October 17, 2025 | 6:00 – 9:00 PM
Marathon Music Works | 1402 Clinton St., Nashville
One of your favorite events returns Friday, October 17, 2025 at an exciting new venue: Marathon Music Works. Located in the Marathon Village neighborhood, our 2025 dinner venue tells its own unique story. Built in the early 1900’s, the Marathon Motor Works factory built automobiles between 1909 and 1914. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places, and Marathon Music Works opened as a concert and event venue in 2011. The name is a product of a community contest and neighborhood input, honoring the factory’s historical roots and its future for Nashvillians.
We hope you will plan to join us for Authors in the Round, a special event dinner that provides vital funding for the 37th annual Southern Festival of Books. Your participation in the dinner ensures that Humanities Tennessee may continue to present the Festival at no charge.
More than 175 authors are slated to attend the Festival, with 40 of those authors participating in the dinner: one seated at every table to provide an intimate dinner party experience among 350 friends and fans of the written word.
We’re thrilled to share that Nashville’s own mother-daughter duo and esteemed writers, Alice Randall and Caroline Randall Williams, are the 2025 Authors in the Round Co-Chairs!
Caption: Caroline Randall Williams, 3, enjoys a collection of Eudora Welty’s photographs with her mother, author Alice Randall, at the Southern Festival of Books on Legislative Plaza in 1990.<br />
file / The Tennessean
SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITIES
Sponsors of the Authors in the Round dinner enjoy double the impact for their support. Since the dinner raises funds to ensure the Southern Festival of Books remains FREE to the public, sponsors are recognized with a variety of benefits for both events!
Sponsorships range from $5,000 – $20,000 and provide visibility to the 350+ Dinner attendees and 20,000+ Festival attendees. Humanities Tennessee prioritizes partnerships, so we hope to discuss your goals and how sponsorship may benefit your organization as well as the Festival.
For more info, please contact Sandy Obodzinski, Development & Communications Director, sandy@humtn.org or 615.933. 5730.
TABLE HOSTS & DONORS
We will begin taking table host reservations July 1, 2025. Tables seat 9 guests plus an author and may be reserved for $3,000. This is a wonderful opportunity for companies to host clients, book clubs to gather members together for a night out, friend groups or colleagues. We recognize all table hosts in the print program and during the evening’s program. Please contact Sandy Obodzinski at sandy@humtn.org with questions.
For guests looking to purchase individual tickets, those will be available September 2, 2025. And if you cannot attend the dinner but would like to make a gift, you may do so below. We thank you for supporting the dinner and Festival!
Thank you for making an early commitment to Authors in the Round to ensure the Southern Festival of Books remains a FREE event in 2025! We welcome gifts of $1,000 for the Folio Society, or gifts in the amount of your choosing.
Every gifts makes a difference!
THANK YOU TO OUR 2025 UNDERWRITERS
