each August since the 1970s. Steinbach's 'Summer in the City' festival is held on Main Street each June. The Steinbach Arts Council has showcased Steinbach arts and culture, of various types, since the 1980s. The Johann G. Barkman Heritage Walkway, stretching along Elmdale Drive, is named after an early long-time mayor, and features plaques and other historic markers documenting the life of early Steinbach along the, now dry, Steinbach Creek. Steinbach has had a public library since 1973, although serious efforts to establish a regional library began in 1968 when Mary Barkman organized a Friends of the Library group. In 1997, the library moved into its own newly constructed building and was renamed Jake Epp Library. Jake Epp, former MP of Provencher, had appointed the very first Library Board in 1973. Mary Barkman, a key figure in the founding of the Library, was also honored at the opening ceremony. After his death in 1998, the library revealed a plaque and reading garden honouring former local teacher Melvin Toews, father of author Miriam Toews and subject of her book Swing Low: A Life. A major library expansion was completed in 2012. Steinbach is known for having a significant place in the world of Mennonite literature. Arnold Dyck was the editor of the German-language Steinbach Post in the early 20th century and the first writer to use Plautdietsch as a written language. In the 1970s and 80s came the work of poet Patrick Friesen, author of The Shunning and many other works, novelist and literary critic Al Reimer, author of My Harp is Turned to Mourning and the Kleindarp stories, and Roy Vogt, founder of the Mennonite Mirror and the Mennonite Literary Society. Beginning in the 1990s, Steinbach's most well-known author Miriam Toews has written numerous award-winning and bestselling novels, some of which are set in Steinbach. Her non-fiction book Swing Low: A Life is set in Steinbach, while her bestselling novels A Complicated Kindness and All My Puny Sorrows, as well as the film adaptation of the book, are set in the fictional East Village, widely regarded to be based on her hometown. Fight Night, inspired by Toews's mother Elvira, also alludes to Steinbach. In 2016, Steinbach writer Andrew Unger started The Daily Bonnet, a website that publishes satirical Russian Mennonite news stories, and published the novel Once Removed in 2020, which draws on fictional elements of Steinbach. Steinbach has also