About the Concord Festival of Authors

Now in its 21st year, the Concord Festival of Authors is the preeminent annual literary event in the Boston area. Programs are held in several venues in Concord, a town that revels in its historic and literary heritage.

The festival was founded by Rob Mitchell in 1993 and is presented and produced by the Angela Arkell Mitchell Foundation, a non-profit.

The mission of the Foundation is to promote books and authors, to present the work of contemporary authors to the public, and to provide forums for authors to discuss their work. In recent years, Anita Hill, Gov. Howard Dean, Andrew Bacevich, David Macauley, Amy Goodman, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Andre Dubus III, Augusten Burroughs, E. L. Doctorow, Randall Kennedy, and Stephen Greenblatt have been among the renowned authors who participated.

The Foundation is particularly pleased to introduce new and emerging authors to festival audiences. Inaugurated in 1997, the “New Literary Voices” program has featured first novelists such as Tom Perrotta, Sena Jeter Naslund, Matthew Pearl, and Jennifer Haigh, all of whom have gone on to notable literary success. In 1995, one of the festival's three opening night speakers was a relatively unknown writer named Barack Obama, on tour for the publication of his first book Dreams From My Father.