Decatur Book Festival’s new leadership looks to the future 

The Decatur Book Festival’s last half-decade has been eventful, seeing the once-sprawling event and its coffers greatly diminished by the pandemic. Canceled in 2023, the Festival was relaunched the next year under the careful leadership of Interim Director Leslie Wingate and Programming Director Denise Auger, who reined in the explosive growth for the 2024 and 2025 editions, recalibrating it for longevity.

“Leslie did such an incredible job,” says Bailee Yarbrough, says Bailee Yarbrough, who was named executive director after Wingate retired in February. Yarbrough, who started with the Festival as a volunteer in 2024, says that Wingate’s leadership “definitely helped us with laying that groundwork and continuing to expand what we want the Festival to look like and what the community wants.” 

Yarbrough’s biggest and earliest challenge was Auger’s retirement, also announced in February. She was eager to hire someone with an understanding of DBF’s mission and experience that balanced her own project engineering background. A month into her tenure, she ended up hiring two people: Literary Director Anna Dobben and Assistant Director Heidi Hill. 

Yarbrough says that Dobben, who has worked with multiple major book festivals, awards and publishers, brought increased industry expertise and access, as well as the community focus Yarbrough wanted to center. “One of the lines that [Dobben] says all the time is, ‘It’s not my Festival. It’s not your Festival. It’s the community’s Festival,’” she explains.

Hill, on the other hand, is a Decatur resident and community volunteer for over 20 years with strong connections and a deep familiarity with the city. “She is very passionate about strategy and helping ensure that we’re not just planning an annual book festival, but we’re building a organization,” Yarbrough says.

“It’s such a source of pride for people,” she adds. “Heidi says this, too: She’s really proud to be like, ‘Yeah, I’m from Decatur’ when people [bring up] the Decatur Book Festival.”

Yarbrough is proud of the team she’s assembled, but they are working on a tight schedule. In their first weeks together, she says, a lot of the work was getting oriented to the tasks at hand. But the trio has started picking up steam, and things are going well.

“We’ve created a strategic plan from now until the Festival, and we are really trying to be mindful of what we can accomplish with our limited capacity and what we want to mark for next year or down the line,” Yarbrough explains, adding that “Prioritization has been a big word.” The team has had to be smart about allocating their time and energy to achieve the most of what is possible now. “There are a lot of things we’d love to do,” she says, “[but] this year, we can’t do it.”

To build their plans for 2027 and beyond, organizers are actively seeking feedback on ways to improve the event in the future. “We’re really trying to think intentionally of how the audience experiences this Festival,” Yarbrough says. She explains that next year’s Festival will evolve based on this year’s information gathering.

As the new executive director, her goal is to nurture DBF’s magic mix of books and people and safeguard it for the long term, and she’s looking forward to helming it for the first time. It’s a responsibility she takes seriously. 

“To wander into this Festival and discover an author especially matters right now, when we really want to encourage everyone to read and have accessibility to books,” she says. “At its core, the Decatur Book Festival is about connecting.”

Where and When 

The 2026 Decatur Book Festival takes place October 2 and October 3 at various locations. 

::

Rachel Wright has a Ph.D. from Georgia State University and an MA from the University College Dublin, both in creative writing. Her work has appeared in The Stinging Fly and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a novel.