29 Jan Memoir-A-Go-Go!
Hosted by Martha Frankel
Woodstock Bookfest always closes with our signature panel, Memoir-A-Go-Go. Memoir speaks to our most basic impulse to tell our stories around the fire. It allows us insight into perspectives outside of our own, and a peek into the human experience of others. Moderated by Martha Frankel, the powerhouse behind Bookfest, this year’s Memoir-A-Go-Go is sure to be entertaining and engaging.
Martha Frankel is the executive director of the Woodstock Bookfest. And also the secretary, treasurer, and stenographer. Sometimes she is the security team. And always she is the biggest cheerleader for this collection of writers and readers. Her memoir, Hats and Eyeglasses, delves into her family’s obsession with gambling.
Elissa Altman is the award-winning author of the memoirs Motherland, Treyf, Poor Man’s Feast, and her upcoming hybrid memoir about permission and creativity, On Permission. A finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, Connecticut Book Award, and Maine Literary Award for memoir, Altman’s work has appeared in Orion; On Being; O, The Oprah Magazine; LitHub; The Wall Street Journal; The Guardian; and the Washington Post, where her column, “Feeding My Mother,” ran for a year. Altman writes and speaks widely on the intersection of sustenance and the creative spirit, and she has appeared live on the TEDx stage and at the Public Theater in New York. She teaches the craft of memoir at the Fine Arts Work Center, Orion, Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, the College of William & Mary, and internationally. She lives in Connecticut with her family.
Emily Bernard is the author of Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, winner of the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black in White, published in 2012 by Yale University Press. She is a 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont.
Lucy Sante is the author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, Folk Photography, The Other Paris, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, and Nineteen Reservoirs. She has won a Whiting Award, a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy Award (for album notes), an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman Center fellowships. Sante recently retired after 24 years teaching at Bard College. Her most recent book, I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition will be released in February 2024.
Get a Full Festival pass and you’ll get to take in the Story Slam on Thursday night. Then sail into the weekend: attending all the wonderful panels, both Little Bites and Big Libations Cocktail Parties, and both evening events. And share the bounty from our always-stuffed goody bag.