This is a guest post by Brett Zongker, Chief of Media Relations in the Library’s Office of Communications.
PBS will stream interviews with eight featured authors beginning July 10. Watch them here.
Books are foundational building blocks to learning and the preface to understanding one another, the human condition and lived experience. In so many ways, books build us up, and that’s the theme for this year’s Library of Congress National Book Festival. It is through books that readers can develop strong bonds with writers and their ideas—relationships that open the entire world, real or imagined, to us all.
Beginning July 10, bookworms across the country can get a glimpse of the 2024 Library of Congress National Book Festival on PBS Books as it hosts a series of virtual interviews with some of the festival’s featured authors. This marks the ninth collaboration between the Library of Congres’s National Book Festival and PBS Books, a national programming initiative produced by Detroit PBS.
The 2024 series highlights seven books with some of the festival’s featured authors including Sandra Cisneros, Max Greenfield, Susan and Lexi Haas, James McBride, Abby Jimenez, Tiya Miles and Renée Fleming.
Free to the public, the 24th annual Library of Congress National Book Festival will be held on Aug. 24, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. (Doors open at 8:30 a.m.)
Highlights from the PBS Books series include:
Wednesday, July 10, 8 p.m. ET: Sandra Cisneros
PBS Books, in collaboration with WTTW in Chicago, presents poet, short story writer, novelist and essayist Sandra Cisneros. Her numerous awards include National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in both poetry and fiction, the Texas Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur Fellowship, the PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature, the National Medal of Arts, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation. Her novel “The House on Mango Street” is featured at the 2024 National Book Festival for a special celebration of its 40th anniversary.
Wednesday, July 17, 8 p.m. ET: Max Greenfield
PBS Books, in collaboration with PBS SoCal, hosts children’s author and American actor Max Greenfield. Known for his roles in “New Girl” and “The Neighborhood,” Greenfield has also published picture books, “I Don’t Want to Read This Book,” “This Book Is Not a Present” and “I Don’t Want to Read This Book Aloud.” Featured at the 2024 National Book Festival, Greenfield’s latest picture book, “Good Night Thoughts,” is a bedtime story about acknowledging anxiety.
Wednesday, July 24, 8 p.m. ET: Susan Haas and Lexi Haas
PBS Books, in collaboration with Kansas City PBS, welcomes Susan and Lexi Haas, the mother-daughter writing team focused on disability education and advocacy. Lexi has a rare and severe form of cerebral palsy, and Susan is a disability advocate. Together they present to schools and organizations across the globe, helping others learn about disability from a first-person narrative. Their collaboration, “The Year of the Buttered Cat: A Mostly True Story,” is the duo’s first book and is featured at the 2024 National Book Festival.
Thursday, Aug. 1, 8 p.m. ET: James McBride
PBS Books, in collaboration with WHYY in Philadelphia, presents James McBride, The New York Times bestselling author, musician, composer and current distinguished writer-in-residence at New York University. He is the author of Oprah’s Book Club selection “Deacon King Kong;” “The Good Lord Bird,” winner of the National Book Award; “The Color of Water;” “Song Yet Sung;” “Miracle at St. Anna;” the story collection “Five-Carat Soul;” and the James Brown biography “Kill ’Em and Leave.” In 2016, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal. McBride’s most recent New York Times bestselling novel, “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store,” is featured at the 2024 National Book Festival.
Wednesday, Aug. 7, 8 p.m. ET: Abby Jimenez
PBS Books, in collaboration with Virginia Public Media, hosts Abby Jimenez, a No. 1 New York Times bestselling romance author. She has earned a Good Morning America Book Club pick, a Book of the Month’s Book of the Year Award and a Minnesota Book Award. Before her writing career launched, she was in the national spotlight as a “Cupcake Wars” champion and founder of Nadia Cakes bakery, which has won numerous “Food Network” competitions and has garnered an international following. Her latest novel, “Just for the Summer,” is featured at the 2024 National Book Festival.
Wednesday, Aug. 14, 8 p.m. ET: Tiya Miles
PBS Books, in collaboration with Maryland Public Television, presents award-winning author Tiya Miles, the Michale Garvey Professor of History at Harvard University. Miles is the author of five prize-winning works on the history of slavery and early American race relations. She is a 2011 MacArthur Fellowship recipient and author of the National Book Award-winning, New York Times bestselling, “All That She Carried.” Her book, “Night Flyer,” is based loosely on Harriet Tubman’s life. The fictitious adaptation probes the ecological reality of Tubman’s surroundings and explores her kinship with other enslaved women whose travels are recorded in profound and moving memoirs. “Night Flyer” is featured at the 2024 National Book Festival.
Wednesday, Aug. 21, 8 p.m. ET: Renée Fleming
PBS Books, in collaboration with WETA in the Washington, D.C., area, welcomes Renée Fleming, opera singer, arts advocate and editor, who has received many honors and awards, including five Grammys, the National Medal of Arts and a Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Award. A prominent advocate for research at the intersection of the arts, health and neuroscience, Fleming serves as an artistic advisor to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where she launched the first ongoing collaboration between the Kennedy Center and the National Institutes of Health. She is a 2023 Kennedy Center Honoree and serves as a World Health Organization goodwill ambassador for arts and health. She is the editor of the new essay collection, “Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness,” which is featured at the 2024 National Book Festival.
For more information on the virtual interviews at PBS Books, visit: pbsbooks.org/loc-bookfest-2024/
C-SPAN’s Book TV will return to the National Book Festival as a media partner to livestream select events and interview featured authors. Media partners also include NPR and The Washington Post.