The Heartland Book Festival returns on Saturday, October 12 for the second year at Central Library at 14 W. 10th Street in downtown Kansas City. Doors open at 9 a.m. and the festival, free and open to the public, runs until 4 p.m.  

This year’s festival, a collaboration between the Library, Missouri Humanities, and the Missouri Center for the Book, celebrates “the people and ideas that shape not only the books you love but society itself.”  

Featured speakers include Stacey Abrams, Sarah Chapelle, Pedro Martín, Tommy Orange, Deborah Jackson Taffa, and more. 

“We want to encourage reading for pleasure,” Missouri Humanities Executive Director Ashley Beard-Fosnow told the Library. “When we convene as a community, it kind of amplifies all of those efforts.”  

Missouri Valley Special Collections staff dug into the archives and found a forerunner to this event — nearly 90 years ago at the former Central location at Linwood Boulevard and Indiana Avenue.  

In June 1937, the Library hosted a book fair, touted in The Kansas City Star as “a new idea for idle time” and “something new and practical for the whole family.”  

This fair, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. stretched throughout the week. Reading rooms were decked out in bright balloons and paper garlands to provide the “appearance of a fairground.”  

As The Star described, it was an all-ages event: “From little sister who is just learning to read, older brother who desires to learn to play chess, mother who is looking for appetizing suggestions for summer meals, or help on her bidding at bridge parties, to father who is an enthusiastic fisherman, and grandfather who likes to work in the garden.” 

Kids who enrolled in a “Time On Your Hands” club received a pasteboard watch; the hour would advance for each book completed.  

The book fair also offered “a little theater and a puppet show, a travel and transportation display, with models of covered wagons up to the latest streamlined train and airplane models, a quilt made in 1839, a hobby show and a fishing exhibit” with suggestions for related books.   

Over 500 visitors stopped by the 1937 fair throughout the week, including groups from Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Wisconsin. And, according to The Star, “Two women driving through Western Kansas ... rerouted their trip through Kansas City” arriving that night before the fair closed.  

Last year, about 2,000 people attended the first Heartland Book Festival at the Central Library. And in 2024, thousands of visitors are again expected to flock to the free event, which provides an opportunity to make community connections — and meet visiting authors.  

The presentations and panel discussions are all free, but require tickets – and many are sold out. But you can still sign up for the waitlist for any of this year’s speakers. Limited seats will also be available for walk-ins to fill empty seats or if standing room is available. 

Several events will be livestreamed on the Library’s YouTube page or on Facebook – and online audiences will be able to watch and submit questions.

Some festival activities don’t require registration. Kate Brady Burr will be on-site writing improvised typewriter poems between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. 

On the second floor are children’s activities and grab-and-go craft kits, Kansas City area independent bookstores, including BLK + BRWN, Bliss Books & Wine, Rainy Day Books, Seven Stories, and Under the Cover, as well as more than a handful of children’s authors.  

Check out the large vendor hall on the third floor where you can visit with representatives from area arts and cultural organizations, and literary-centric makers.  

Free festival goodies like coloring books, colored pencils, seed packages, tote bags, and more, will be available while supplies last.