Book Booster
Norah Piehl, executive director of San Francisco’s Litquake, aspires to foster author-readership connections “well beyond the festival.” (Image by Christian Ericksen) “For me, a sign of success is when people are still talking about the events, hours or days after they took place,” says Norah Piehl, MA ’99 LAS.
Piehl is executive director of Litquake, San Francisco’s annual, two-weeks-long literary festival that celebrates practically every genre of writing, with offerings all over the city, from cafés and elementary schools to studios and dive bars.
A former English major with a background in publishing (including a copy editing job at the U. of I. Press) and stints at literary festivals in Boston and Berkeley, Piehl is a perfect fit to run Litquake: precise and detail-oriented, with a love for all-things-literature and a creative mind that helps her to engage the public in novel ways—such as a Taylor Swift poetry reading (sans Taylor)—in an attempt to attract new audiences.
This year, Piehl programmed a 24-hour-marathon reading of Moby-Dick, an evening spotlighting women poets on sex and death, and film screenings and talks on biographies of Bruce Lee and John Candy, among dozens of other events.
“Audiences love it,” says Piehl. “And authors love it, too, because the programs we put together are different from anything else they might be doing on their book tour.”
For Piehl, whose academic parents taught her the value of reading and learning as a child, a literary festival is an opportunity to teach the public about books and big ideas. And few festivals do that on the scale of Litquake.
The festival’s massive footprint and longevity (it started in 1999) are a testament to the importance of art and culture in San Francisco, Piehl says. She tries to foster that by programming a diverse slate of authors, genres, topics, and events that will appeal to book lovers of all kinds.
