Local Authors

A grassroots festival showcasing and bringing together Jacksonville writers, JaxbyJax Literary Arts Festival was founded in 2014 by prolific local author Tim Gilmore and his wife, Florida State College at Jacksonville professor Jo Carlisle. The event includes local author readings, workshops, coaching and a student showcase. For its 11th year, JaxbyJax will make its return to the Conference Center at Main Library on Friday and Saturday, November 8-9, 2024. 

The Library's biggest celebration of authors, books, and writing is back! Jax Book Fest returns September 20-21 to the Main Library in downtown Jacksonville featuring a Lit Chat Interview with Gabrielle Zevin on Saturday, September 21 from 2 - 3 p.m. Gabrielle Zevin is a #1 New York Times bestselling novelist whose books have been translated into forty languages. Her tenth novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, was a New York Times bestseller, a Sunday Times bestseller, and a selection of the Tonight Show’s Fallon Book Club.

The Library's biggest celebration of authors, books, and writing is back! Jax Book Fest returns September 20-21 to the Main Library in downtown Jacksonville featuring a Teen Lit Chat Interview with Jason Reynolds, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of many award-winning books, including Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks, All American Boys (with Brendan Kiely), Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You (with Ibram X. Kendi), Stuntboy, in the Meantime (illustrated by Raúl the Third), and Ain’t Burned All the Bright (with artwork by Jason Griffin).

Jax Book Fest returns September 20-21 to the Main Library in downtown Jacksonville with the #1 New York Times bestselling creator of Big, Little Leaders, Little Dreamers, and Little Legends and the illustrator of Andrea Beaty's I Love You Like Yellow, Matthew Cherry’s Hair Love, and Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic’s Hello, Star, among others. She received a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor for Lupita Nyong’o’s Sulwe and is also a two-time recipient of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work for Children.

Are you an indie author looking for a chance to showcase your talent? The Indie Author Project Annual Contest is looking for the best indie-published e-book in seven genres. Submit your work before May 31 for your chance to win $2,500 and other amazing prizes!

Saturday, November 25, 2023, is Small Business Saturday – a day to celebrate and support small businesses, artists, local authors, and other creators! Of course, we hope you support local authors all year long! In addition to our annual Jax Book Fest which features dozens of local authors, we also invite local authors and creators to talk about (and sign) their books at Lit Chat Author Talks and Interview programs. While these events are free to attend, they are a great way for authors to find new readers and for readers to find new authors! 

Nat Glover was born in 1943, in segregated Jacksonville, Florida. At seventeen, he unknowingly headed into an angry white mob and the Ku Klux Klan attacking young black protestors staging a sit-in at a downtown whites-only lunch counter. Known as “Ax Handle Saturday,” this harrowing encounter with racism would commit him to a lifetime of fighting for justice. He joined the Jacksonville Police Department in 1966 where he was promoted to detective, rose to sergeant, and was appointed the city’s first hostage negotiator. In 1995, Duval County voters elected him the first Black sheriff in Florida since Reconstruction. Hear more about his incredible work and his new memoir, Striving for Justice: A Black Sheriff.

For National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), we asked a few of our recent Lit Chat and Writer's Lab alumni to answer a few questions about their writing process. Our second guest blogger is Sohrab Homi Fracis. Our second guest blogger is Sohrab Homi Fracis. True Fiction, his new book of North Florida (and elsewhere) stories, won the 2023 International Book Award for story collections. Fracis was also the first Asian American author to win the Iowa Short Fiction Award, described by the New York Times Book Review as "among the most prestigious literary prizes America offers," for his first book, Ticket to Minto: Stories of India and America.

For National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), we asked a few of our recent Lit Chat and Writer's Lab alumni to answer a few questions about their writing process. Hurley Winkler is a writer and a lifelong resident of Jacksonville. Her fiction and nonfiction work has appeared in Hobart, Neutral Spaces, The Millions, and elsewhere, and she interviews writers and musicians for The Creative Independent and WJCT's Jacksonville Music Experience. 

Writing 50,000 words in a single month can be a daunting task... but it doesn't have to be a solitary one! There's a whole community of writers, right here in Jacksonville, and several ways to network and learn from them. Between monthly Writer's Lab workshops as well as Lit Chat Interviews and Author Talks, the Library is truly a local author's best friend. You never have to pay to attend these classes either, whether it's an up-and-coming local author or an international bestselling author. Not only that, the Library has tons of books on writing, publishing and more... and it's all completely free to use!