The Bloomington Book Festival is back for its third year, but organizers have squeezed the celebration into a single, tighter weekend built around a Sunday evening with two celebrated authors. New York Times-bestselling writer Wright Thompson and Bloomington native Michael Koryta will headline the festival's main event at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, drawing book lovers downtown before the festival makes a bigger move next year.
According to WISH-TV, the main event takes place Sunday at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, featuring Thompson and Koryta together onstage. Doors open at 4:30 p.m., with the program starting at 5 p.m., and college students get in free with a valid ID. Festival vice president Jenn Christy told the station the shortened format is intentional: “This is a very compacted weekend,” she said, explaining that the festival is moving to spring next year in part because Indiana University became national champions.
Thompson, whose latest book is “The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi,” is this year's winner of the Bob Hammel Writing Award, according to the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, which calls him a New York Times-bestselling author and revered journalist. It marks the third annual presentation of the award. Koryta, a Bloomington native whose novel “Die Famous” follows Savannah Cody and her son Alford through 1937 Indiana, will present Thompson with the Hammel Award and join him in conversation. Both writers are scheduled to sign books after the event, per the same venue listing.
From a Parking Lot to Downtown Bloomington
The festival's footprint has grown considerably since it began in the parking lot of Morgenstern Books, per WISH-TV's report. It expanded downtown in its second year, and organizers say next year's event will move to Switchyard Park. The 2027 festival is expected to return in spring with an expanded schedule at the park, the station reports.
That second-year expansion brought the festival across several venues at once. The Indiana Daily Student reported the 2025 festival ran Friday through Sunday at The Dimension Mill, Morgenstern Books and Café, and the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, with Madison Street closed to traffic and local bookshops and food trucks joining the celebration on Saturday. That year's highlight was a sold-out Friday event with author John Green at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, alongside a Local Author Fair, Poetry on Demand sessions, a true-crime panel, and children's book readings and activities, the paper noted.
Public broadcaster IPM similarly described the second annual festival running October 24 through 26, 2025, with John Green and Koryta speaking together at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater that Friday. The weekend also included a children's book swap, poetry on demand, a children's book writing class, and a panel on how a book gets published, with a fiction and nonfiction book swap held that Sunday at Morgenstern Books.
A Literacy Program Born From the Festival's Success
Beyond the author lineup, the festival has become the engine behind BloomREADS, a community literacy initiative. WISH-TV reports that festival president Jenna Bowman said low literacy rates prompted the program's launch across Bloomington, Monroe County and surrounding counties, and that the festival's first two years of success allowed BloomREADS to spin off as its own entity focused on getting books to children who need them most.
BloomREADS describes itself as the Bloomington Book Festival's community literacy project on its own website, aiming to nurture the skill and love of reading through multi-modal early-learning tools and programs not offered in schools, while also planting books throughout the community and offering free literacy toolkits to families, according to BloomREADS. Its first initiative is to build an on-site book collection and literacy toolkit for families at Tandem Community Birth Center and Postpartum House.
The festival's success helped BloomREADS launch. With the 2027 move to Switchyard Park expected to bring a fuller vendor and community day, organizers appear to be betting that this year's scaled-back weekend is a bridge to something larger.
