Dreams come true at the Miami Book Fair -- even for would-be rock stars.
It was the mid ‘90s, and Tananarive Due, a horror author and Miami Herald journalist, had published her first book “The Between.” She walked up to author and columnist Dave Barry at a cafeteria and told him how excited she was to see him at the fair perform with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a classic rock band made up of popular published writers. And it would be a dream to play with them one day, she said.
Due was in luck. The band needed a keyboardist for “Jailhouse Rock” and Barry asked if she knew the song. “Sure!” she said. “I can figure it out.”
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And there she was, rocking out on stage with Stephen King, Amy Tan and Mitch Albom at the book fair. (She later found out that sound engineer didn’t quite trust her and turned her sound down, but who cares?)
“That’s just fun for me in terms of being able to live out my dreams as a frustrated rock star,” she said. “It really is, to me, my favorite book festival in the country. It’s so unique.”
This year marks the 40th edition of the Miami Book Fair, a local institution that has attracted authors from around the world, bolstered emerging writers and kept Miami’s bookworms busy for decades. The fair runs from Nov. 12 to 19 at the Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus downtown.
Since its inception as a two-day event in 1984, the fair has grown to include a selection of music, food, yearlong programming and events in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole. It boasts thousands of attendees, over 400 authors and the title as the nation’s largest, longest-running literary festival.
“Our little city has exploded into a number of buildings and people and visitors,” said Lissette Mendez, the book fair executive director. “So the book fair has grown alongside it.”
On Sunday, the festival kicks off with events presenting highly-anticipated celebrity memoirs. Actress Kerry Washington, known for her role in “Scandal,” will discuss her memoir “Thicker Than Water” with Eva Longoria. In the evening, Jada Pinkett Smith will unpack her life story, her relationship with Tupac and her marriage with Will Smith chronicled in her book “Worthy” with producer Lena Waithe. Later, singer and activist Joan Baez presents her book “Am I Pretty When I Fly?:An Album of Upside Down Drawing” with Justin Richmond. From Nov. 17 to 19, the last three days of the Miami Book Fair, is the Street Fair, featuring hundreds of vendors, food provided by Smorgasborg Miami, the Off The Shelf mini music festival, artwork installations and the Children’s Alley.
“It’s really a special time in Miami when we’re able to host so many authors and bring the community together for the love of reading,” said MDC president Madeline Pumariega.
This is where writers are treated like rock stars. Kids read for fun, not for homework. And in the midst of a nationwide book ban trend, controversies over censorship and concern over literacy rates, books reign supreme in Miami.
'A labor of love'
Mitchell Kaplan knew something was missing. In fact, Miami’s whole literary community knew something was missing.
Kaplan, who opened the independent bookstore Books & Books in 1982, recalled Miami’s “series of challenges” in the early ‘80s. Among those challenges was an image problem. Miami was known for rampant violence and cocaine trafficking. Not literature.
“We’re talking about a time before the internet, before computers, cable had just been starting. Books were very primary,” he said. “But Miami was viewed not as the most sophisticated of towns.” Kaplan, along with a small group of booksellers, librarians and educators, disagreed with the assumption that Miami didn’t read. Eduardo Padrón, the MDC president at the time, “threw the weight of the college” behind the idea of the book fair, Kaplan said.
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“We felt like there was a community here that was as sophisticated as anywhere else, and that we needed to get writers down and present them to their readers, and that there were readers,” Kaplan said. “We were the first in the country to really conceptualize this kind of thing, of a congress of authors as well as a street festival. So we were flying a little bit blind.”
The idea was a hit. Since the earlier days, he said, the fair made a point to include Spanish-speaking authors, books and events. The first year, the fair welcomed civil rights activist and literary giant James Baldwin just a few years before his death. One year, fans stood in line for blocks and blocks for Anne Rice to sign their copies of “Interview With The Vampire.”
The Miami Book Fair has attracted big names for decades. The fair’s growing list of famed guests include Salman Rushdie, Trevor Noah, Bernie Sanders, George W. Bush, Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, John Waters, Cornel West, Elie Wiesel, Fran Leibowitz, Jimmy Buffett and the prince and princess of Spain.
There was the particularly hectic time in 2006 when then-senator Barack Obama attracted thousands of people -- so many people that the fair had to quickly change venues to accommodate the crowd.
Another year, Nobel Prize winning poet Czeslaw Milosz ended an event by pulling a piece of paper from his pocket. It was a poem he had never read to anyone before about his wife who had recently died.
Every year though, Kaplan’s favorite part is to stand by the entrance on Fridays to watch busloads of children visit the fair during field trips.
“It just goes on and on and on,” Kaplan said. “So there isn’t one memory, it’s that all the memories continually fill me.”
The book fair is “a labor of love” for the MDC faculty and staff that volunteer each year, Pumariega said.
“The secret sauce is always the people that have such a passion for the book fair and for making sure that it remains in this community. It’s something that anchors,” Pumariega said. “If not for the college, you’d have to wonder if it would have survived.”
