“It’s a labor of love” is how programing advisor Jeff Waxman summed up Philadelphia’s 215 Festival, coming in May 2021. When work began on bringing back the 215 Festival, Philadelphia’s only literary arts festival, we were meeting in the conference room of the CultureWorks building in Center City. By our third meeting in 2020, we were relegated to small squares on a Google Hangout and we’d pivoted from actively trying to book spaces for a summer event that was doomed to be shelved, to establishing a mutual aid fund to support out-of-work writers during the pandemic. In the months we spent in our apartments, we raised over $17,000 for 33 recipients in the Philadelphia area through the Philadelphia Emergency Writer’s Fund, revamped a website with new branding, established a newsletter, planned out programs, and looked desperately to the future for the return of the 215 Festival. All of it is a labor of love.
It’s also going to be “a damn good time for people who love to read,” according to festival director and Blue Stoop co-founder Joshua Demaree. “I think a lot of times you could pluck a literary festival up from one city and drop it into another and nothing would change or feel out of place. We want this to be a festival that could only happen in Philly. We want to celebrate all the amazing writers who live here but we also want to celebrate the city itself.” That goal is embodied in the logo of the festival, a stack of books building up the Liberty Bell to signify how the written word and literary history of the city has shaped the culture itself. Operations Coordinator Heather Bowlan says: “I’m excited about how we’ll showcase different neighborhoods that make Philly such a great place to live and connect.”
The festival is doing that through a variety of programing. Philadelphia’s own team of women writers including Emma Copley Eisenberg, Jaqueline Goldfinger, Piyali Bhattacarya, Liz Greenspan, and others will be offering readings and conversations. The writers of Philadelphia indie publisher Lanternfish Press will gather for a brunch reading event. The Philly Black Uprising and the Rittenhouse Writers Group also have events scheduled. And then there’s the panel with the Concerned Black Workers who, in June, justly demanded protections from both the public health crisis of the pandemic and the public health crisis of institutionalized racism and discrimination within the Free Library of Philadelphia. They’ll be discussing their essential, continuing work.
Ultimately, the 215 Festival will be a celebration of the “DIY, scrappy spirit” of the Philadelphia writing scene, as Demaree characterizes it. Since 2001, the festival’s mission has been to celebrate the power of storytelling by bringing it off the shelf and into unlikely spaces. And computer screens is one such unlikely space, even if not the one anyone was planning on when work on the festival began before the pandemic. The festival has embraced the challenge and the benefits of being able to bring events to people in this way, into their homes on their screens.
The festival kicks off May 10 and runs through May 15. Keep up with announcements, programing schedules, and more by signing up for the monthly newsletter to find out when and how you can bring the unique world of Philly’s writing scene into your own home through this year’s 20th anniversary 215 Festival.
More information about the 215 Festival
Editor’s note: Write Now Philly welcomes guest posts like this one about literary events and other topics of interest to the Philadelphia literary community.
Melanie is a copywriter and author of two novels, The Rules of Me published in 2018 through Waterton Publishing and a forthcoming novel in 2021 through Lanternfish Press. Her short fiction has been published in Ghost Parachute, Meat for Tea, and A Woman is a Cinema. Her nonfiction and criticism pieces have appeared on POPSUGAR, Prometheus Dreaming, and DIYMFA. She enjoys cooking, golfing, and exploring Philly’s restaurant scene.