The Friendly City Books
Community Connection

Here’s a just a few of the places where you can find our donated books: Columbus Municipal School District, Lowndes County School District, Starkville Oktibbeha School District, Baptist Memorial Hospital, Columbus Air Force Base, the Columbus Juneteenth Celebration, the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library System, the Columbus-Lowndes Chamber of Commerce’s Educators are Essential Conference, the Mississippi Book Festival, the Mississippi School for Mathematics & Science, Mississippi University for Women, and more across the region.

We’ve connected our local schools with the opportunity for students to meet inspiring writers with Mississippi roots. Highlights include visits in Columbus and Starkville from bestselling author Angie Thomas on her book tour for Nic Blake and the Remarkables and award-winning animator Andy Harkness for his picture book Wolfboy Is Scared. We also host an annual program for children to learn about the new Mississippi state flag and state song through the children’s book One Mississippi with songwriter/author Steve Azar and illustrator Sarah Frances Hardy.

We launched a book festival in 2024 to bring authors from across the South to the Friendly City. Our inaugural festival attracted 1,000 book lovers to our adult book fair, author panels, local author showcase, and storytime. We’re working to make it even bigger and better this year. Learn more on our Festival page and join us on August 16, 2025 at the Columbus Arts Council at 501 Main Street for the big day.

We’re lucky to be located near two unique public educational institutions – the Mississippi University for Women and the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science – and we joined forces with them to bring MUW’s recommended reading for incoming students beyond the gates of campus to the greater community, along with the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library and the City of Columbus. We’ve been a part of the 2023 program for Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed and the 2024 program for Alejandra Campoverdi’s First Gen, including book giveaways and events on and off campus. This year’s selection is The Barn by Wright Thompson.

As part of our mission, we use books and authors to bring together people from all walks of life to learn from each other. We’ve held book events everywhere from the Lowndes County Courthouse lawn to the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library to local restaurants. We’ve partnered with Mississippi University for Women to bring The Comfort of Crows author Margaret Renkl to the Ina E. Gordy Honors Forum Series and Emotional Labor author Rose Hackman for the Nell Peel Wolfe Lecture. We also brought author Nyani Nkrumah to five communities in Mississippi for conversations about her novel Wade in the Water which deals with the aftermath of the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.

With Mississippi Poet Laureate Catherine Pierce, we staged the Mississippi Young Writers’ Poetry Festival, which gave over 125 schoolchildren statewide the opportunity to develop their creative writing talents. Over two days at Delta State University and the University of Southern Mississippi, students shared their award-winning poems with each other, their families, and their teachers. They participated in workshops led by a dozen professional poets from Mississippi, and they were inspired by a keynote presentation by National Youth Poet Laureate Stephanie Pacheco.