Shelley Youngblut: Looking Ahead at 2016

It’s Official

We want you to be among the first to know that Shelley Youngblut has accepted the position of General Director of Wordfest. After successfully guiding the Festival through its 20th anniversary celebrations this past October, Youngblut looks forward to Wordfest’s third decade as Calgary’s Number One Reader’s Festival.

A strong advocate for high-quality community engagement, Youngblut comes to Wordfest from her previous positions as Western Editor of the Globe and Mail and founding editor of Swerve, the Calgary Herald’s award-winning weekly magazine. A well-known “creative ringleader,” she is a regular member of the Unconventional Panel on CBC Calgary’s The Eyeopener, and recently curated the photography exhibit, Your Town is Our Town, at the Lougheed House Gallery.

Youngblut is a past participant of the Banff Centre’s Literary Journalism, Wired Writing Studio and Arts Journalism programs, as well as the Stanford Professional Publishing Program. She also packaged three sports books for Hyperion: The Quotable ESPN, Did You Know? and Way Inside ESPN’s X Games, which was named one of the best books for teens by the New York Public Library.

Looking Ahead at 2016

We are dreaming big for the upcoming 2016 season. The New Year kicks off with a free reading and talk on January 15, presented in conjunction with Calgary Opera’s production of Die tote Stadt. We also look forward to partnering with Alberta Theatre Projects on a free pre-show talk featuring novelist Rawi Hage and guests on March 4. ATP’s production of Cockroach is based on the novel by Hage. More details will be announced in January.

And we have already confirmed two exciting writers for spring. Yann Martel, author of the international bestseller Life of Pi, joins us on March 15. And on April 15 we look forward to presenting social movement pioneer Micah White, who co-created Occupy Wall Street while working as an editor at Adbusters. These special Wordfest appearances are presented in partnership with Owl’s Nest Books. Stay tuned in the new year for all the details. Tickets go on sale mid-January.

Until then, please enjoy a look back at all we accomplished this year collectively as patrons, volunteers, donors, sponsors and community partners. As you explore our photos on Flickr.com and Festival recaps on Storify.com, we hope that you see traces of yourself and Calgary’s reading community captured proudly in these highlights from 2015.

Wishing you all the best this holiday season,

Wordfest’s Board of Directors, Staff and Volunteers