The key to the fair’s longevity isn’t really about how it has changed over the years, Mendez said. It’s about how the fair has stayed the same.
It’s always been about the books and the authors and the community members that come in,” Mendez said. “It still is to this day.”
Readers today, authors tomorrow
Andrew Otazo was around 7 years old and obsessed with dinosaurs when his parents took him to the Miami Book Fair.
He remembers the big crowd, the colorful tents and his first “Goosebumps” book -- the one about the abominable snowman. He found sanctuary in one author’s tent, where he was completely surrounded by dinosaur books.
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“That was my happy place,” said Otazo, now 36.
This year, he returns to the book fair for the first time as an author with his silly yet political book, “The Miami Creation Myth.” In the book, twin sisters journey through Miami’s diverse Black, Latino and indigenous communities to save the city from a stupefying malaise. On Nov. 19, Otazo and Mario Ariza, a friend and fellow author, are hosting a discussion about Miami, possibly while wearing croqueta costumes. Participating in the fair as an author feels surreal, he said.
“It’s wild for me, beyond the fact that I worked on this book for seven years and I had no idea if anyone would give a crap about it,” Otazo said. “It tells me something that I already knew, which is that [Miami residents’] stories have value and their experiences have value. The fact that my book is included in this book fair is because of them.”
For Richard Blanco, a Miami native and the county’s first poet laureate the fair always feels like home.
Last month, Blanco published his latest book, a collection of poems on identity and belonging called “Homeland of my Body.”After receiving the prestigious National Humanities Medal earlier this year, Blanco will be recognized during the fair’s The Next Page celebration dinner. Honorees include outgoing Knight Foundation president Alberto Ibargüen and Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat.
READ MORE: Miami poet Richard Blanco finds belonging in 'Homeland of My Body'
Blanco said he was pleasantly surprised to learn that the book fair was celebrating its 40th year.
“Word on the street among the authors is that this is the best book fair in the country, and I will attest to that,” Blanco said. “It’s a rock, it’s solid rock of a place for so many reasons.”
When he first started writing, Sandra Cisneros, the author behind “The House on Mango Street,” was one of Blanco’s biggest influences. “Her work gave me permission to write my story, so to speak,” he said. He met her at the Miami Book Fair, where they hit it off and made plans with a group to go out dinner. They been friends for the last 30 years, he said.
Another favorite memory was when he did a reading at the fair in 2013. Earlier that year, he became the nation’s fifth inaugural poet at President Obama’s second inauguration.
“That was such a great feeling of homecoming,” he said. “It just felt so so, so wonderful. I was just so glad to be home and to be home at the book fair.”
The power of books
Books — and who should be allowed to read them — have been front of mind to many, especially in Florida.
In the past school year, more books were pulled from Florida public schools compared to any other state, according to a report by PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for freedom of expression. Across the country, the nonprofit recorded 3,362 instances of bans in public school classrooms and libraries from July 2022 to June 2023. Many of the books that have been challenged contain themes of violence, gender, sexuality, bullying and race.
Kaplan, whose flagship store is known for promoting banned books, said the Miami Book Fair’s popularity is proof that the community values the free flow of ideas.
“The beautiful thing is just the existence of the book fair in all of its fullness and all of its richness shows the importance of the freedom to read,” he said. “It’s been embraced by the community, which leads me to believe that, really when you look at it, even though there has been a lot of book banning in the state of Florida, I don’t think that is indicative of the way the community feels.”
These days, getting banned means you’re doing something right, Otazo joked. “I’m disappointed [my book] hasn’t been banned yet.”
Due noted that her most recent book “is exactly the kind of story certain kinds of politicians and some parents don’t want their children to know about.”
“The Reformatory” tells the story of Robbie Stephens, a 12-year-old Black boy living in 1950s Florida, who is sent to a reformatory school after kicking a white boy who made advances toward his sister. Robbie learns that the school is haunted by the ghosts of boys who have died there.
In real life, there was a boy named Robert Stephens. He was 15 when he died at the segregated Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, in 1937. He was one of at least 55 other children buried at the school’s makeshift cemetery. And he was Due’s great uncle. She learned of him for the first time 10 years ago when the state attorney general’s office told her she may have a relative buried there.
Though “The Reformatory” is a fictional ghost story, it shines a light on a dark part of Florida’s history and examines how the state and society treat people of color and children in the criminal justice system.
“We need institutions that allow us to celebrate books and celebrate learning because even a novel can teach us,” Due said.
When reflecting on the importance of the book fair, Due was reminded of the time she interviewed Anne Rice for a Herald article ahead of the 1992 Miami Book Fair. That interview inspired Due to write her first novel.
Whether it’s “Jane Eyre” or “Frankenstein” or “The Iliad,” stories push people to ask life changing questions, Rice told her.
“And it was not just an escape, but an escape that improves you,” Rice said. “You go back feeling different, and that’s what literature should do.”
This story was produced with financial support from The Pérez Family Foundation, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The Miami Herald maintains full editorial control of this work.
