The WIT Literary Festival has become an integral part of the cultural landscape of the Berkshires.
By Anastasia Stanmeyer
Photos Courtesy of The Authors Guild Foundation
The Authors Guild Foundation’s annual Words, Ideas, and Thinkers (WIT) Literary Festival considers Lenox home. More specifically, the WIT festival has been held annually at Shakespeare & Company. The relationship between the two entities has worked out quite well, setting the stage for other collaborations between the Authors Guild Foundation and organizations in the region. In fact, in organizing ancillary festival events, the foundation has collaborated closely with Lenox and Drury high schools, Berkshire Community College, Lenox and Stockbridge libraries, Festival Latino, The Mount, and The Bookstore. And the list keeps growing.
“The WIT festival has been embraced by the cultural community of the Berkshires,” says Bernard Schwartz, executive producer of literary programs at the Authors Guild Foundation. “The festival has come a long way in its three years, and we also have a long way to go. Each new version of the festival is an exciting opportunity to plant seeds and tend to their growth. For me, as a curator, my role is to knock on people’s doors and to invite other organizations to enter into a conversation about working with us.”
Planning already has begun for the next WIT Literary Festival on September 26 to 28. It’s impressive to look back at the authors who have appeared at past festivals, including Rita Dove, Rachel Maddow, Michael Cunningham, Margaret Verble, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Jane Smiley, Isaac Fitzgerald, and many others.
Schwartz’s job is not just the festival, but also year-round programming for the Authors Guild Foundation. For example, he has commissioned four contemporary poets to write plays. One of the poets selected, Aracelis Girmay, is creating a words-and-music composition. As a result of a relationship developed with Tanglewood by way of the WIT festival, Schwartz pitched the idea of co-producing that piece.
The collaborative wheels began to turn once again. Tanglewood Learning Institute Production Manager Mark Rulison helped to match Girmay with the right musicians and the right composer, and the result is the August 9 premiere of An Experiment in Voices at Tanglewood’s Linde Center. Girmay will explore the legacy of her great-grandmother in this words-and-music collaboration with composer Brittany J. Green and Castle of Our Skins, a Boston-based arts institution that celebrates and aims to generate curiosity in Black music. In the coming months, they will determine the director and the cast.
This world premiere is another example of how the Authors Guild Foundation is building productive and mutually beneficial relationships with other cultural organizations in the Berkshires. “We partner very well with music or dance or visual arts organizations,” says Schwartz. “Collaborating builds an ever-widening community. The same can be said about online literary seminars. We’re a nationwide organization that is excited about the prospect of building community nationwide through reading and responding to classic literature.”
You don’t have to wait until the fall to take part in literary offerings. The compelling online seminar series “Reading James Baldwin” has just begun, in timing with the writer and civil rights activist’s centenary. Few American writers have marked their era as powerfully as Baldwin, and his works are as important and prescient and alive now as they have ever been. These sessions feature converations with some of today’s most exciting writers, scholars, and essayists.
“Here is this positive history that Baldwin and his family had with the Authors Guild,” says Schwartz. Baldwin was an Authors Guild member, and after he died, the guild supported his family in a dispute with his publisher.
“Doing a series like this in association with the James Baldwin Estate reflects that positive history, and it demonstrates our commitment to fostering literary community,” Schwartz continues. “All these high-profile contemporary authors, scholars, and essayists have their own kind of personal and professional response to Baldwin's work. The classes are one part talk and another part exchanges between the instructor and the participants. Practically speaking, you might benefit from having read the selections in advance. Or, we find people who read them after they've participated or experienced a talk. It introduces them to work that they maybe hadn't encountered before.”
All sessions to the ticketed series begin at 2 p.m., and all are recorded. You can sign up for all or attend one or two. The schedule is as follows, beginning with an introduction on
Wednesday, February 26, by book author and Harvard professor Jesse McCarthy, co-curator of "Reading James Baldwin.”
Tuesday, March 18: “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” presented by Colm Tóibín, Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, critic, playwright and poet. In Go Tell It on a Mountain, his first novel, Baldwin explores the mind and experience of John Grimes, a young protagonist in Harlem. John studies the world around him, alert to its fragility, aware of its secrets and its dangers. In this talk, Tóibín engages with the tone and style of the book, its narrative structure, and its focus on the past as haunting and strangely present in the lives of the older generation who came north in the Great Migration.
Thursday, April 24: “‘Sonny’s Blues’ & ‘The Uses of the Blues,’” presented by Imani Perry, American interdisciplinary scholar of race, law, literature, and African American culture. In this talk featuring one of Baldwin’s most famous works, the short story “Sonny’s Blues,” Perry connects Baldwin’s ideas on the blues with her own, exploring, as she does in her new book, Black in Blues, how the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with another color: blue.
Wednesday, May 21: “Notes of a Native Son,” presented by W. Ralph Eubanks, distinguished author, essayist and Southern culture educator, and Eddie Glaude, Jr., New York Times bestselling author, political commentator and academic scholar. Published in 1955, the essay collection Notes of a Native Son is Baldwin’s attempt “to understand the contradictions of his country,” writes Glaude.
Thursday, June 26: “No Name in the Street,” presented by Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose novel The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was turned into an HBO series. His forthcoming To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other will be released in April. No Name in the Street was Baldwin’s first book after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “The central contradictions that Baldwin is working with are the central contradictions of the country itself,” writes Nguyen.
Thursday, July 24: “Baldwin & Delaney,” presented by Rachel Cohen, who began writing about Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin more than 20 years ago, in A Chance Meeting: American Encounters. She has recently written about the relationship again as part of the anthology Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin. Participants in this class will read the two key essays that Baldwin wrote about Delaney; they will learn something of the periods when the two shared an apartment and look closely at several of the huge number of portraits Delaney painted of Baldwin.
Thursday, August 21: “Another Country,” presented by Vinson Cunningham, whose debut novel, Great Expectations, came out in 2024. Cunningham is a critic for The New Yorker, covering theater, TV, and more. Baldwin’s epigraph for Another Country, his bestselling novel from 1962, is a quotation from one of his great models, Henry James. Cunningham discusses Another Country with a focus on the book’s narration and how it can be understood as an extended oratorical performance.
Thursday, September 18: “The Fire Next Time,” presented by Ayana Mathis, the author of two novels who is currently pursuing her Masters of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary. She recently explored the intertwining of faith and American literature in her five-part, New York Times essay series “Imprinted By Belief.” More than 60 years after its original publication, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963), comprised of two letters, remains a touchstone in American literature.
To register for “Reading James Baldwin: An Online Literary Seminar,” go to authorsguild.org. To purchase tickets to An Experiment in Voices at Tanglewood Linde’s Center on August 9, go to bso.org/tanglewood. And keep checking in at authorsguild.org/foundation for the latest on the fourth annual WIT Literary Festival, as well as subscribe to Berkshire Magazine for issue-by-issue coverage of the WIT festival and related content.