Festival Schedule
A lively marketplace where stories come to life! Meet emerging and established authors, browse a curated selection of books across genres, and grab your next favorite read.
Mix, mingle, and make memories! Swap books, snap photos, and network with authors and fellow book lovers. This is the place to spark new connections and make new friends.
Get hands-on and get creative! This is your space to create, play, and express your inner storyteller.
Bookworms unite for a fast, funny showdown of literary knowledge. Think you know your favorite reads inside and out? Prove it. Bring your book club or make new friends on the spot and battle it out for bragging rights (and prizes) at ABF’s Book Trivia.
Ever notice how a single image can say more than a page of dialogue? Join Caleb Seales for a live conversation on the art of visual storytelling. He’ll break down the five essential elements every great scene needs: character, environment, color, light, and composition. Along the way, he’ll dig into how directors think, how books become films, and where AI fits into the creative process without losing the human heart of a story. Stick around for an interactive exercise where the audience builds a whole narrative from a single photograph.
Want to publish your own zine but don’t know where to begin? In this hands-on workshop, Todd Sullivan walks you through everything you need to launch a digital zine, from concept and content to layout and publishing. Whether you’re a first-time creator or looking to take an existing project digital, you’ll leave with the tools and the confidence to bring your ideas to life.
This workshop reframes writer’s block not as failure, but as Creative Stillness — an active state where language forms beneath pressure before it reaches the page. Rooted in the anthology Creative Stillness, participants will explore writing as a process that begins in pause, not performance. Through guided prompts, writers will move from resistance to observation, from silence to language that emerges without force — leaving with new writing and a new understanding of stillness as part of the creative process.
Writing can be more than a craft. It can be a path through pain, purpose, and healing. Join Nigel Darius, Dr. Michelle Cooke, John Onwuchekwa, and Troy Harris for a candid conversation on turning lived experience into words that speak to others. From memoir to ministry to mental and physical health, this panel explores what it takes to tell your story honestly and why doing so matters.
Every published graphic novel begins with a single idea. David Dabel shares the journey from concept to publication, including pitching, finding collaborators, working with an agent, navigating publishers, and lessons learned along the way. Ideal for aspiring creators interested in comics, graphic novels, and traditional publishing.
In this workshop, participants will learn how to ground the reader in both time and place in ways that strengthen narrative clarity and deepen the world of their characters. We’ll explore how time shapes a scene’s mood, pacing, and tension, and how the setting creates texture that pulls readers into the moment. Through discussion, guided examples, and exercises, attendees will practice weaving temporal cues and sensory setting details so that every moment feels vivid and intentional.
When was the last time you wrote a love letter? When was the last time you received an apology letter? This workshop is a guided letter writing experience that blends storytelling, self-reflection, & creative writing. You will engage with and write your own letters that speak to what you need in this season — you’ll have a unique opportunity to write an apology / love letter to or from a person, place, or an experience.
A mystery is always a game between the author and the reader. In this interactive session, you’ll examine suspects, uncover clues, separate red herrings from real evidence, and put your detective skills to the test. Along the way, you’ll discover how mystery writers hide clues in plain sight and what makes a satisfying whodunit. Whether you’re a devoted mystery reader or an aspiring writer, come ready to investigate.
A great story always has a turn you didn’t see coming, and so does every writer’s path to telling it. Join Aimee Hardy, Rosey Lee, Jayna Breigh, and Shakir Rashaan for a conversation on the art of the plot twist, on the page and off. They’ll share how they build twists into their own work, the unexpected turns in their own writing journeys, and the books with twists they still can’t stop thinking about.
Think you can out-spell the room? The Atlanta Book Bee brings the classic spelling bee back with a bookish twist. Come compete, cheer, and celebrate the words behind great stories.