By Mitchell Kaplan, co-founder and chair of the Miami Book Fair International Shoppers during Miami Book Fair International

Miami Book Fair opens Nov. 16, and for the 31^st year in a row, the streets of downtown Miami will fill with books and the people who love them. With more than 600 authors in town, our city, for the next eight days will be not just “The Magic City,” but a magical city where stories and ideas are celebrated, and where everyone – young and old, black, brown and white — can come together and find literary common ground.

Thirty-one years ago I believed a fair of this kind was possible, and I wanted to prove that Miami was a literary city. And I was right. And the fair is still here, growing and maintaining vitality because the people of South Florida, and the many who travel here to enjoy it, keep coming—more and more of them each year.

Just as Knight Foundation’s goal is to make art general in our city, my goal, the fair’s goal, Miami Dade College’s goal, has always been to make books (and reading) ubiquitous.

Such closely aligned values have led to this year’s powerful new partnership between the fair and Knight Foundation. Their investment of $440,000 will fund programs that will continue to bring new audiences to the fair, and the fair to new audiences.

The fruits of this partnership will be experienced by every fairgoer across various programs.. They include: daily live-streaming and national event coverage by PBS; a major new section of the fair dedicated to Florida-centric literary, musical and other artistic events, “The Swamp”; an international children’s theatre festival, Play Time!, produced by Teatro Prometeo; a roundtable on the Amazon Effect and profound changes in publishing and literary culture; and an expanded array of independent publishers and artist-made books during Street Fair weekend.

Knight Foundation’s support has also led to a new partnership with the National Book Foundation, making Miami the only gathering outside New York for the 2014 National Book Awards Winners and Finalists, who will appear at the Fair on Friday, Nov. 21 and Saturday, Nov. 22, as well as a new partnership with the Poetry Foundation, helping to make this year’s Fair one of the country’s largest and most prominent gathering of poets.

Knight Foundation’s commitment to the literary culture of South Florida will continue beyond the Fair, when The Center for Writing and Literature at MDC, presenter of the Fair, will embark on a strategic planning process to gauge what Miami wants from a literary arts organization, how the Fair can promote reading and writing more broadly across Miami-Dade County, and how to best serve a national audience using technologies that can help it transcend its physical location. I am looking forward to the next 30 years, with partners such as Knight Foundation, I know the future of books is bright as our Florida sun.