Knoxville Book Festival 2026 Review: No-Spice Fantasy Finds & Meeting Jordan St. James

A few weeks ago my oldest daughter treated me to a day at the Knoxville Book Festival. This was my Mother’s Day gift, so you could say she really knows me well.

It was only the festival’s second year, and the theme seemed to center on banned books. Some of them are books I really enjoy, so I was surprised to see them on the banned book list. That said there were a lot of Fantasy book authors this year.

I enjoy fantasy, The Chronicles of Narnia and the Lord of the Rings series are both high on my list of stories to enjoy. However, the recent trend toward overly spicy fantasy books has turned me off a bit. You can tell a great romance story without going into explicit detail about what happens behind closed doors. I mean most readers have a good imagination we know what goes on.

So It is always refreshing when I find authors who publicly say they are low-spice or no-spice authors. Which is what happened when I met the authors of The Silversaar Legacy Books. I actually met them a couple of weeks before at the Appalachian Renaissance Faire where I purchased book 1 When Things are Set Right. The authors are a husband and wife duo that write under the pen name of Jordan St. James. The sign in their booth said “no-spice fantasy” which immediately got my attention. So I am now reading the first of the books in the series. I purchased books 2 & 3 at the Knoxville Book Festival. They were such wonderful people—easy to talk to, and by the end of the conversation, I felt like we had made new friends.

I came home with a stack of books to add to my TBR list. Which is great because I’m stretching myself on my reading goals this year and if I make it through my TBR I will have read more than I set out to do.

Anyway, back to the festival. It was a pretty cool festival. There were so many authors there.As I mentioned before, fantasy seemed to dominate, but there were also plenty of indie and local authors represented. There were vendors selling everything from books and candy to clothing and handmade items. I personally would have loved to seen more paper goods beyond books and book accessories. I would have also liked to see more Christian authors there. There were a few but I can pretty much say it was just a handful.

There were sessions about writing, character building, how to publish, etc. And there were a few main sessions that had some interesting topics. My favorite session was the one featuring James Dashner. I had never read any of his books before, but after hearing him speak, I wouldn’t mind going back and reading The Maze Runner series. I’ve never even seen the movies, so I’d be going in completely blind

I am looking forward to the next one. But hopefully it won’t be all the same and they mix it up a bit. If you’re a book lover like me, I would definitely recommend checking it out next year.