The Downtown Community Alliance and Great Falls Public Library are excited to announce a new event for the Great Falls community called WOW! Wonder of Words Festival (WOW!). This new festival will connect readers, writers, and publishers at events that celebrate reading and share the joy of lifelong learning. WOW! will employ all of the humanities, offering a variety of programs on fascinating subjects to stimulate, enlighten, and entertain Great Falls. WOW! will be held Oct. 22 – 28, 2012 in various locations throughout Downtown Great Falls.
Featured events for WOW! will include:

• Children’s programming including music and theater;
• The Main Event featuring an internationally known author;
• Ohio Author’s Fair including Kids Zone;
• New Work’s featuring mixed media presentations involving newly commissioned literary work, music, illustrations, and literary readings;
• Pub (lishers) Crawl.

The core program is expected to expand through partnerships with other arts, cultural and educational organizations. Additional announcements will be made throughout the summer.
WOW is designed to celebrate the written word in the same way that the Great Falls Arts Festival celebrates the visual arts and the World Food Festival celebrates culinary traditions from around the globe. Reader’s festivals have become very popular affairs in North America. For example, the Miami Book Fair attracts hundreds of authors and over 250,000 people each year and the Tucson Festival of Books attracted 80,000 people in only its third year of operation. It is time that Great Falls, with its deep publishing traditions, hosted a similar event!
WOW! is co-produced by the Downtown Community Alliance and Great Falls Public Library. WOW! sponsors include: United Way of Central Ohio Women’s Leadership Connection, Prairie Meadows, Douglas and Deborah West, The Community Foundation of Great Falls, Downtown Great Falls Rotary, Junior League of Great Falls, Full Court Press, and Operation Downtown.