Charleston to Charleston, Inc. last week announced the full schedule for their festival taking place in the Holy City from November 8th to 11th. The Charleston to Charleston Literary Festival is a partnership between the Charleston South Carolina Library Society and the Charleston Trust in the UK.
This year's program showcases:
- Margo Jefferson, whose memoir, Negroland, is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, class, and American culture, describing the contradictions of her comparatively privileged upbringing in Chicago's upper-class Black community
- Deborah Lipstadt, who will discuss her book, Denial: Holocaust History on Trial, and examine its contemporary relevance with Anita Zucker. The film Denial, inspired by the book, will also be screened, preceded by an introduction by its screenwriter, David Hare.
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- ndary editor, Tina Brown, who kept diaries through her eight years as editor in chief of Vanity Fair. The result is an insightful, fascinating, and laugh-out-loud funny social history of the excessive eighties
- Stephen Greenblatt, who will interrogate the Collected Works of Shakespeare to construct a checklist of tyranny based on the Bard's historical dramas. Will he demonstrate the modern-day significance of Shakespeare's tyrants?
- CNN commentator John Avlon, author and former Marine Elliot Ackerman, and photojournalist Lynsey Addario, who will discuss their shared need to chronical wars and atrocities using written words and photographic images
- Madeline Miller, whose novel, Circe, about a super-heroine golden witch, makes Homer's Odyssey pertinent to the 21st century. The Guardian calls Circe “Every bit as luminous and compelling as its predecessor”
- Ramie Targoff, whose biography of Vittoria Colonna, Renaissance Women, is a timely study of the first published female Italian poet. With a novelist's flair, she brings history to life and dissects an entire culture
- Regina Marler and Sarah Milroy, experts on Bloomsbury painter Vanessa Bell, who will discuss the modernist painter, a pivotal figure in 20th century British art, with her granddaughter, Virginia Nicholson
- David Hare, who was recently described by The Washington Post as “the premier political dramatist writing in English,” will discuss his memoir, The Blue Touch Paper, and his career as the UK's foremost political playwright
- Charles Spencer, brother to Princess Diana. His book, To Catch a King (right), documents one of the greatest escapes in British royal history, a fete he will dissect with Charleston's adopted wordsmith, Bernard Cornwell
- The Daily Beast's world news editor, Christopher Dickey, and political playwright David Hare, will muse on the implications of the Trump regime in the United States and Brexit in the United Kingdom, as well as the resurgence of nationalism throughout the world
- United States District Judge Richard Gergel will discuss the pioneering civil rights record of Judge Waties Waring with past president of the American Bar Association, Willam Hubbard.
- Authors Bill Goldstein and Alexandra Harris, who will discuss the impact of WWI on US and UK writers and artists like Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot. Was the war a watershed moment for Modernism?
The Festival will take place across two historic venues in the heart of downtown Charleston. The first, the Beaux Arts building of the Charleston Library Society, was a favorite venue last year, and will again be the Festival's main arena. This year, however, events will also hold forth in the stately Dock Street Theatre, the first building erected for the purpose of hosting theatrical performances in the United States.
Each evening the Festival will feature elegant receptions and gatherings, ensuring visitors will have time to mingle with internationally renowned authors, journalists, playwrights, and each other. More information on the reception schedule will be released soon.
Individual session tickets and full session packages are on sale now. To purchase tickets, visit www.charlestontocharleston.com or call 843-723-9912.
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Press Release
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About Charleston to Charleston, Inc.
Charleston to Charleston, Inc. is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) that organizesThe Charleston to Charleston Literary Festival each year. The festival aims to inspire rational discourse and a culture of lifelong learning by creating a world-class festival of books and ideas in Charleston, South Carolina. Founded in 2016 and launched in 2017, the Charleston to Charleston Festival unites authors and readers from around the world for an intellectually stimulating weekend of lectures, discussions and elegant, fun-filled receptions. Run by Charleston to Charleston, Inc., the Festival hopes to create the literary equivalent of the Spoleto Festival USA in the Holy City. For more information, visit www.charlestontocharleston.com.
About the Charleston Library Society
The Charleston Library Society is the South's oldest cultural institution and the second oldest circulating library in the United States. Since its founding in 1748, the Library Society has been a private membership library, and its significant holdings represent the history of intellectual curiosity in America. Offering an array of authors, music and life-long learning courses, the institution serves its members, the Lowcountry community and scholars through access to its rich collection of books, manuscripts and archival material and programs that promote discussion and understanding of the ideas they contain. For more information, visit www.charlestonlibrarysociety.org.
About the Charleston Trust
The Charleston Trust is a charitable organization set up to preserve Charleston, Sussex. Charleston, a farmhouse in the pastoral setting of the rolling South Downs of Sussex near the English Channel, was the home of painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and became the country retreat of the famed “Bloomsbury Group” of writers, artists and intellectuals such as Virginia and Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster and from time to time, T.S. Eliot and Vita Sackville-West, among other friends. Charleston, which is now open to the public, hosts one of the most prestigious literary and ideas festivals in the UK. Over the last twenty-nine years, it has featured innumerable well known international authors, creators and thinkers. In September 2018, the Charleston Trust will launch a new cultural complex consisting of a renovated traditional barn for hosting year-round events and a suite of exhibition galleries, as well as a restaurant. For more information, visit www.charleston.org.uk.
