Global Arts

Get out your bookmarks and save Saturday, October 10, 2009 for The Big Read festival. The event is a FREE book festival intended to inspire readers across the nation to simply pick up a good book. This year The Big Read wanted to raise the bar by inviting, #1 New York Times Best Selling author, Greg Mortenson, who wrote Three Cups of Tea, a book that has sold more than three million copies and stayed on the New York Times best selling list 20 months after its release.

This year attendees will find: famous authors onsite, a children’s stage, live entertainment, speed reading, poetry and poetry slams, workshops, writing seminars, a food café and more. The author is slatted to go on at 11:45pm to discuss his spiritual journey and overall life experience. Mortenson was an obvious choice to lead this festival because of his underlying educational theme. Mortenson’s life is to devote his path to building schools in the remote mountains of Pakistan. His love for climbing mountains to reach the top is similar to someone reading a book until the end.

Mortenson’s, Three Cups of Tea has been read by over three dozen college campuses and was published in over 20 countries internationally. A young adult version of Three Cups of Tea was published by Penguin on January 22, 2009 and a sequel to Three Cups of Tea, titled Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, In Afghanistan and Pakistan, is scheduled for a December 2009 release.

The Big Read will take place on Saturday, October 10, 2009 from 9am-4pm on The Clayton High School Campus (1 Mark Twain Circle, Clayton, Mo 63105). The Big Read gives communities the opportunity to come together to read, discuss, and celebrate one of 30 selections from the U.S. and world literature. The Big Read project in St. Louis will announce at the festival their focus on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, a classic story about a boy and his adventure set in a small town in Missouri.

ABOUT THE CULTURAL FESTIVALS’ BIG READ PROJECT

Cultural Festivals, an organization known for the widely popular St. Louis Art Fair,

(one of the top 5 art fairs in the U.S.)and is also one of 269 nonprofit organizations nationwide including arts, culture, and science organizations to receive a grant to host The Big Read project. The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to restore reading to the center of American culture. The Big Read’s mission is to give the community the opportunity to come together to read, discuss, and celebrate sections from U.S. and world literature. The Big Read highlights more than just literature; it also focuses on what can be accomplished in partnerships between nonprofit agencies, local governments, and media outlets, as well as continuing communication and languages between all ethnicities. (For more information on The Big Read: www.bigread.net| www.neabigread.org).