Roger Jellinek knew all along that 2020 was going to be a challenging year for the Hawai‘i Book &Music Festival. After 14 years of successfully presenting it as a weekend event on the Civic Grounds adjacent to Honolulu Hale, Jellinek, executive director of the event, partnered with the University of Hawaii at Manoa and planned to hold this year’s festival on campus.
The logistics of the move to Manoa would be challenging — even with the UH making parking free for festivalgoers.
Then came COVID-19.
So Jellinek made some quick adjustments and now the Hawai‘i Book &Music Festival 2020 will be an online celebration of books, music and culture that will run through the entire month of October and until Nov. 4.
“It’s very exciting, it’s a great adventure. I’m really pleased with it,” Jellinek said cheerfully in a recent telephone conversation. The adventure starts at 2 p.m. Thursday when UH President David Lassner officially announces the new UH/HBMF partnership and shares his views on the role of the university in the community. From there Jellinek will be presenting multiple panels on buzzword subjects like sustainability, innovation and wellness and resilience. He will also introduce new books by two dozen authors with Hawaii ties and spotlight the talents of storytellers from several nations.
Panel guests scheduled to appear include Halekulani CEO Peter Shaindlin, playwright Vilsoni Hereniko, musician Aaron Sala and Lt. Gov. Josh Green, MD. Among the featured authors are Sara Ackerman (“Red Sky Over Hawai‘i”), Gregory Shepherd (“Sea of Fire”) and Penny Pence Smith (“The Last Legwoman”), along with David Forbes, editor of “The Diaries of Queen Liliuokalani 1885-1990.”
The 12 storytellers include Hawaii favorites Jeff Gere, James McCarthy, Dann Seki and Cathy Collins. A schedule of musical performances is being worked out.
For the complete schedule, viewing links and additional information, visit hbmf.online or hawaiibookandmusicfestival.com.
“It’s been a fairly rich past 12 or 18 months (for books),” Jellinek said, explaining that all the authors either live in Hawaii or are connected to Hawaii in some way. “We’ve also added an international storytellers (section) because it is a festival and we didn’t want to be ‘all vegetables.’ I’m really, very pleased with what we have.”
Jellinek emphasized that he is very happy to be partnering with the UH.
“They have extraordinary resources and their peer group is global, it’s not local, and they received the idea (of a partnership) with huge enthusiasm. They saw it as a way to connect with the community in a way that they hadn’t generally been able to. We’re so used to playing down what Hawaii can do, but what I’ve found is an extraordinary level of competence. The university as a resource is phenomenal.”
As the festival evolved through the years, Jellinek broadened its community appeal by adding themed programs to the panel discussions, concerts and book signings and author meet-and-greets.
“We always had what we thought was the most in-depth program on Hawaiian culture for a general audience in the state,” he said. “We added different programs each year — it could be on energy, it could be on Buddhism, it could be on wellness or something else. Each year we had one or two or three additional programs like that, and we realized that we were becoming a festival of ideas as much as a book festival.”
This year’s theme was going to be climate change, but when COVID-19 forced an indefinite shutdown of the visitor industry — and raised huge questions about the overall economic future of Hawaii — Jellinek refocused it on what he calls “Hawaii 2.0.”
“We have two completely new programs and a refreshed third one. Of the new ones is ‘Innovation Future,’ which is all high-tech from startups to investment accelerators and breakthrough projects that are all happening here in Hawaii. The other is a really major program on sustainability, which is a new major at UH — there’s a lot of interest in it, and it is such an essential idea.”
Jellinek’s third program, “Wellness &Resilience,” has been “refreshed” with several panels on COVID-related subjects as well as panels covering chronic health problems and social issues.
Looking forward, Jellinek hopes to present further programming in the spring. For now he’s excited and happy as the Hawai‘i Book &Music Festival goes digital with the University of Hawaii.
Correction: The Hawai‘i Book & Music Festival was founded by Buddy Bess, Blair Collis and Jeff Swartz. An earlier version of this story misidentified Roger Jellinek as the festival's founder.
