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Posted by: Jennifer Gavin
Monday would have been the 100th birthday of a poet whose translation of Homer’s “The Odyssey” brought me one of the really memorable reading experiences of a lifetime. Robert S. Fitzgerald, who awoke to his interest in poetry at a high school in Springfield, Illinois and whose work translating Homer’s Greek into English – while …
Posted in: Collections, Events, National Book Festival, Poetry, Washington DC
Posted by: Jennifer Gavin
Saturday, Sept. 25 will mark the 10th anniversary of the Library of Congress National Book Festival – “A Decade of Words and Wonder.” If you’re among the hundreds of thousands of people who have attended the event in its first nine glorious years, or just want to know more about this celebration of books, the …
Posted in: Books, Capitol Hill, Education, Events, National Book Festival, Poetry, Uncategorized, Washington DC
Posted by: Jennifer Gavin
On Tuesday, April 20 at noon, 16 actors will appear at the Library of Congress’ Whittall Pavilion to deliver more world-famous iambic pentameter than you can shake a spear at. It’s the annual Shakespeare’s Birthday reading, a chapter in the “Poetry at Noon” series presented by the Library’s Poetry and Literature Center. (It’s Shakespeare’s 446th.) …
Posted in: Capitol Hill, Education, Events, Poetry, Thomas Jefferson Building, Uncategorized, Washington DC
Posted by: Matt Raymond
(The following is a guest post by my colleague Donna Urschel.) Did you ever wonder how the literary giants create their work? Does it just pour out of them effortlessly? Or is there some sort of magic trick? On April 1, master poet Kay Ryan, the 16th Poet Laureate of the United States, will provide …
Posted by: Jennifer Gavin
A bunch of ninth-grade girls got in touch with their favorite radio station, making a song request for a tune by one of their favorite artists. But they couldn’t resist the chance to raise that universal complaint: “Why, why, why, why do you always repeat the same songs?” It could have been from the suburbs …
Posted in: Collections, Congress, Curators, Exhibitions, Music, Poetry, Social Media
Posted by: Jennifer Gavin
Art and science, and sometimes art and politics, mirror each other in times of rapid change. Robert Hughes made that case in his history of modern art – noting it moved from straight representation to pointillism, cubism, and abstraction as science checked off its discoveries of the 20th Century, such as X-rays and the structure …
Posted in: Books, Collections, Education, Poetry
Posted by: Jennifer Gavin
Right now, here and there all over the world, people are sitting down with a good book and enjoying a good read. Sprawled on the lawn, curled up on the sofa, sitting on the steps in the piazza — they’re communing with a great author, or a funny author, or an author who’s telling them …
Posted in: Blogging, Books, Capitol Hill, Education, Events, National Book Festival, New Visitors Experience, Podcasts, Poetry, Social Media, Uncategorized, Washington DC
Posted by: Jennifer Gavin
For the past 10 weeks, 47 college students have been digging through a variety of Library of Congress collections–finding amazing stuff so people like you can come here and get lost in it. Such as? Such as an ad for a patent medicine that figured in an 1898 murder case; a first edition in Russian …
Posted in: American Folklife Center, Books, Cataloging, Collections, Copyright, Education, Poetry
Posted by: Jennifer Gavin
This year’s Library of Congress National Book Festival already promises the biggest lineup of literary stars this side of the Crab Nebula. Book-lovers can look forward, on Saturday, Sept. 26, to hearing from David Baldacci, John Grisham, John Irving, Julia Alvarez, Judy Blume, Ken Burns, Gwen Ifill and Jodi Picoult–not to mention celebrity chef Paula …
Posted in: Books, Capitol Hill, Events, National Book Festival, Podcasts, Poetry, Social Media, Washington DC