Dean Bakopoulos was the buyer and events director at the late, great Canterbury Booksellers in Madison when he applied for the job as director of a new initiative by the nonprofit Wisconsin Humanities Council.

“This was in 2001, and they had received a grant to hire a book festival director — like, $32,000, plus benefits — from a Republican-led state Legislature at the encouragement of First Lady Laura Bush, who was big on literacy,” Bakopoulos tells Isthmus. “She had started the Texas Book Festival and the National Book Festival, and she was encouraging all 50 states to start festivals and celebrate authors and literacy. It was a different time politically.”

He got the gig and then quickly raised about a half-million dollars to fund programming for what became the first Wisconsin Book Festival, in October 2002. (The Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation and the Evjue Foundation were two early big donors.) Held over five days at more than two dozen venues in downtown Madison, including the Madison Public Library, Memorial Union, the Great Dane Pub & Brewing Company, Café Montmartre, and both indie and franchise bookstores, the event featured authors and poets from not only around the state but also from around the country. That first-year roster included Jane Hamilton, Dave Eggers, Paul Auster, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Charles Baxter, Tenaya Darlington, Brenda Cárdenas and Kevin Henkes.

In a full-circle moment, three of those writers — Racine County novelist Hamilton, Madison-based children’s author Henkes, and Wisconsin’s current poet laureate Cárdenas — will be among the 80 authors appearing at this year’s silver-anniversary edition of the Wisconsin Book Festival. In fact, Hamilton and Henkes will present together in a session on writing about family life Oct. 18 at Central Library.

“The fact that those two authors reached out and asked to do that, to me, speaks volumes about what we’re doing and how the festival has grown and supported authors over time,” says Jane Rotonda, who became the fourth director in Wisconsin Book Festival history in 2023.

A total of 55 events are happening at Madison Public Library’s Central Library and a handful of other venues Oct. 15-18 as part of the festival’s Fall Celebration. And just like a quarter-century ago, all of them are free and open to the public.

The Wisconsin Book Festival has become one of the premier book festivals in the country, offering a year-round series of author events that hosted 92 programs in 2025 — attracting 14,000 attendees. Rotonda is especially enthusiastic about the increasing number of younger attendees between 19 and 24; the only age group with greater representation is 65 to 74.

Bakopoulos moved on after that first festival in 2002 but returned to serve as executive director of the Wisconsin Humanities Council from 2004 to 2008. He wrote three novels and is now chair of the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa.

“Dean made a fantastic blueprint for what this festival could be, and that was an occasion to bring writers in to connect with people and showcase our local talent,” says Alison Jones Chaim, director of the Wisconsin Book Festival from 2003 through 2012. “I felt that it followed the blueprint of the initial years of the Wisconsin Film Festival [which began in 1999] by using multiple venues and having overlapping programming streams. It was a bold vision, and I was excited to ride his coattails.”

The biggest challenge in those early years was finding and keeping long-term donors and sponsors to sustain the festival from year to year. No federal or state money was used, she says, and at some point, there even was talk of taking the book festival on the road to other cities — which would have made it truly a Wisconsin Book Festival.

“At the same time, we looked at how locally structured it already was, the relationships were really solid,” says Jones Chaim, who now lives in Michigan. “There were some fantastic longtime donors who wanted to keep funding it the way it was, and it felt like the festival grew to be something that belonged in Madison.”

Enter the Madison Public Library and the Madison Public Library Foundation. The Central Library on West Mifflin Street reopened in September 2013 after a $30 million renovation and expansion project — making it the perfect time to transfer oversight of the festival from the Wisconsin Humanities Council (which shortened its name to Wisconsin Humanities in 2019).

“It was a different kind of commitment than the events we normally did,” says Tana Elias, digital services and marketing manager for the Madison Public Library at the time and now library director. “It would need to have dedicated staff, a dedicated budget and dedicated PR. So we worked through all of those logistics and decided it was a really good fit for the library.”

The 2013 festival was the first under the library’s direction, happening just weeks after the Central Library building reopened. It was helmed by Conor Moran, who’d previously worked at a Washington, D.C., bookstore that hosted 400 events a year, before relocating to Madison.

“I found the job description for festival director at the library and thought to myself, ‘This is the books job I didn’t think existed in Madison,’” Moran says today. “I’ve never, ever prepared better for a job interview. I had to get that job. I came in with some ideas, and ones about hosting standalone events and [focusing on] different audiences that we weren’t capturing really landed.”

Under Moran’s leadership from 2013 to 2023, the fall festival went from five days to four and a reduced number of host venues while also expanding its year-round presence with individual events. It also added more author visits to schools; brought in C-SPAN’s Book TV to cover events; and partnered with the Wisconsin Science Festival, The Bubbler at Madison Public Library, and other entities to promote cross-programming during the Fall Celebration.

“The biggest challenge was convincing [publishers and publicists] who had never been to Madison to send us their biggest asset — James Patterson or a Pulitzer-Prize winner — and getting them to understand that this wasn’t just a sweet little event put on by a regional library,” says Moran, now executive director of the Madison Public Library Foundation, which privately raises money and provides other critical financial support to keep all Wisconsin Book Festival events free. “We had a number of wins, and then we could use those wins to get the next one.”

One of the most recent wins came earlier this year, on a frigid February weeknight, when Booker Prize recipient George Saunders took the stage for a stimulating and introspective conversation with Madison writer Quan Barry at a packed Orpheum Theater. All attendees received a free copy of Vigil, too — Saunders’ latest novel released just days earlier.

Since Rotonda’s arrival, the festival has expanded its partnerships with independent bookstores; broadened its audience with more events for poets, youth writers and other groups; and altered the format of some events to include conversation partners and panel discussions.

“I think change is healthy,” Rotonda says. “It’s really great to examine how things are done and to evolve and change them when it makes sense. And even though the festival has changed, the core and heart of what we’re doing is something that resonates with people. It’s all about what happens when you put people in a room together who are of different ages and different backgrounds and perspectives. That is what a book festival is. And you might get to meet your favorite author, too.”