The 2023 Bookstock Festival of Words features the theme: “Voices On the Village Green” and includes a three-day festival featuring free public conversations on key issues with renowned authors, poets and storytellers. Speakers include: The New Yorker Satirist Andy Borowitz; two-time GRAMMY® Award-winning recording artist Speech Thomas; National Book Award and Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Joseph J. Ellis; USA Today Washington Bureau Chief and biographer Susan Page; #1 New York Times bestselling author Bill Gifford; Garrett Award for Fiction winner and environmental journalist Megan Mayhew Bergman; Kirkus Review Best Book award winner Emily Bernard; American writer and indigenous storyteller Joseph Bruchac; Oprah Pick and Maine Book Award bestselling author Susan Conley; former Poet Laureate of Vermont Chard deNiord; New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall; 2021 Vermont Book Award winner Melanie Finn; poet, Los Angeles Times columnist Jacques Leslie; novelist, biographer and critic Jay Parini; bestselling author and contributing editor to Vanity Fair Jeff Sharlet; and New York Times bestselling author Ilyon Woo Speakers include three current Vermont Book Award finalists: YA author Jo Knowles; Pushcart Prize Winning fiction writer Peter Orner; and critically acclaimed poet Bianca Stone.