Book Fair’s Big Read Celebration Returns For 19th Installment

Miami Book Fair and the National Endowment for the Arts launched their 19th annual Big Read Miami celebration on March 1. 

The program, which aims to encourage community reading by discussing a featured book, will showcase several artists, authors and events through April 30.

This year’s activities center around Madeline Miller’s Circe, a fantasy fiction novel narrated by the Greek enchantress who has the power to turn humans into gods and monsters. Book discussions will be held at various Miami-Dade County public libraries. 

“Our goal as Miami Book Fair is to reach leaders of all types, both readers and non-readers,” said Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, program coordinator of the MBF.

Miller is an American author known for mythology pieces, most notably Song of Achilles, a romance fantasy novel that follows the love story of two Trojan War heroes—Patroclus and Achilles.

The 45-year-old earned a master’s degree in classics—the study of Greek and Roman history, literature, language and philosophy—at Brown University and has taught Latin, Greek and Shakespeare to high school students for more than 15 years.

Events kicked-off on March 1 with the Big Read open house, featuring a short-film, a tour of the mansion at the Koubek Center, poetry activities and Afro-Cuban and rumba dance classes.

On March 9, Live Arts Miami and North Campus’ Miami International Festival of the Arts, hosted renowned Indian classical dancer Bijayini Satpathy at the Lehman Theater.

Satpathy, who was a principal dancer, teacher, researcher and administrator for twenty-five years at the Nrityagram Dance Ensemble, specializes in the art of Odissi, an Indian classical dance that highlights body movement, costumes, expressions, gestures and sign language to convey a story or spiritual message.

On March 20, Florida International University partnered with MBF and NEA to discuss the intersection between STEM and fiction writing with three writers—Ken Liu, a software engineer, Usman Malik, a Pakistani doctor and Vandana Singh, an Indian physicist—at the FIU Graham Center.

Big Read also hosted workshops throughout March, including the MBF’s Speak Up, a virtual creative writing and performance workshop series for teens. 

Writers like Sajni Patel explored what it means to be a monster through her Greek mythology-inspired novel, Rick Riordan Presents: A Drop of Venom.

Margot Kahn, a biographer, poet and editor, discussed how women communicate what they want by analyzing works such as Circe and her most recent co-edited essay collection Women: Writing About Desire.

Maud Newton, a writer and former lawyer, addressed the importance of sharing difficult family stories.  

On April  2, Miller will lead a virtual conversation at 7 p.m. with George O’Connor, author and illustrator of Olympians, a 12-book graphic novel series on the major deities of the Greek pantheon. They will discuss themes found in Circe and the continued influence of mythology on culture. Students can register for the livestream at https://bit.ly/492Z7wY. 

Big Read will culminate on April 27 with a Greek mythology edition of Picnic de Libros, a bilingual family day program that celebrates literature, at the Koubek Center, 2705 S.W. Third St., at 2 p.m.

It will feature arts and crafts, a puppet dance show inspired by Afro-Caribbean mythology, characters from Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away—an animated film—and a presentation on Afro-Latino drumming and oral traditions.

Food, children’s books and copies of Circe will be given out for free. Families are encouraged to dress up as their favorite mythological character. 

Dates and locations of Circe book discussions are available at https://bit.ly/3IJYNZr. 

For more information, visit https://bit.ly/3TKoiAn or contact Bello at mcanciob@mdc.edu. 

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