Lit Crawls Across the Map
The Lit Crawl is a madcap concept created by San Francisco’s literary festival, Litquake (litquake.org), back in 2006. It’s a bar crawl with literature—where hundreds of literati get drunk on words!
The inaugural Lit Crawl NYC took place in September 2008 and was wildly popular, spurring its lit-loving, NY-loving crawlers to make it an annual event, growing, in true Lit Crawl tradition, with every year. In 2011, having conquered both Left and Right Coasts, Lit Crawl expanded to the Third Coast: Austin, Texas.
The striking thing about Lit Crawl, actually, was not the variegated writerly menu; nor was it the variety of venues—54 of them, including bookstores, bars, coffee shops, galleries and a bee-keeping supply store. Rather it was the specter of writing and literature—literature!—transforming an ordinary Saturday night in the neighborhood into a carnival of sorts. Up and down Valencia Street, crowds overflowed out of open doorways, and between readings, people hustled from one event to another or gathered on street corners clutching red Lit Crawl maps like participants in a mammoth scavenger hunt.”
—New York Times