About the Concord Festival of Authors

Approaching its 18th year, the Concord Festival of Authors is the preeminent annual literary event in the Boston area. Programs are held in several venues in Concord, a town that revels in its historic and literary heritage, and in Lowell, a city whose history and diversity are the source of its vitality.

The festival was founded by Rob Mitchell in 1993 and is presented and produced by the Angela Arkell Mitchell Foundation, a non-profit.

The mission of the Foundation is to promote books and authors, to present the work of contemporary authors to the public, and to provide forums for authors to discuss their work. In recent years, Gov. Howard Dean, Jonathan Kozol, David Halberstam, Amy Goodman, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Dennis Lehane, Sebastian Junger, Augusten Burroughs, E. L. Doctorow, and John Hope Franklin have been among the renowned authors who participated.

The Foundation is particularly pleased to introduce new and emerging authors to festival audiences. Inaugurated in 1997, the “New Literary Voices” program has featured first novelists such as Tom Perrotta, Sena Jeter Naslund, Matthew Pearl, and Jennifer Haigh, all of whom have gone on to notable literary success. In 1995, one of the festival’s three opening night speakers was a relatively unknown writer named Barack Obama, on tour for the publication of his first book Dreams From My Father.