Hi, everybody. Welcome to The Librarian is in the New York Public Library's podcast about books, culture, and what are you next? I'm Gwen.

I'm Frank. And we are so excited today to be joined by the founder of the Bronx Book Festival, Ceresia Finnell. Thank you so much for coming.

Thanks so much for having me.

Perfect. This is so exciting to have you here. I watched your Kickstarter video and I was like,

who is this person we need to talk to her right now? Thank you. So can you tell us a little bit about

the book festival and about how you got started with the idea? Oh man, I've talked about

this so much, but I get emotional every single time. So I started out as a book publicist in about

2012 and I had to escort an author to the Brooklyn Book Festival and that was the first time I had ever been to a

book festival. And I realized that the Bronx doesn't have anything amazing like that. And that was

like the seed for the idea for the book festival. A little bit background about me. I was born in

Brooklyn, grew up there until I was about the age eight,

and then we moved over to the Bronx.

And while I was in the Bronx, I had never had any school visits from authors or illustrators

or anything like that.

So I had no idea that that was a thing that happened.

And after I graduated high school, I went to school and became a business major

and was super happy with that until I did a couple of internships and realized that was not for me.

So I transferred to City College and studied English there. And I was just about to graduate

and I needed to do a minor. And my advisor said, you know, you're an English major. Have you thought about publishing? And I immediately thought about magazine publishing. And I told her, no, not really interested. I don't want to be an editor. I'll just, you know, go back and become a teacher, go back and study education.

And she said, well, actually I think you should talk out this program.

It's book publishing.

You're an English major.

...