Founded in 2000 by first lady Laura Bush, the National Book Festival has attracted hundreds of thousands of people a year to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for an end-of-the-summer celebration of the literary arts. Past featured guests have included Ruth Bader Ginsburg, José Andrés and Henry Louis Gates Jr.
But this year, like every other book festival in the country, planners were forced by the coronavirus pandemic to pivot from a live event to a virtual one. From Sept. 25-27, more than 100 authors and poets delivered presentations online, including Salman Rushdie, Jason Reynolds, Amy Tan, John Grisham, Melinda Gates, Joy Harjo and Madeleine Albright.
Don’t fret if you missed it, though. The videos will remain online for about 60 days at the Library of Congress website at loc.gov.
Among the participating authors were several with Georgia ties, including Nic Stone, a YA author from Atlanta who wrote “Dear Martin”; Jenn Shapland, whose memoir, “My Autobiography of Carson McCullers,” is long-listed for the National Book Award in Nonfiction; and Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “His Truth is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope.”
The theme for this year’s festival was Celebrating American Ingenuity. Marie Arana, literary director for the Library of Congress and programming director for the festival, could not have foreseen how appropriate that theme would turn out to be.
“We had no idea when we used the placeholder name, ‘American Ingenuity,’ way back in March,” said Arana. “It stuck because every moment we were realizing people are really doing new things and problem-solving and inventing and making it up as (they) go along to survive and keep something really valuable alive. It has been a tremendously educational and inspiring time for all of us.”
New to the festival this year is a television special, “The National Book Festival: Celebrating American Ingenuity,” which airs on GPB at noon Sunday.
The TV program was created as a stand-in for the festival’s main stage. It provides a forum to highlight the top-tier talent and gives them the opportunity to address the theme, as well as the related topics of memory, reason and imagination.
“It took shape in a way that was surprising because the whole notion of American ingenuity — everybody had a different idea of what that meant,” said Arana. “Some people said it’s logic, it’s problem-solving. Other people said it’s to have the imagination to do something different. That was my favorite part.”
Highlights from the two-hour program include:
• Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Nickel Boys” and “Underground Railroad,” defines ingenuity as survival. He points to New York City in the ’70s, making the observation that it was a time of great economic and social decline, but it was also a time of creativity marked by the birth of hip-hop and punk music. “Survival is transcending your environment to make something new and pass something on,” he said.
• Sarah M. Broom, National Book Award winner for her memoir “The Yellow House,” discusses her quest to investigate the family stories the youngest of 12 children had been told all her life. “Memory is one thing, but it’s also important to go beyond that and inquire about other people’s memories, to fact-check our memories, because memory can lie, actually.” She cautions viewers to remember that history is a "composed thing, and it’s important to always ask the question, who is doing the composing?”
• Salman Rushdie discusses his novel “Quichotte,” a modern take on “Don Quixote” that traces a fired pharmaceutical salesman on his journey across America to win the hand of a reality TV star with whom he thinks he’s fallen in love. “It’s about the breakdown of reality in our time,” said Rushdie. “It allows readers to think, what kind of world do they want to make of this presently fractured world?”
Other bonus features of the National Book Festival this year are two, one-hour YouTube specials for young readers. Jason Reynolds, the national ambassador of young people’s literature and co-author with Ibram X. Kendi of the New York Times bestseller “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You,” hosts the teen program “Grab the Mic: Tell Your Story.” Jon Scieszka, author of the children’s books “The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs” and “The Stinky Cheese Man,” hosts the children’s program “Be You!”
TELEVISION PREVIEW
‘The National Book Festival: Celebrating American Ingenuity’
Noon Sunday. GPB. Also available online at loc.gov.
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