1,000+ volunteers will power this weekend's Tucson Festival of Books

Chances are she will be standing, not sitting, but there’s little doubt she will be front and center when more than 300 authors gather next Saturday and Sunday at the University of Arizona.

A volunteer since the festival began in 2009, Adler now manages its largest venue: the Student Union Ballroom. She will meet many of the festival’s top authors and greet more than 6,000 attendees next weekend, and she has been counting the days for a while now.

“I’m pretty sure I have the best job at the festival,” the longtime Tucsonan said last week. “To see the excitement and feel the energy of so many people, all weekend long, is really special.”

Among those appearing in the ballroom this year will be Salman Rushdie, Erik Larson, Brad Thor and Susan Lucci.

C.J. Box will be onstage with J.A. Jance. Gary Shteyngart will compare notes with fellow novelists Jess Walter and Catherine Newman.

There will be five one-hour programs each day, and the baton will be in the hands of a slender, silver-haired retiree who has served as the venue captain there for the last 10 years.

Adler will report for duty at 8:30 both mornings to meet the sound technician, test the microphones, check the stage setup and look for things that might be missing. By 9:00, she will have compared notes with her line managers outside, and by 9:15, organized the volunteers who will help her direct traffic once the doors open at 9:30.

The weekend’s first program, featuring songwriter and memoirist Marc Shaiman, will start at 10:00.

“Once we open the doors, it’s pretty much nonstop all day, both days,” Adler said.

Since she is the stage manager, too, Adler will meet with the authors and moderators before each session begins.

“That’s one of the perks,” she laughed. “I get to meet the people everyone else has come to see.”

One year, she got a playful kiss on the lips from Ed Asner. A few years later, she bantered like a cowgirl with author Craig Johnson and the cast of the TV series Longmire. In 2023, she met Linda Ronstadt and Bernie Sanders on the same Sunday afternoon.

“That was a day,” Adler said. “Linda got a standing ovation the minute she entered the room, and you could have heard a pin drop the rest of the hour. The very next session was Bernie Sanders, and people who couldn’t get in sat on the floor in the lobby just so they could hear what he had to say.”

Community volunteers have been the backbone of this event since the year it began — even now, there are only two paid staffers — and Adler remembers the good ol’ days.

“Back then, I’m not really sure we really knew what a book festival even was,” she confessed. “We just started spreading the word that we needed volunteers and hoped that enough people would show up to do everything that needed to get done. Luckily, they did.”

Unlike today, when volunteers can choose their assignments, those early volunteers didn’t know where they might be assigned until they arrived on campus

“Jane Barton and I were in charge of volunteer check-in,” Adler recalled. “Nobody had been pre-assigned. We just knew where people were needed, and as volunteers checked in we’d send them there.”

Adler would later become an author escort, guiding authors and moderators to the appropriate stage before their sessions began, and later still a venue monitor.

Among the authors she met along the way was John Straley, the writer laureate of Alaska.

“Two or three years later, when my husband Ira and I were getting ready for an Alaskan cruise, we reached out to John to see if we could come see him,” Adler said. “When we got to Sitka, he and his wife took us to lunch. Best chowder we’ve ever had.”

This will be Adler’s 17th book festival, and she hopes there are many more to come.

“I look forward to this every year, and when it’s over I start looking forward to the next one,” she said. “To know how much the festival depends on volunteers, and to see the results, it’s infectious. You just can’t shake the feeling you get by being part of all this.”

Still time to sign up to volunteer

Volunteer coordinator Jim Critchley said more than 1,000 volunteers will work some 3,000 four-hour shifts next weekend, from setup on Friday morning to cleanup Sunday night. A number of popular slots are still available, and new signups will be accepted through Thursday. To select an assignment, just visit the Volunteer page on the festival’s website, tucsonfestivalofbooks.org.

“Walk-in volunteers” can also join the party during the festival itself. Just stop by the festival’s Volunteer Center on the ground-level patio north of the Student Union.

Footnotes

• Poet, essayist and memoirist Logan Phillips has been selected as Tucson’s next poet laureate by the Arts Foundation of Tucson and Southern Arizona and the City of Tucson. The formal announcement and Phillips’ first public reading will take place next Sunday afternoon, March 15, at the Tucson Festival of Books. Mayor Regina Romero will be part of a program that is scheduled for 4 p.m. in the Student Union Kiva. Phillips’ most recent book is his memoir, “Reckon.” He will serve a three-year term as poet laureate, succeeding TC Tolbert.
• Festival author Jonny Garza Villa will discuss his latest book, “Futbolista," this coming Friday, March 13, at the Martha Cooper Library. The 3 o’clock program is being co-sponsored by the library’s Pride and Nuestras Raices teams. To learn more, visit library.pima.gov.
• Festival-goers should know the UA has instituted a clear-bag policy for all author presentations, similar to the clear-bag requirements at Centennial Hall, Arizona Stadium and McKale Center. Cloth-bag check stations will be available, and the UA Campus Store will have clear bags available for purchase.