BRATTLEBORO-The Brattleboro Literary Festival, an annual three-day festival founded in 2002, will host Ada Calhoun and Jessica Anthony Thursday, Feb. 12, for a virtual cocktail hour at 5 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
Festival organizers say they are very excited to host Anthony and welcome back Calhoun, New York Times bestselling author of Crush: A Novel, which, according to promotional materials has been hailed on NBC’s Today show as the month’s Best Romance, praised by The Washington Post for its “whirlwind of desire and possibility,” and named by Time magazine as one of the 100 Must-Read Books of 2025.
Calhoun’s memoir Also a Poet was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2022 by The New York Times, one of Maureen Corrigan’s favorites on NPR, and one of 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction by The Washington Post. It was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. The New York Times Book Review called it “a big valentine to New York City past and present, and a contribution to literary scholarship, molten with soul.”
Past books include Why We Can’t Sleep, Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, and St. Marks is Dead.
Anthony is the author of four books of fiction, among them the 2024 novel The Most, longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction, and a finalist for the Prix Fitzgerald. Her novel Enter the Aardvark was a finalist for the New England Book Award in Fiction.
Her novels have been published in over a dozen countries, and been featured in Time, Newsweek, Esquire, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Times Book Review as an Editors’ Choice.
Anthony served as the 41st Bridge Guard in Literature, in Štúrovo, Slovakia. She has received literary fellowships from the Maine Arts Commission, the Millay Colony, Ucross, MacDowell, the Bogliasco Foundation, and recently spent a month in residence at the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington.
She won the inaugural Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award from McSweeney’s, and she is a recipient of the Creative Capital Award for Literature. Her story “The Death of Mustango Salvaje,” originally published by McSweeney’s, is currently in development with A24 for a limited TV series, filmed in Spain.
The Brattleboro Literary Festival has grown from year to year to “become one of the region’s most significant annual events, drawing more tourists, more sponsors and has presented over 1,000 authors, including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Women’s Prize, Newbery Medal and Caldecott Medal, among others,” wrote organizers in a news release.
The Brattleboro area has a strong history of writing and publishing. In addition to Saul Bellow, authors Rudyard Kipling, John Irving, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Lucy Terry Prince, and many more called the area home.
The Festival celebrates its 25th anniversary this October. Register for the event at bit.ly/BrattLitFeb2026. To make a tax deductible donation to the festival, go to brattleborolitfest.org/donate-now.
This Arts item was submitted to The Commons.