The Evanston Literary Festival will commence its fifth year of programming with dozens of events across the city, featuring local authors and writing workshops.

The festival will open May 11, with the second annual Evanston Literary Festival Book Fair, where local publishers, authors and literary organizations will sell books and offer information at the Evanston Public Library. This year’s festival will focus on graphic novels, with a number of events hosted at Comix Revolution. On May 16, representatives from One Book One Northwestern will speak on a panel about the new graphic novel release of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” this school year’s chosen book.

Additionally, there will be events geared toward writing about global issues. Political science Prof. Wendy Pearlman, along with the nonprofit group 90 Days, 90 Voices, will speak at Monday, May 13 event focused on telling the stories of migrant people. Over the course of the week, local and national authors, as well as student authors, will present their work to the Evanston community and local writers will be able to participate in workshops free of cost.

Festival co-organizers Lynn Haller and John Wilson partnered with literary institutions like EPL, Bookends & Beginnings, Comix Revolution and the Northwestern Spring Writers’ Festival to organize the events, which are meant to increase public knowledge about literature in the city.

“There was so much already going on (in Evanston) like the Spring Writers’ Festival which a lot of the residents didn’t know about,” Haller told The Daily in 2018. “So that was some of the impetus, realizing all the gems we have here that we wanted to spotlight.”

The festival will run from Saturday to May 19, and all of the programming is free.

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Twitter: @kristinakarisch

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