![]() “Reexamining American History” with David Blight & Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Identity and Belonging” with Ayad Akhtar & Susan Choi ![]() “Does the Supreme Court Have a Future?” with Linda Greenhouse & Nikolas Bowie “When Religion Meets Science” with Dan Brown The topics at the inaugural WIT Festival: We want to keep it fun, serious fun, with a different theme every year. Everybody talks about growth, but we don’t want it to move into bigger and bigger halls. We want audiences to feel like they have access to the speakers, that it’s intimate enough that people can continue to feel like their questions can be answered. We never want it to become slick, or huge. We want to keep it free and open to the public, and we want it to grow. What’s your vision for this festival? We would love for this to become an annual event. Shops and enough room to spread out and live a life at the pace that you want to. It’s a great mix of town and country, all of the amenities that you would want in a community. It’s a great mix of wonderful restaurants, great independent bookstores, swimming and kayaking and canoeing, lakes and ponds and walking trails. This is the perfect complement to what already exists.” Also, it is so beautiful there. People who I thought would be, like, “Oh, gosh, another cultural institution?” But no, instead it’s like, “Oh my gosh, how can I help? We need this here. One thing is how remarkable the community is and how I have been welcomed with open arms by other not-for-profit leaders-from the Pillow to the people at the Botanical Garden, Tanglewood Learning Institute, BIFF, and Shakespeare and Company. What have you discovered about this area? It’s easy to get to and has a wonderful community already, primed for something like this.įor the past year, you’ve been doing the groundwork here for this event. And when placing the festival, we thought, where is a place that you would expect to find a literary festival, or an ideas festival, that has a built-in community that’s sophisticated, that’s intelligent, that’s well-read but doesn’t have a festival like this? The Berk- shires came up because a number of our trustees have second homes there or live there year-round-it really seems like a place where we could have a sustainable presence. We had a year’s worth of online WIT conversations. The WIT festival was conceived as an ideas festival. And so one of the fun parts of my job is to create these experiences for people, where they meet their literary heroes and are able to talk with them and hear the thoughts behind their work. One of the ways we do it is to position authors, journalists, poets, nonfiction writers as the thought leaders of their time. The Authors Guild Foundation’s mission is to celebrate the literary culture of the United States. Why is the Words, Ideas, and Thinkers Festival happening? We had the opportunity to talk to Boulger about this exciting festival that will make its home in the Berkshires. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, and her creative work has appeared in literary magazines such as Ploughshares, Aegis, and The Seattle Review. Prior to taking on this role, Boulger served for 13 years as Dean of Institutional Advancement for the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. Lynn Boulger is executive director of the New York-based Authors Guild Foundation. They will be held at The Mount, at Shakespeare & Company with food trucks and a band, and at a private Berkshire estate. Dinners with speakers and special guests will be available for ticketed purchase. Festival admission is free, and attendees will have the opportunity to interact with speakers in Q&A sessions, book signings, and receptions. Novelists, playwrights, journalists, and other thought leaders will discuss topics such as creating identity, reexamining his- tory, the U.S.’s shifting role in the world, climate change, religion, and the U.S.
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