Scene @ Nashville’s Southern Festival of Books

We wish we could have been in Nashville last weekend for the Southern Festival of Books last weekend, but Julie Schoerke sent us some pictures. She met up with festival co-coordinators Serenity Gerbman and Emily Masters, and then with authors Gary Slaughter and Susan Gregg Gilmore, and then she took a peek backstage at the gift bags presented to all the weekend’s guest writers, which included a tiny bottle of Jack Daniels and a mud pie.

This year’s festival highlights included “Authors in the Round,” a fundraising dinner where fans willing to pay between $200 and $2,000 got to share a table with one of forty authors, including Madison Smartt Bell, Rick Bragg, or Beth Ann Fennelly. Among the dozens of other literary stars who came for the weekend: National Book Award winner Sherman Alexie, Katie Crouch, and Oprah Book Club star David Wroblewski. And Schoerke tells us the Book TV crew was there, and they read GalleyCat. Woo!

(We are so going next year. It’s not even up for debate.)

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