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FOLD director Jael Richardson on a decade at the helm

FOLD’s Jael Richardson, right, on stage with author Waubgeshig Rice during FOLD 2024. (Photo courtesy FOLD)

Jael Richardson is ready for just about anything. 

As founder and executive director of the Festival of Literary Diversity, she has had to oversee a lot of unexpected disruptions during the festival’s first decade – not least of which was the FOLD’s complete pivot to an all-virtual event in 2020. In only six weeks, Richardson and her team shifted the 25 in-person events planned for the festival to an all-Zoom, online-only lineup. 

That nimble response to an abrupt change in circumstances is characteristic of how Richardson sees her role – and that of the FOLD itself – in the larger Canadian book industry. And that unexpected shift to an all-virtual platform led the festival to embrace the identity it currently has as a multi-modal festival.  

“We’re celebrating year 10, but we’re really only in year two or three of being who I think we’re meant to be in the industry,” Richardson says. “We operate virtually and in-person, we serve underrepresented communities, and we represent authors from underrepresented communities, and it’s the badge we’ll wear going forward.”

The festival launched in 2016 with an extremely limited budget and no staff. Richardson and others working to put the inaugural event together, including literary agent Léonicka Valcius, all volunteered their time. FOLD was born of a vision of creating an event for Canadian writers and readers where diversity wasn’t relegated to a token panel or two, but instead was the organizing principle. 

The team is still small, and determining new ways of generating revenue is constantly on her mind, but Richardson is proud of what the Brampton, Ontario-based festival has accomplished in a decade. 

For starters, what was once one festival is now two: FOLD launched its kids’ festival, FOLD Kids Book Fest, which is held in the fall, in 2019. Attendance has grown – from about 500 in its first year to about 2,000 in-person, and 10–20,000 virtual attendees, largely from Canada, over the two festivals. In the festival’s first few years, those in attendance came mostly from Brampton or Toronto, but FOLD now has committed attendees who make the trip from as far away as Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan. Uptake has also been strong among teachers at the Peel and Halton school boards. Over time, FOLD has added varied events that draw people who wouldn’t otherwise be committed literary festival attendees, such as a paint and poetry night, a romance writers high tea, and a film screening. 

“We’ve really been able to tap into a few demographics, whether that’s teachers who are looking for stuff for their students, or film folks, or book club people; there’s a whole bunch of different groups that we have intentionally targeted with our events,” Richardson says. 

Organizationally, FOLD achieved the stuff non-profit dreams are made of when the organization was able to turn its positions into three full-time jobs with benefits.

“That’s a really big accomplishment for me,” Richardson says. “I feel like I have the best festival staff you could ask for, and I’m really grateful to be able to provide that.”

To mark the festival’s anniversary, FOLD launched a commemorative book lover’s box this week, and plans are underway to launch an apparel line before the festival opens in April. The annual reading challenge has also received an anniversary upgrade. For its January challenge – “Read a romance by an Asian Canadian author” – FOLD is hosting a read-along of Jackie Lau’s Love, Lies, and Cherry Pie, which will culminate in a virtual Galentine’s Day event in February. 

FOLD also launched the Into the FOLD podcast, hosted by Richardson and FOLD program coordinator Hudson Lin to mark the 10th anniversary, which may or may not continue into the future. 

“One of the policies I have, in general, is whenever we have a new idea, we pilot it,” Richardson says. “We always have a year or a season where we make no promises, no commitments.”

The foundation of the festival hasn’t changed, and that is something that Valcius, who served as a board member of the FOLD for a number of years and currently sits on its 10th anniversary committee, deeply values. 

I’m proud to see how it has continued and how it is sustainable, because my biggest issue with diversity initiatives is always that there’s a lot of support when it’s on trend, and then as soon as it becomes politically inconvenient, the support is not there anymore,” she says. 

Because it was built from the ground up to acknowledge and celebrate the multiplicity of voices in literature and books, the FOLD has offered attendees a rich experience. 

Once you bring marginalized people to the centre, the whole thing is actually about the people who have been vulnerable, and it’s catered around their needs and their points of view,” Valcius says. “The conversations become richer, the interactions become richer, simply because of who is afforded centre stage.”

This year’s festival will feature events with authors including David A. Robertson, Tanya Talaga, and Amanda Leduc, who was the festival’s communications and development coordinator for many years and will be attending this year “for the first time ever only as an author,” Richardson says. The adaptation of David Chariandy’s novel Brother will be featured at the FOLD’s film screening.

Richardson admits that the constant worry about festival finances weighs on her, and that there were times over the last year when she considered hanging up her festival director’s hat after the conclusion of the 2025 event. But feedback from others in the industry refocused her commitment. 

“I kept going to events where people said to me, ‘I don’t know where I’d be without the FOLD.’ Or ‘I’m so grateful for the FOLD,’ or ‘Publishing needs the FOLD.’ And it was that response that made me realize, okay, my question can’t be when do we wrap this up – it’s how do we keep it going? What changes do we have to make in order to make what we have work?”

Looking ahead to the festival’s next decade, Richardson hopes to see FOLD continue to do what it’s already doing – “but better,” with greater outreach to more school boards across the country.

“I think the authors we bring, the kinds of conversations we have, the space we create, would be extremely valuable to every school across this country,” Richardson says. “So I would like what we’re doing to be wider and deeper, and if that involves a few more events, great. But really it’s making sure the teachers in Manitoba, and teachers in Alberta, and teachers in Newfoundland all have awareness of and access to FOLD events.”