Master Class - Teacher Robin Gaby Fisher will help you learn the principles of compelling storytelling and find your voice in creating your own story. Meet in the Norman Williams Public Library Mezzanine.

Master Class - Teacher Kitta MacPherson will guide the class through prompted exercises in creating various forms of micro fiction — such as six-word short stories. Meet in the Norman Williams Public Library Mezzanine.

Bookstock 2026 opens with a conversation with the winners and finalists of the Vermont Book Awards, moderated by Vermont Book Awards director Miciah Bay Gault. We’re thrilled to welcome writers of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature from all across Vermont to sit down together to talk inspiration, writing process, research, the state of literature today, and how to write an award-winning book. Appetizers, drinks, and mingling to follow.

Master Class - Teacher Beth Malow will lead participants in determining whether Self Publishing is the right option for publishing their book and, if it is, how to go about it.

Special Event – Clint Hunt, an award-winning coffee roaster, will lead a Coffee Tasting at Abracadabara, which Food & Wine dubbed the best coffee shop in Vermont. 35 Wayside Drive.

Author Talk – Garrett M. Graff has spent two decades covering politics, technology, and national security and is the author of ten books. Watergate: A New History was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Master Class – In Creative Writing for Teens, Kitta MacPherson will help teen writers learn how to turn moments in their lives into compelling stories.

Author Talk – Amity Gaige is the bestselling author of five novels. Heartwood was called “the best thriller of the year” by the Boston Globe.

Author Talk – Katherine Arden is the New York Times bestselling author of the Winternight trilogy and the Small Spaces quartet.

Author Talk – Patrick Bringley is the New York Times bestselling author of All the Beauty in the World, a memoir about his decade working as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Cookstock: A Celebration of Vermont Farm-to-Table Dining

Produced in Collaboration with The Woodstock Inn

Tickets for Cookstock are sold separetly at this page:

https://www.zeffy.com/ticketing/cookstock--2026

Poetry Readings – Three noted poets will read their works.

Produced in Collaboration with Sundog Poetry. Meg Reynolds is a poet, artist, and teacher from New England whose work has been published in numerous literary journals and in three collections. Wyn Cooper has published five books of poetry; his sixth book, The Unraveling, will appear in May 2026. A poem from his first book was turned into Sheryl Crow’s Grammy-winning “All I Wanna Do.” Sydney Lea is a Pulitzer finalist in poetry, founder of New England Review, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-15), and recipient of Vermont’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.

Author Talk – Caleb Kenna, author of Art from Above Vermont, is a freelance photographer and certified drone pilot from Middlebury whose work has been widely published. Followed his talk, he will demonstrate drone photography in the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historic Park.

Poetry Readings – Readings by the 2025-2026 Vermont Youth Poet Laureate and two noted poets.

Produced in Collaboration with Sundog Poetry

Emma Paris is the 2025-26 Vermont Youth Poet Laureate and a sophomore at Bennington College, where she studies Poetry and Environmental Science. Jennifer Militello, the Poet Laureate of New Hampshire, is the author of a memoir, five collections of poetry, and a hybrid collection, Identifying the Pathogen. The Chinese poet Xue Di came to the US immediately after the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 in Beijing, becoming writer-in-residence at Brown University.