Texas Book Festival

I didn’t think I’d be posting about the Texas Book Festival this year (October 22-23), unless it was an “after-party” post about events I went to see. For years now, I’ve been the Chair of the events going on at the Austin Museum of Art. At that venue, we hosted a lot of art, architecture, and photography books and authors. But since the 2010 TBF, the Austin Museum of Art (AMOA) moved out of the downtown area, so we lost it as a venue.

That meant I no longer had a Chair position. As it turns out, TBF needed a third person to help chair the Author Escorts committee, so I’m back working. While AMOA was a one-person chair that needed around 20 or 25 volunteers over the weekend, Author Escorts needs three chairs, well over a hundred volunteers and one night of pre-training.

The good news is that those volunteers are the ones who “herd” authors, some local, some national. (The complete listing of this year’s authors is not up, but the lineup for the 2011 Gala can be found, starting on the home page.) They escort them to their event venue. When their talk is over, they escort them to the book signing tent. They make sure the author gets where he or she needs to go, has everything he needs, including nametag and water or coffee, and she doesn’t arrive late because she stopped to talk to another author and lost track of time. The volunteers get to meet and talk to authors, be they best-selling politicians or first-time authors.

Doesn’t that sound like a cool volunteer opportunity? If it does, you can go to the Texas Book Festival site and sign up for a shift or two. If you do, be sure you yell “hi” to me!