Festival

Kelsey Kleinhen, owner of Kelsey's Kloset Boutique, is organizing a Spring Fest at Cherry Tree Shopping Center. The family-friendly spring festival will take place April 27, from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., at 11200 Scaggsville Road, located off Routes 29 and 216. There will be face painting, food, live music, a mini fashion show and photo booth. Surrounding business vendors include Tree House School of Music, Dan Kamen Photography, Paul Mitchell School, Cookie Lee, Energy Drinks, Erin Krespan Photography, Universal Life Coach, Chloe & Isabel, Pure Romance, Tastefully Simple, Perfectly Posh, Evvy Lou Handmade Cloth Diapers, Thirty One, Legaci Buys Gold, Nomades, Pink Zebra and Creative Memories.

The 10th annual Highlandtown Wine Festival is Sunday. The annual street festival brings more than 1,000 visitors to Baltimore's east side neighborhood for tastings of homemade wine, an amateur winemaking competition, Italian food from DiPasquale's Italian Market and live music. Admission to the family-friendly festival includes five tastings of homemade wines, including vintages like the Highlandtown Red and Bel Air Zin. DiPasquale's will be selling meatball subs, sausage and peppers and other Italian treats.

The Library of Congress released today the list of speakers for the fall National Book Festival, and, as usual, the event is studded with prominent writers and poets. Among the headliners: Margaret Atwood, Baltimore's own Taylor Branch, Don DeLillo, Khaled Hosseini, Barbara Kingsolver, Joyce Carol Oates, and U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. All together, there will be more than 100 speakers and there isn't much drop-off through the lineup. Take a quick glance at the list, and you'll see names including T.C. Boyle, Geraldine Brooks, Patricia Cornwell, Junot Díaz, Charlaine Harris, Jeff Kinney (Go Terps!

Author George Saunders is having the kind of year that could lead the former roofer and slaughterhouse worker to imagine that someone is spritzing the air around him with a giant bottle of perfume. "The way things have been going recently, it's as if I had a personal sprayer walking behind me and making sure that the world always smells sweet," says the New York-based writer, who will visit Baltimore on April 13 to headline the 10th annual CityLit Festival. With the publication in January of his new book, "Tenth of December," Saunders, 54, a professor at Syracuse University, has been receiving the kind of attention seldom given to short-story writers - even those who, like him, received a 2006 MacArthur "genius" grant.

When it comes to spring color, Washington knows how to put on a show. The National Cherry Blossom Festival blossoms each year to commemorate the gift of some 3,000 cherry trees from Tokyo to the nation's capital in 1912. While the festival had modest beginnings, the event has since evolved into a springtime celebration that attracts millions of visitors from around the world. "It's truly amazing how a gift from over 100 years ago has now reached so many people," says Diana Mayhew, the festival's president.

The lineup for the 10th annual CityLit Festival is set, so Baltimore-area book lovers should mark April 13 on calendars. The event, held at the central branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library , offers a full day of author readings, panel discussions and how-to sessions, as well as a literary marketplace. It's organized each year by a dedicated group from the library and the CityLit Project, which is headed by Gregg Wilhelm. This year's fiction headliner is George Saunders, whose short story collections include "In Persuasion Nation," "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" and his newest, "Tenth of December.

Every community has positive attributes and problems. Heck, some states - New Jersey and West Virginia, to name two in the immediate vicinity - have their own brand of associated jokes. Yet plenty of people are proud to call New Jersey and West Virginia home, and both states can boast having strong tourism components to their respective economies. Jokes about what exit a certain attraction is off of or the number of dentists per 100,000 population are likely to persist, but that doesn't mean either state is lacking or in need of making a particular change because of what someone who lives in New York or Ohio or Maryland might think.

Somewhere along the line, Hal Cummings came up with the slogan "Have Pipes, Will Travel. " That's no exaggeration. On St. Patrick's Day in particular, Cummings, a Naval Academy graduate and retired Navy line officer as well as a master bagpipe player, faces a whirlwind schedule. On Saturday night, the Arnold resident is scheduled to play in Washington establishments including the Irish Whistle, the Mighty Pint, the Side of the Whale and the Uptown Tap House. "Then on St. Patrick's Day, I'll be playing with a group that includes a guitarist, keyboard player and a drummer," said Cummings a few days before the day of green celebration.

Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of "The Great Gatsby" will kick off the 66th Festival de Cannes, organizers announced today . "It is a great honor for all those who have worked on 'The Great Gatsby' to open the Cannes Film Festival," Luhrmann said in a statement. "We are thrilled to return to a country, place and festival that has always been so close to our hearts, not only because my first film 'Strictly Ballroom' was screened there 21 years ago, but also because F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote some of the most poignant and beautiful passages of his extraordinary novel just a short distance away at a villa outside Saint-Raphaël.

"I Am Divine," a documentary on the life and career of Baltimore's favorite home-grown drag queen, was to make its debut Saturday night at the South by Southwest arts festival in Austin, Texas. Director Jeffrey Schwarz, interviewed for SXSW's online program, calls his film "the story of how an overweight, effeminate, bullied Baltimore kid transformed himself into an internationally recognized drag superstar. " The documentary includes interviews with director John Waters, who featured Divine in many of his early films and for whom his boyhood friend served as something of a muse, as well as Ricki Lake (Divine's daughter in "Hairspray")