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Archive: August 2023 (6 Posts)

Carla Hayden, at left, hands a crystal trophy to George Saunders, at right.

George Saunders Accepts the Library’s Prize for American Fiction

Posted by: Neely Tucker

Novelist, short-story writer and essayist George Saunders was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction Saturday evening in one of the final sessions of the 2023 National Book Festival, conferring a lifetime honor on a versatile writer whose most famous book cast one of Washington's most famous residents in a surreal light. Saunders' 2017 novel "Lincoln in the Bardo" took a fantastical look at the visit President Abraham Lincoln paid to his young son's tomb in a Georgetown cemetery one night in 1862.

Color photo shows Hannah Whitaker turned slightly to her left, smiling, at the forefront of a flower garden.

Q & A: Hannah Whitaker, Preserving Live Music from Long Ago

Posted by: Neely Tucker

Hannah Whitaker, interning this summer as a junior fellow in the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, discusses her work in helping preserve live recordings from early in the 20th century, including performances by stars such as Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday.

An engraved portrait of Hannah Carson. She is seated, hands in lap around a small framed portrait (perhaps of her late husband or father). She is weaing a dark dress, buttoned to the collar, with her hair wrapped in a white scarf.

Hannah Carson: “Like a Fire in All My Bones”

Posted by: Neely Tucker

Nestled in the archives of the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection is a short, 1864 account of the remarkable life of Hannah Carson. “Glorying in Tribulation: A Brief Memoir of Hannah Carson, For Thirteen Years Deprived of the Use of All Her Limbs,” is testament to how a severely disabled Black woman became an inspiration to the Christian community, both white and black, in Philadelphia before and during the Civil War.