners, a great basketball star, or a culinary chef, there are ways they can help us teach the joys of writing and reading so it reaches all kinds of people.”
The fair offers something for all ages.
Still, that kind of populism makes some longtime fair fans nervous—particularly in light of the similarly Miami Dade College-run Miami Film Festival’s move to screen forgettable star vehicles in many of its prime programming slots. The result is celebrity glitz, but at what cost? Might the book fair take that as a cue and begin seeing serious novelists jockeying for space with reality-TV memoirists?
“I don’t think there’s any risk of us abandoning where serious literature comes from,” Healy insists firmly. “I’m on the board of PEN—I’ve met with writers around the world who are imprisoned or being censored for the urgency of what they have to say. So trivializing what the culture of creativity is through writing would never happen here. But what I would say is that every young kid needs to get hooked on reading somehow. And study after study shows it doesn’t matter what you read—if you start to read, your world expands into other kinds of reading. The book fair is meant to be for everybody, and there’s room for high literature and comic books—and sometimes they’re the same thing.” The Miami Book Fair International begins November 16. For a full schedule, visit miamibookfair.com