Unbound Book Festival and CoMoGives: Can You Help?

We hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and that you got all the books you were hoping for! We were very busy at the shop, right up until the last minute, and we're grateful to everyone who did their shopping with us. If you received a Skylark gift certificate, we'll look forward to seeing you soon and helping you spend it!

Unlike most of our newsletters, this is not really about things going on at Skylark, but it is about books. Specifically, it's about the Unbound Book Festival, the literary festival that takes place in Columbia every April. We are sponsors of the festival, and are proud to be the official bookseller at the event. (Our owner, Alex George, is also the founder and director of the festival, but the bookshop and the festival are wholly independent entities.)

If you've never attended Unbound, here's a short movie to give you a sense of what you're missing...

Unbound is a nonprofit organization that brings acclaimed writers and poets to Columbia to read from and speak about their work. Last year, 57 authors attended the event and over 9,500 people attended an Unbound event. Next year's festival takes place from April 23 to 26, 2020. The keynote speaker will be the Pulitzer Prize winning U.S. Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith. Past keynotes have been Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and George Saunders.

Through their "Authors in the Schools" program, last year over 3,500 local students had the opportunity to see a writer in the flesh - including 1,100 very excited middle schoolers who filled the Missouri Theatre to hear Jacqueline Woodson.

We think Unbound is a pretty great thing for our community, and it's absolutely free for everyone to attend. Which is why we're writing.

Throughout December, Unbound is participating in CoMoGives, the annual online charitable giving campaign for mid-Missouri charities. Because the festival doesn't charge for tickets, it largely relies on donations to meet the considerable expenses of bringing those wonderful writers to Columbia every year. So may we ask a favor? If you love books and reading (and since you're receiving this, you probably do), would you please consider making a gift to help keep the festival free before the end of the year? It's tremendously easy to give, and every little helps. And because Unbound is 100% volunteer-run, every cent goes directly to bringing those amazing authors to town.

Thank you, thank you! We look forward to seeing you in the shop (and at the festival!) in 2020.