After a four-year hiatus, the Baltimore Book Festival is coming back in 2024.
Todd Yuhanick, interim CEO of the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts (BOPA), announced on Wednesday that his organization is planning to produce the festival next May as one of its signature events for fiscal 2024.
“The Book Fest is coming back,” he told his board. “The Book Fest is going to be in Waverly this year. We are going to work with [City Council member Odette Ramos] and partner on it…Right now they’re looking at the third weekend in May [May 17-19] but that is not formalized…In the next week or two, we’ll begin formal conversations about how we can support and help bring Book Fest to life…and make it a special signature event of BOPA again.”
The 2024 event will be the first time since 2019 that BOPA has put on the Baltimore Book Festival. Yuhanick’s announcement came less than a week after BOPA brought back another festival, Artscape, for the first time since 2019.
Held for many years in the Mount Vernon area, the Baltimore Book Festival later was moved to the Inner Harbor after it outgrew the four public squares around the Washington Monument.
In 2019, former BOPA CEO Donna Drew Sawyer merged the book festival with another Inner Harbor event, Light City. That was the last book festival BOPA put on. In 2020, 2021 and 2022, Sawyer suspended Artscape, the book festival and Light City, citing health concerns about public gatherings following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This year, frustrated that Sawyer had no plans to bring back the book festival in 2023, merchants and other community leaders in Waverly mounted their own event and called it the Waverly Book Festival.
Ramos and Waverly Main Street Executive Director Diana Emerson worked with the Waverly branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library and businesses such as Red Emma’s, Normal’s Books and Records, and the Peabody Heights Brewery to organize a three-day event, April 28 to 30, 2023. BOPA had no involvement in the Waverly event.
Sawyer resigned in January, after Mayor Brandon Scott said he lost confidence in her ability to run BOPA. Yuhanick began as interim CEO on June 2 and has made it a priority to bring back festivals that Sawyer put on hold.
Yuhanick said on Wednesday that BOPA will take the lead on producing the 2024 book festival, as it did in the past, and will work with the businesses that participated in the Waverly Book Festival and with others. He said the idea is to use the lot designated for the 32nd Street Farmers Market at 400 E. 32nd St. and other venues as settings for the event, just as organizers of the Waverly Book Festival planned.
BOPA is an independent agency that has a contract with the city to serve until June 30, 2024, as its events producer, film office and arts council. In recognition that BOPA’s board is taking steps to improve relations with the Mayor’s Office that were frayed by Sawyer’s missteps, including failure to organize a Martin Luther King Jr. Day Parade last January, the City Council’s Ways and Means Committee voted 5 to 1 with one member absent on Tuesday to restore $581,334 that had been temporarily withheld from BOPA’s fiscal 2024 budget. The full council is scheduled to take a final vote on Monday to restore that amount to BOPA’s budget.
