In an increasingly digital world, connecting over a common interest in real life is even more meaningful.
“It’s person to person. It’s getting recommendations. It’s finding out from your friends or people you admire what they’re reading,” said C.J. Box, the author behind the Western mystery series Joe Pickett. “You just got to get out there and start.”
Box is one of four headlining authors for the DSM Book Festival on Saturday, March 22. Beaverdale’s Franklin Event Center will host the free day of author talks, panel discussions, children’s activities (courtesy of the Des Moines Public Library), vendors and book recommendations galore.
“It’s just continuing to offer what we offer and making books and thoughts and ideas available for everybody,” said Jan Danielson Kaiser, Beaverdale Books’ events and marketing coordinator and the lead organizer for the DSM Book Festival.
In 2019, the Greater Des Moines Partnership presented the first DSM Book Festival at Capital Square downtown. After some leadership changes, Beaverdale Books took over this year’s event, with financial support from the Beaverdale Neighborhood Association.
“I think it’s kind of unique that a bookstore is putting it on — that we are the presenting sponsor,” Kaiser said. “There’s going to be so many things to learn and so many people to talk with that I could guarantee there would be something of interest to just about anybody.”
The first author presenting on March 22 is Claire Lombardo, a bestselling fiction writer (The Most Fun We Ever Had, Same As It Ever Was) from Oak Park, Illinois. Her 10 a.m. talk is moderated by fellow novelist Kali Van Baale, an Iowa resident.
At noon is presidential historian and commentator Alexis Coe (You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington), who Kaiser considers to be “a young Doris Kearns Goodwin.” The L.A.-born, New York-based writer’s talk is presented by the Iowa Historical Society.
A year removed from his basketball-centric presentation at Mission Creek Festival 2024, culture critic Hanif Abdurraqib (A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension) is DSM Book Fest’s 2 p.m. headliner. A spoken word poet from Columbus, Ohio turned essayist and MacArthur Fellow, Abdurraqib is sure to find chemistry with Iowa City spoken word performer and author Caleb “The Negro Artist” Rainey.
Rounding out the afternoon is C.J. Box, a Wyoming wordsmith with more than 30 published novels under his belt, translated into 27 languages.
“It’s always interesting to get the perspective of readers in different parts of the country, and in some cases, different parts of the world,” said Box. His 4:30 p.m. talk is moderated by Iowa’s own Heather Gudenkauf, whose novel Everyone is Watching is her 10th in the thriller/mystery genre.
Kaiser said the spread of featured authors were booked with “every demographic in mind.” The cost of entry — free — also serves this purpose.
“We just hope to make it as accessible to everybody as possible,” Kaiser said. “We’ve had wonderful comments from people who appreciate that there’s going to be free parking and that they won’t have to drive all the way downtown.”
DSM Book Fest will also offer panels on “Getting Published in the Heartland” and “Inspiring Words” for aspiring authors. Fans of visual aids will enjoy the “Words from Book Illustrators” session, while romance fans shouldn’t miss “Is it Hot in Here or is it My Book?”
“I know not everybody can afford a book,” Kaiser said. “But by having a free event, they can meet people, they can hear ideas and they can be surrounded by other people with the same goal.”
It’s never been more important to convene a community around books, especially in Iowa. According to a report by PEN America, Iowa came second only to Florida in public school book bans last year, with 3,671 instances across 117 districts.
However, Iowans also are turning out to defend banned books and challenged authors. Kaiser said Beaverdale’s Books’ small staff have stayed busy planning talks and accommodating large crowds.
“We had some really major events with Jodi Picoult and Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Banned Wagon from Penguin Random House [last fall] … and this spring is promising to be the same,” she explained.
Des Moines’ bibliophiles continue to show up and show out to these events. According to Kaiser, Picoult’s sold-out talk in Iowa’s capital city was “the biggest audience of her entire book tour.” Picoult happens to be the author of the most commonly banned book during the 2023-2024 school year, Nineteen Minutes.
Big names draw in big crowds, and Kaiser hopes that is the case for the 2025 DSM Book Festival. Getting such a massive event together hasn’t been easy amid the transition — the festival’s last Facebook post, from over a year ago, discussed Beaverdale taking over as the presenting sponsor and promised another festival in 2024. But that never happened.
“We should have started sooner,” Kaiser laughed. “We were going to do it last October and we just plain ran out of time.”
The lineup for March 22 is all set to go, though, and it couldn’t come soon enough.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s March 2025 issue.
