Rain Taxi launched the Twin Cities Book Festival in 2001 as a way to support readers, writers, publishers, and booksellers, as well as to engage the Twin Cities literary community in an exchange of ideas.

While writing and reading are usually solitary activities, the TCBF is a way to celebrate writing in community and acknowledge the social value of writing as an art form. Part of Rain Taxi’s mission is to call attention to the abundance and diversity of contemporary literature, and the Festival surely does that, while bringing pride to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area as a reading capital of the US.