The Writer's Institute, UAlbany, and The Book House bring you The First Annual Book Festival.

Authors will be added as they are announced.

Please visit https://www.albanybookfestival.com for details and schedules.

Gregory Maguire, UAlbany alumnus, Albany native, and author of the best-selling  Wicked series, the inspiration behind the  blockbuster Broadway musical "Wicked." His other works include Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister,  Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation,  and his most recent novel, Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker.

Mike Kurlansky, major best- selling author of food history, inclumajor best- selling author of food history, including Salt: A World History, Cod, and his newest book, Milk! : A 10,000-Year Food Fracasding Salt: A World History, Cod, and his newest book, Milk! : A 10,000-Year Food Fracas

Adbi Nor Iftin,  Somali refugee, "secret broadcaster" of NPR's "Messages from Mogadishu," and author of the new memoir, Call Me American.

Radha Agrawal, social entrepreneur, author and founder of Daybreaker,  kicks off the Albany Book Festival with a morning dance party. Radha will also discuss her new book, Belong: Find Your People, Create Community, and Live a More Connected Life, to be published in early September.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, One of America’s best-known and bestselling historians, Doris Kearns Goodwin earned the Lincoln Prize for the runaway bestseller Team of Rivals, the basis for Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning film Lincoln, and the Carnegie Medal for The Bully Pulpit, the New York Times bestselling chronicle of the friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.  Her new book, Leadership in Turbulent Times, will be published in September.

Walter Mosely, major bestselling mystery author known for detective fiction featuring African American protagonists, including Devil in a Blue Dress, which was adapted into a film starring Denzel Washington. Mosley began writing at 34 and has continued ever since, having penned 50 books in different fiction genres including mystery and Afrofuturist science fiction. He has also written non-fiction and plays.

Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of history and law at Harvard,  won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009 for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. Her other books include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy and, with Peter S. Onuf, Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination 

Jonathan Santlofer,  Author of five novels including The Death Artist and Anatomy of Fear, editor of the collection It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art. His memoir, The Widower’s Notebook, was published in July. 

William Kennedy, William Kennedy, founder of the NYS Writers Institute, will be on hand to sign copies of the newly published Bootlegger of the Soul: The Literary Legacy of William Kennedy, a retrospective collection of his long and distinguished career which will includes speeches, a play and a short story by Kennedy, as well as in-depth interviews, reviews and scholarly essays on his work.