Ginger Hendricks on Booking the BookMarks Festival

Ginger Hendricks is the executive director of BookMarks, a literary arts nonprofit organization. She helps plan the annual BookMarks festival, where authors talk about their books and attendees speak with them. WFDD Radio Camper Michael Fournaier has more.

I met with Ginger Hendricks on the campus of Wake Forest University. She approached me with a bright voice and a bright smile. We sat down and talked about her dedication to BookMarks. We also talked about what her favorite part about BookMarks is.

My favorite part, honestly, is the authors and schools work that we do. So as I'd said, we'd bring in [an] author into the schools, and it can be with a group of 10 or 15 or it can be an assembly, depending on what serves the school best ways and what they're trying to accomplish with their curriculum. And I get so excited seeing these students as they watch, and hear, and ask questions and participate with the authors.

During our time, I asked Ginger how the festival is planned, and how they pick the authors that attend the events.

When we're thinking about a festival, we're thinking specifically about what authors we want to bring. And more importantly, we're looking at authors who are on tour. We want, specifically, to bring an author that has a book out within the last year. That's really important to us, because it excites our public a lot to be able to meet these authors after they've just had a book. It also helps us because we're able to work with publicists and publishing houses to set up book tours and be part of their book tours, and it's very competitive. We have to be chosen to present these different authors.

To learn more about BookMarks, visit their website at www.bookmarksnc.org, or be sure to attend their upcoming festival on Saturday, September 6th, 2014, in downtown Winston-Salem.

For 88.5 WFDD Radio Camp, I'm Michael Fournaier.