2025 Festival News
Local Writers to Kick Off Provincetown Book Festival - Call for Submissions to “READING LOCAL”
The 2025 Provincetown Book Festival will kick off at 10:00 a.m. Saturday, September 20, with a curated reading by local authors. This event, dubbed “Reading Local,” will be curated by acclaimed fiction writer Alejandro Varela. Varela is the author of a collection of short stories, The People Who Report More Stress, and two novels, The Town of Babylon, a finalist for the National Book Award, and the forthcoming Middle Spoon, to be published in September 2025 by Viking.
Alejandro Varela will review submissions from local Cape Cod and regional writers, and will select five writers to read at the opening program of the Provincetown Book Festival. The reading may include poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction.
Writers who are interested in submitting their work for “Reading Local,” should send a sample, no longer than three pages, with a brief introduction and bio, to Nan Cinnater at the Provincetown Library (ncinnater@clamsnet.org). Deadline for submissions is July 24. The list of readers will be announced on August 22.
This year the program, “Sense of Place: Cape Cod Writers,” takes place just after “Reading Local” on September 20 at 11:30 a.m. Featured Cape Cod writers are Cynthia Blakely, Dennis Minsky and Judith Stiles. Wellfleet resident Judith Stiles, author of the novel Hush Little Fire, has become a legendary “Reading Local” success story.
As Judith tells it, “I like to … read my work in public, partly because I'm 90% deaf, but mostly to get an immediate response to my work in real time. [This includes] story slams, open mics, porch readings, and especially the wonderful READING LOCAL at the Provincetown Book Festival.” When Judith was chosen to read from her work at “Reading Local” in 2023, she fulfilled every writer’s dream. As she puts is, “You never know who will be in the audience. A literary agent heard my story at the Ptown Bookfest, and now I just published my first novel because of that listener.”
A weekend of free events for readers, writers, and book lovers of all kinds, the 2025 Provincetown Book Festival takes place on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, September 19 -- 21. All events are held at the Provincetown Public Library. The Provincetown Book Festival is sponsored in part by the Friends of the Provincetown Library, the Provincetown Tourism Fund, the Massachusetts Center for the Book and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. For more information, go to provincetownbookfestival.org.