Louisville Book Festival

We believe that literacy is a fundamental human right and that there is power and purpose in bringing books to life every day of the year. The Louisville Book Festival is a year-round nonprofit organization founded in 2018 to celebrate and promote the love and the benefits of reading, writing, and literacy.  We celebrate books and use them to highlight and grow the resilient culture of our vibrant city, as well as to encourage and elevate our creative thinking as a community.

• The festival and the It Pays to Read program support children and families throughout our city.
• Last year we gave away more than six thousand books and held workshops geared towards fostering a love of reading among children. 
• This year more than 100 authors and presenters will share their work and their stories with our community. 
• We will continue our goal to ensure that all children have access to books in their home. 
• Book festivals help highlight literacy issues in a community and cultivate a lifelong love of reading and learning.

Our annual event, the 2024 Louisville Book Festival will be held in downtown Louisville, KY on October 18 and 19 from 10 am to 5 pm at the Kentucky International Convention Center. This is the FIFTH year for the Louisville Book Festival. We need you to tell everyone you know we are here!

Our founder, Deedee Cummings, began this mission after working as an in-home therapist and witnessing first-hand the extreme lack of access to books in the homes of the families she served. In Louisville, there is an interstate called I-65. This interstate also happens to be a natural divide (literally and figuratively) between East and West Louisville. When Deedee began this mission, there were no bookstores west of 65. Though there are now a couple of bookstores west of I-65, there is no comparison to the bountiful literary resources the rest of the city has access to.

This circumstance alone reduces access to books for a large portion of our city's children and youth creating a book desert. Our goal for the Louisville Book Festival is to ensure every child attending the Book Festival leaves with at least one free age-appropriate book. We are doing more than bringing books to all areas of Louisville. We are also facilitating conversations and connections through a shared love of reading and the power of books in our lives. We work year-round to get books into the hands of children and to get them to read books through our programs like It Pays to Read.

Your support helps us continue to offer free books and free classes designed to show how books are instrumental to our overall health and well-being. 

"Children who can't read, can't read people." ~ Louisville Book Festival Founder Deedee Cummings

Nearly one out of every four Kentucky adults cannot read. We often forget what a blessing it is to be able to incorporate reading as a skill in our everyday lives.

• When a person cannot read, they cannot navigate daily life.
• Reading affects everything from a person's ability to catch a bus to their ability to read a prescription label.
• Reading changes lives.
• Reading saves lives.

Through our programs we not only gain access to books for families with no books, we also highlight the issues that illiteracy causes for individuals and for the community we all live in. A donation to our program is a donation to our future. We cannot thank you enough for visiting our page and for sharing our mission with others.