In 2007, Lewis Lapham, the former editor of Harper’s magazine, took on a young couple as his first two hires to help him put out Lapham’s Quarterly, his elegant new journal of history and ideas. “It turned out to be a very prudent move on his part,” Timothy Don recalled with a laugh. “It meant that we were all in, fully invested in the journal, and we would do everything we could for its success.”

And now the couple is all in on another literary startup: Don and his wife, Kira Brunner Don, have co-founded the Oakland Book Festival, a free, first-of-its-kind event that will take place in and around City Hall on Sunday, May 31. Ninety writers will participate in 40 events in the one-day festival, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Don and Brunner Don still work for Lapham’s Quarterly (as art director and editor at large, respectively), but the couple left New York last year to move to Oakland, where Brunner Don grew up. (In fact, the couple have been living in the Rockridge house where Brunner Don was raised. The older of their two children, who is 6, goes to the elementary school her mother attended.)

It didn’t take long for the couple to fall for their new city. “Everywhere Kira and I go in this city,” Don said, “we see people hatching ideas, playing music, creating art, reading newspapers and novels and works of history and even poetry. People in Oakland are active, they are vibrant and they are engaged. They take culture seriously, and they have fun while they are doing it.”

As thrilling as it’s been to be in what Don calls “a rising city, an incredibly exciting place,” the couple realized there wasn’t a book festival in town. And so they set about establishing one, approaching City Hall and the Oakland Public Library and other community organizations. “Do you want to try this? Should we try this together?” they asked. The overwhelming response? “Yes, go for it!”

With help from a literary council whose members include Greil Marcus, New Yorker writers Philip Gourevitch and George Packer, and Litquake co-founders Jack Boulware and Jane Ganahl, Don and Brunner Don have set up a nonprofit festival that is, in Don’s words, “Oakland-based, but internationally flavored.”

Oakland, Don said, “is an incredibly diverse city, and the Bay Area is rich with writers, intellectuals, journalists, poets and novelists. Our idea is essentially to provide a forum in which those people can get together, along with folks from other parts of the country and the world, to talk about the ideas that inspire them and the challenges we face as a community and a culture.

“Kira and I are not ‘creating’ anything,” Don added. “We see the festival more as a kind of accelerant that can be thrown onto the creative flame that is already burning here.”

Of the 90 writers in the festival, more than half are from Oakland, Don said. They include Novella Carpenter, Vikram Chandra, Anthony Marra and Mary Roach. Visiting from out of town will be Paul Beatty, Edwidge Danticat, Tracy K. Smith and Héctor Tobar.

The festival will be a homecoming of sorts for Lapham. The San Francisco native, who worked as a general assignment reporter for the Examiner in the 1950s (and whose grandfather Roger Lapham was the mayor of San Francisco from 1944 to 1948), will deliver the festival’s plenary address on Saturday, May 30.

Festival panelists will discuss a great variety of subjects, including gentrification, Bay Area literary history, local food and labor, and writing about sex. City Hall hearing rooms will be used as event spaces, and live performances for all ages will be held outside, on Frank Ogawa Plaza. A children’s area will feature performances by Children’s Fairyland and Storytime with the Oakland Public Library.

Laurel Book Store will also host panels. Previously in the city’s Laurel district, the store moved last year to the 1907 Lionel J. Wilson Building opposite City Hall.

The curatorial principle of this first festival, Don said, is utopia. “Cities can be full of conflict and aggression, disappointment, disenfranchisement and abuses. We get that,” said Don, who has a degree in the history of ideas from the New School’s Graduate Faculty. “But in that sense, if you want to make the world a better place — well, cities are the most obvious place to start. Cities invite us and they challenge us to be better than ourselves.”

Just how grassroots is the festival? The couple has done all the fundraising by themselves, without applying for any grants. “It doesn’t cost a lot to pull this off,” Don said. “We’re getting City Hall for free, and the Oakland Library and Children’s Fairyland are donating their time and services for free.”

Don even put his artistic skills to use in designing the festival’s logo — a tree growing out of a book — that was inspired by the city’s oak tree logo.

The festival will be only a day long, but the goal is to have it grow over the years. “We really believe in small beginnings. Plant a seed and do it right,” Don said. “Our hope, of course, is that this will take off, and that the people of Oakland will really get behind it and that we’ll expand it from there.”

John McMurtrie is The San Francisco Chronicle’s book editor. Twitter: @McMurtrieSF

Oakland Book Festival

11 a.m.-6 p.m. Sunday, May 31. Oakland City Hall. www.oaklandbookfestival.org.