Exeter Literary Festival Announces Featured Authors for 2025

EXETER__The Exeter Literary Festival is thrilled to welcome Dr. Tiya Miles and J. Courtney Sullivan as the featured authors for their 2025 event which takes place the first weekend in April.

Held for the first time in 2019, the annual event aims to shine a spotlight on the wealth of local talent in the Exeter area as well as bringing in featured authors and poets from the region. Events at the literary festival, held in the historic Exeter Town Hall and Exeter Public Library, are always free and open to all.

An opening reception with jazz music will take place at the Exeter Public Library on Friday, April 4 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

This year’s festival will kick off on Saturday, April 5th at 9:30 a.m. at the Exeter Public Library with Cynthia Copeland, author of the middle grade graphic novels Drive and Cub, talking about her books and being an author.

The main event will begin at 11 a.m. in the Exeter Town Hall with featured author J. Courtney Sullivan in conversation with Katie Adams. Sullivan is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Commencement, Maine, The Engagements, Saints for All Occasions, and Friends and Strangers. Her latest book, The Cliffs, was a 2024 Reese’s Book Club pick. Courtney’s work has been translated into seventeen languages. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, New York, Real Simple, and O: The Oprah Magazine, among many other publications. In 2017, she wrote the forewords to new editions of two of her favorite classic novels–Anne of Green Gables and Little Women. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two children.

Dr. Tiya Miles will be the last of the day’s authors when she takes the stage at 4 p.m. in conversation with Caleb Gale. Miles is the author of eight books, including four prize-winning histories about race and slavery in the American past. Her latest work is the biography Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People. Her 2021 National Book Award winner, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, was a New York Times bestseller that won eleven historical and literary prizes, including the Cundill History Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize. All That She Carried was named A Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, The Atlantic, Time, and more. Her other nonfiction works include Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, The Dawn of Detroit, Tales from the Haunted South, The House on Diamond Hill, and Ties That Bind. Miles publishes essays and reviews in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and other media outlets, and she is the author of the time-bridge novel, The Cherokee Rose, a ghost story set in the plantation South. She has consulted with colleagues at historic sites and museums on representations of slavery, African American material culture, and the Black-Indigenous intertwined past, including, most recently, the Fabric of a Nation quilt exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her work has been supported by a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Miles was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, and she is currently the Michael Garvey Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University.

Other discussions during the day include:

Keith O’Brien, author of Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, in conversation with Dan Provost.

Independent Publishing in the Modern World featuring authors Renay Allen, Michael Cameron Ward, Justin Corriss and Sara North, moderated by Lara Bricker.

Damsels and Dragons: Romance, Fantasy, and Marrying the Two featuring authors Jacquelyn Benson, Laura Mayo, and Lyra Selene moderated by Naomi Farr.

Echoes of Now: Poets of the Present Moment featuring poets K. Iver, Cate Marvin, and Nathan McClain as curated by Diannely Antigua, the 13th Poet Laureate of Portsmouth.

Family and Finding Home, featuring authors Jane Brox and Alexandra Chan, moderated by Stef Kiper Schmidt.

Exeter High School Student Poetry.

This year’s festival will also include adjacent events in the community on Friday and Sunday with the Exeter Public Library, Town Exeter Arts Music (TEAM), and Art up Front Street. Follow the Exeter LitFest social media for updates on these events as the weekend gets closer.

Held for the first time in 2019, the Exeter LitFest is a 501C-3 non-profit organization that hosts an annual literary festival the first weekend of April. The inaugural festival included a keynote by Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, as well as events with Joe Hill, Brendan Dubois, and NH Teen Poet Laureate Cate Dixon.

For updates on the 2025 Exeter LitFest, including the schedule, follow Exeter LitFest on Facebook and Instagram or visit www.exeterlitfest.com