After sell-out in-person crowds to see Isabel Allende The Long Petal of the Sea on 22 January 2020 and Malcolm Gladwell Talking to Strangers on February 6 2020, on 12 March 2020 Succeed2gether’s Montclair Literary Festival postponed its planned event with Colum McCann talking about Apeirogon, and subsequently all festival events planned for the week of March 23, including Festival Day on Saturday March 28, and all writing workshops and the final event with Paul Krugman on March 29.
The guide to our scheduled festival can be found here.
We quickly moved our ticketed events online, starting with Erik Larson The Splendid and the Vile on March 9, and finishing with Paul Krugman Arguing with Zombies on July 8. We also added a few children’s online events and some free events over those three months. You can see details here.
We presented our rescheduled free Festival events on Saturday September 12 and Sunday September 13, 2020. You can see the links to watch replays of our events here. We also ran our workshops over the evenings of that following week.
Our unprecedented year ended with an event with Jane Fonda and Chelsea Clinton, discussing Jane’s latest book What Can I Do? My Path from Climate Despair to Action. You can watch the replay here (still behind paywall).
All in all, we reached just under 9,000 people in 35 events with 50 authors including Jane Fonda, Chelsea Clinton, Paul Krugman, Erik Larson, Malcolm Gladwell, Isabel Allende, Nicholas Kristof, Colum McCann, Emily St. John Mandel, Mo Rocca, John Sayles, Bill Buford, Madeline Miller, Mona Awad, Eduardo Porter, Adrienne Miller, Eilene Zimmerman as well as childrens’ authors Lori Richmond, Michael Rex, and Diana Murray.
We are grateful to all our authors who appear for free at all our events. The best way to support them is by buying their book. Details of all participating authors are here and September authors here. Most of our online events can be found on our YouTube channel here.