Programming will be held at Linden Place Ballroom and Bristol Art Museum.

Our Program Speakers/Panelists

Anne E. Fernald

Professor of English and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Fordham University. Her work includes editing “Mrs. Dalloway” (Cambridge University Press), the “Norton Critical Edition: Mrs. Dalloway”  (W. W. Norton) which is the text BBF recommends this year,  and the “Oxford Handbook to Virginia Woolf.” Her book, “Her Own Voice: Eight Women Who Rewrote Life and Art,” will be published this year (Beacon).

Carolyn Vega

Curator of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at The New York Public Library, which holds the archives of Virginia Woolf, Jack Kerouac, and many others. She has organized a number of exhibitions including “Virginia Woolf: A Modern Mind.” She holds an MSLIS from Pratt Institute.

Steven L. Calvert, Ph.D.

Bristol BookFest co-chair and teacher of the 2026 Winter Seminar on “Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway”.

A Vietnam-era U.S. Navy Veteran and graduate of Dartmouth College, he wrote his Rutgers University Ph.D. thesis on Henry James. He is the author of “Alumni Continuing Education” (Macmillan, 1987), has drafted an annotated edition of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”, including a new introduction, and is currently writing an essay to explain the “triple-frame” ending of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”.

Steve and Patti moved to Bristol in 1999. They have two daughters—an artist an graduate faculty chair at Washington University in St. Louis, and a NOAA ocean scientist in Juneau, Alaska. There is a grandchild too far away in each location.