New Directions

Danielle Bennett has a lot of friends, a decade of event-planning experience, and a job I wouldn't wish on anyone: She's the new executive director of Northwest Bookfest. The 10-year-old annual festival blows through hundreds of thousands of dollars every year and has sunk many a talented event producer. Last year's festival drew about 9,000 people, less than half the number of attendees as in previous years, and afterward, compounding Bookfest's already unstable financial footing, the Seattle Times pulled their crucial (and long-standing) sponsorship. This was soon followed by the resignation of executive director Eleanor Mason, who had been with the festival for less than a year. It was not, embarrassingly enough, the first time a Bookfest director had come and gone so quickly. Bennett is Bookfest's fourth executive director in four years.

Last week, Bennett's friends and coworkers from The Workshop and One Reel threw her a goodbye party at Tini Bigs. (The Workshop is a Seattle event-management company where Bennett has worked for three years. One Reel, where Bennett worked for six years previous, is the organization that produces Bumbershoot and other events. Tini Bigs is a crowded lower-Queen Anne martini bar with great bartenders.) Bennett, 32, has straight black hair, wears hoop earrings and jeans, and is probably not the first person you'd pick if you were trying to guess who in a crowd was the new executive director of a $600,000 literary festival. (Someone else had to point her out to me.) She was drinking and smoking and making small talk, occasionally interrupting herself to move to the music. When I tried to ask her about her new job and the challenges ahead, she said, "I kind of want to hang out with my cronies. It's my going away party."

Which I liked.

"She's not quiet and she's not shy," said Gigi Lamm, a publicist for University of Washington Press who met Bennett at Bookfest in 1998. (Bennett has been involved with Bookfest--first as an exhibitor, then as a volunteer, then as a contractor--since the festival's inception.) "If there's someone who can turn Bookfest around, it's her," Lamm said. "She could produce an event out of a paper bag."

The day after the party at Tini Bigs, in a phone interview, Bennett told me she wasn't ready to talk specifics about next year's festival. (If you're just joining us, I have been pushing, in this column, for the festival to be moved to a more accessible location--which isn't possible this year--as well as for more headliners and more daring programming, which may yet happen.) And although Bennett doesn't have much fundraising experience, which is a key part of this job ("I'll be looking for the board's support on that"), she mentioned how, given her experience, her career was seeming to come around full circle. "I started at Seal Press and Bay Press because I'm a book lover"--she was an intern at both presses before working for One Reel--"and I fell into the event world. And then, 10 years later, to come back to an organization whose mission is to celebrate the written word and promote literacy--I can't think of anything better."

frizzelle@thestranger.com