For Marcia Evers Levy of Creve Coeur, books are her boss.

Director of the St. Louis Jewish Book Festival, Levy has been credited with making the festival one of the most successful of its kind in the country.

"I like to say I bring creativity to planning and putting together authors," she said. "And I can't stress enough that I have a wonderful group of volunteers who work on the festival. There's no possible way I could do it without them."

The festival hunts out authors, she said, and not just celebrity authors and authors with new books everyone is talking about.

"We also like to find authors hopefully people will be talking about in the future," she said.

Held in November in celebration of Jewish Book Month, the non-profit festival is a 34-year-old program of the Jewish Community Center. It attracts more than 23,000 people over a 12-day period, Levy said.

In addition to the November festival, the organization does author programs year round. The next program will be at 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 22, at Plaza Frontenac, with Wall Street Journal columnist and author Jeffrey Zaslow. who has written "Girls from Ames" and co-authored "The Last Lecture" with Randy Pausch.

Levy regularly serves on an advisory committee with the Jewish Book Council and as a consultant to other book festivals and fairs nationwide.

Levy recently talked about her career, authors, books and the future.

QUESTION: How and why did you first get involved in the St. Louis Jewish Book Festival?

ANSWER: I started working in the cultural arts department at the Jewish Community Center in 1996, shortly after I moved to St. Louis. I was coordinating other special events, and the director position for the book festival became open. The administration asked me if I would take it over in 1998, only a month before that year's festival. So I was jumping in with both feet and hands and all my toes and fingers. However, we had wonderful volunteers already in place. For instance, Zelda Sparks, director of the cultural arts department at the JCC, has been here all along and always has been incredibly supportive.

Q: Are there other Jewish Book Festivals on the scale of ours?

A: There are a number of Jewish book festivals across the country. St. Louis's is number one in regards to attendance, but Detroit's is the oldest, running for about 56 years now, and Houston's runs for three weeks, so it's the longest.

Q: What differentiates the St. Louis Jewish Book Festival from others?

A: Attendance, community support, and community involvement. The St. Louis Jewish community and the general community have just opened their arms to the festival and have really responded and supported and enjoyed it. When someone comes once, they will come again. Many will tell me "I didn't know that's what this was like." I hope more will come that first time because I know they'll come back.

Q: Do you have a favorite Jewish author and book?

A: That's like asking a mother what child is her favorite. I can mention several people who've come to our festival that I really enjoyed spending time with and getting to know. One author might be Henry Winkler, the nicest person you will ever meet, who writes children's books, the Hank Zipzer series. But he also talks about his parents escaping the Holocaust and his struggles as a young person with dyslexia and how he's helped others with their careers. A lovely man. He's also been helpful to us at the festival by recommending his experience to other people, which we appreciate. A lesser known author, but still wonderful is Jan Goldstein, who's a man. But I had no idea he was a man when I read his first book, "All That Matters." It's a beautiful, incredible book about a grandmother whose suicidal granddaughter comes to live with her. He's written several books and has been to the festival with each, telling wonderful stories about his family, life experience and books. I'll read anything he comes up with.

Q: What aspect of the festival are you most proud of?

A: I think the fact that volunteers who get involved with the festival stay involved. People really enjoy working on the festival. It also doesn't hurt that the authors keep in touch with us and want to come back when they write future books.

Q: What is your favorite moment or speaker over the history of the festival and why?

A: That's another of those mother and favorite child questions. I very much enjoy the presentations when the audience and author laugh together. The presentations that are humorous or have humor to them, though it may not be a humorous book. But when everyone is laughing together, there's such a warm, healing kind of feeling. What's also special is authors who speak about world affairs and current affairs, like Ambassador Dennis Ross, who speaks about the peace process in the Middle East and talks about what it was like to sit down with world leaders and hash out agreements and peace treaties. It was like listening in on history. George Wein, founder of the Newport Jazz Festival and the Heritage Folk Festival, talked about what it was like in the early days to help jazz musicians like Miles Davis and others get their start at a time before civil rights.

Q: What do you see as the future of the St. Louis Jewish Book Festival?

A: I would like to see more people attend it, more people getting involved, and I'd like to see younger people coming in addition to everyone else. We have done events for teenagers, such as one in 2011 with author Ellen Schreiber, who writes vampire and werewolf romance novels for teens. It was so gratifying to see teenagers and even middle-schoolers being so fascinated and interested and excited about reading and characters in books and learning how to write. As Ellen said, just to get a teen to briefly glance up from their iPhone or whatever technology device is gratifying.

Q: What's the best part of your job?

A: Hunting out the authors. It's the thrill of the hunt, if you will. Finding someone writing a book and how to get to them and talking them into coming. There's a lot of jumping around when someone says yes.