Windham County Reads is a Brattleboro Literary Festival partner, with responsibility for events featuring authors and illustrators of books for children and young adults. In 2009, those events included two programs for students during the school day; one with picture book creators Ashley Bryan (three-time Coretta Scott King Award-winner) and Janice Harrington (author of two Vermont Red Clover books), and one with juvenile mystery writers Tony Abbott (also the author of the Secrets of Droon series) and Peter Abrahams (also the author of suspense novels for adults).

Weekend events featured an unforgettable hour of storytelling, performance poetry and songs with Ashley Bryan, a sneak preview of Anna Dewdney's non-fiction picture book about the Southeast Asian pangolin, a Secrets of Droon celebration with Tony Abbott, Donna Freitas and Peter Gould sharing their quirky young adult novels, and a lively, multi-media presentation with New Yorker cartoonist and picture book author and illustrator Harry Bliss.

Dates for the 2010 Literary Festival are Friday, October 1 through Sunday, October 3. Festival attenders will have the opportunity to hear and meet Francisco X. Stork, the author of a funny and moving novel about a young man with Asperger's, Jan Reynolds, whose photo-essays about the world's vanishing cultures are both beautiful and thought-provoking, and Katherine Paterson, whose most recent novel about an Albanian family's refugee and immigrant experience is the 2010 Vermont Reads selection.

They will be joined by many more authors for a spectacular weekend celebrating books and reading. The entire schedule of free events, including biographies of all 2010 authors, will be posted on the Brattleboro Literary Festival website in July.