Tucson Festival of Books March 15-16

The 6th annual Tucson Festival of Books, one of America's largest, begins today in Tucson, Arizona. It's gonna be sunny and 80 degrees, an antidote to this never-ending winter that'll entertain you and make you smarter.

The Tucson Festival of Books is a wide-ranging affair. It offers panel discussions on a thousand different topics, conversations with individual authors, poetry readings, current affairs, publishing industry issues, cooking demonstrations from author-chefs and workshops, among others. A sample: Finding Home: Exiles in Fiction, Reporting the Past: A Journalistic Approach to History, Border Lives, The Future of Elections in America — A Conversation with Dan Balz, Armchair Reading: Capturing the Quirks of Culture, Poetry Readings by Rigoberto González and Tim Hernandez, Studio Lesson: Illustrating and Writing Lucha Libre and Don't Tell Me What NOT to Read: Teens and Censorship.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Go here for a complete schedule of the presenting authors including: Luis Alberto Urrea, Andre Dubus, Alice Hoffman, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Sandra Day O'Connor, Larry McMurtry, Scott Turow, Richard Russo, and Monica Drake.

Monica Drake

If all of this isn't enough to exhaust you then go here for a list of activities to complete the job. There will be food, music, cultural performances, science city, petting zoos, arts and crafts, book signings, improv, storytelling - you name it and it'll be happening somewhere.

If all of this is a little overwhelming, there's an app for that: Android, iPhone and Kindle Fire.