Louisville Reads Bad Feminist: A Citywide Book Club Leading Up to the Louisville Book Festival

What if an entire city read a book together?

This fall, the Louisville Book Festival is inviting Louisville to do exactly that.

On August 30, we are launching Louisville Reads, a citywide community reading initiative that invites readers across Louisville to read and discuss Roxane Gay’s acclaimed essay collection, Bad Feminist. The experience will culminate in a virtual community book club meeting on Saturday, October 10, before we welcome Roxane Gay to Louisville as a featured author at the 2026 Louisville Book Festival on Saturday, October 24.

It is a book club, but it is also something bigger. Louisville Reads is an invitation to make reading a community experience. To explore ideas together, ask questions together, and create the kinds of conversations that can continue long after we close the book.

Order the book from local indie store, Foxing Books, here.

Register for the virtual book club here. 

Louisville Reads: One Book, One City, A Whole Lot to Talk About

Throughout Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay writes about feminism, race, gender, identity, politics, culture, entertainment, contradiction, and the complicated experience of being human.

Louisville Reads gives our community an opportunity to explore those ideas together.

Beginning August 30, readers can pick up a copy of Bad Feminist and read at their own pace. You can participate individually, invite a friend to read with you, bring the book to your existing book club, start conversations with coworkers or family members, or simply follow along with the Louisville Book Festival as we share discussion questions and prompts.

You do not need to be a literary scholar. You do not need to have the “right” interpretation of the book. You do not even need to finish every page before joining us on October 10.

You simply need to be willing to read, think, listen, and join the conversation.

Read Bad Feminist—Submit a Question to Roxane Gay

Louisville Reads participants will also have a special opportunity as part of this year’s Louisville Book Festival.

As you read Bad Feminist, we encourage you to notice the passages that stay with you. Pay attention to the ideas that challenge you, surprise you, make you uncomfortable, make you laugh, or make you reconsider something you thought you understood. Then think about what you would ask the person who wrote them.

Louisville Reads participants will have the opportunity to submit questions for Roxane Gay, and one question will be selected to ask her during her appearance at the Louisville Book Festival on October 24, 2026.

It creates a remarkable connection between reading a book privately and then gathering as a community to hear directly from its author.

Support a Louisville Independent Bookstore While You Read

Books create communities, and bookstores help sustain them. We encourage Louisville Reads participants to purchase Bad Feminist through Foxing Books, an independent Louisville bookstore and Louisville Book Festival partner. You can order your copy from Foxing Books here. Supporting an independent bookstore keeps more of our community’s investment in books right here in Louisville while helping strengthen the local literary ecosystem we want to see grow.

More Than a Book Festival: Building a Literary Community in Louisville

The Louisville Book Festival was created around a simple belief: books should be accessible to everyone.

A book festival should not feel like something reserved for people already connected to the publishing world. A child discovering an author for the first time belongs there. A lifelong reader belongs there. An aspiring writer carrying a manuscript in their bag belongs there. A family looking for something meaningful to do together belongs there. So does the person who hasn’t picked up a book in years but might discover one that changes something for them.

That is why the Louisville Book Festival has worked to make books, authors, literacy, and literary experiences more accessible to our community.

Each year, the festival brings authors and readers together in Louisville for conversations, readings, books, programming, and opportunities to discover stories they may never have encountered otherwise. We intentionally work to create space for voices and stories that have historically been underrepresented while creating an experience where people throughout our community can see themselves as readers.

But our vision has never been limited to what happens on one festival day.

We want Louisville to be a city that reads.

We want children to grow up surrounded by books and to know the joy of choosing books for themselves. We want emerging writers to know there is a literary community here for them. We want independent bookstores to thrive. We want authors to see Louisville as a city worth visiting. We want neighbors who may have very different lives and experiences to encounter one another through stories.

And we want books to become a reason for people to gather.

Louisville Reads is another step toward that vision.

Why Book Festivals Matter to Cities Like Louisville

Books can entertain us, but they can also do something extraordinary: they allow us to enter experiences beyond our own. We can meet people we might never meet in our daily lives. We can travel to places we may never visit. We can encounter histories we were never taught. We can sit with perspectives that challenge our own. Children can find characters who remind them of themselves, and they can discover characters whose lives look nothing like theirs.

That is one reason literacy and access to books are about more than reading proficiency. They are also about imagination, empathy, possibility, and belonging. A community book festival creates a physical space for all of those things. The Louisville Book Festival is working to make Louisville a place where literature isn’t something happening somewhere else—in New York, Los Angeles, or another major publishing city.

It is happening here.

Authors are coming here.

Local authors are celebrated here.

Readers are gathering here.

Writers are building community here.

Children are discovering books here.

Important conversations are happening here.

And this fall, Louisville has the opportunity to read together here.

Join Louisville Reads and the 2026 Louisville Book Festival

Louisville Reads begins August 30, 2026.

Pick up a copy of Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, invite someone to read with you, and join us for our virtual Louisville Reads community book club on Saturday, October 10. You can register for the Louisville Reads virtual event here.

As you read, keep track of the questions you would love to ask Roxane Gay. Your question could be the one selected to be asked when we welcome her to Louisville.

Then join us on Saturday, October 24, 2026, for the Louisville Book Festival and experience what happens when a city comes together around books, stories, writers, and ideas.

Whether you read every essay or only a few, you are welcome in the conversation.

Whether you attend book events every month or have never attended a literary festival before, you are welcome at the Louisville Book Festival.

This belongs to Louisville.

Let’s read together!

One book. One city. A whole lot to talk about. Even more to think about.