The Library will award the 2024 Prize for American Fiction to novelist and author James McBride, Librarian Carla Hayden announced today. McBride, 66, is the author of the hugely popular memoir "The Color of Water," novels such as “The Good Lord Bird” (winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction) and, most recently "The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store," which received the 2023 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and was named Barnes and Noble’s 2023 Book of the Year. In 2016, he was awarded the the National Humanities Medal. He will be awarded the Prize for Fiction at the 2024 National Book Festival.
Bernie Taupin took the stage recently to speak with Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden about his songwriting journey with Elton John. The pair are the 2024 Gershwin Prize for Popular Song winners and their award concert will be broadcast on PBS April 8.
The Libarary's 2023 National Book Festival on August 12 features a stunning array literary stars including Amor Towls, Beverly Gage, Victor Lavelle, Elizabeth Acevedo, Rebecca Makkai, David Grann, S.A. Crosby, Cheuk Kwan and Tahir Hamut Izgil. Librarian of Congress will present the Prize for American Fiction to novelist George Saunders at day's end.
Ada Limón, named the U.S. Poet Laureate last year, will serve two more years, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden has announced, making the California native the third laureate to serve for as long as three years. Limón is composing a poem that will be engraved on NASA's Europa Clipper mission. The spacecraft will travel 1.8 billion miles to explore Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons.
Every institution has its institutions, and one of the Library’s is John Hessler, who will retire from the Geography and Map Division at the end of this month. He holds many titles, official and unofficial. One of the official ones is curator of the Jay I. Kislak Collection of the Archaeology & History of the …
The Library's 2022 National Book Festival was the first in-person festival in three years, since COVID shut down much of public life in D.C, and thousands of readers and fans thronged the Convention Center in search of a good read. Celebrities such as Janelle Monae, Nick Offerman, Leslie Jordan and Megan Mullally were there to greet them. So were big names in fiction, non-fiction and children's books, including Geraldine Brooks, Karen Joy Fowler and Mitch Albom.
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink co-wrote "Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress," published this month. They researched the book, a biography of the first woman of color in the U.S. Congress, at the Library.
Civil War historian Elizabeth Leonard has written a number of books about the role of women on the battlefield and the social and political reverberations of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. She's researched those books, including her soon-to-be-published title, “Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life,” in the Library’s Manuscript Division.
In this segment of a regular feature on authors who use the Library's collections, we interview Walter Stahr, a lawyer turned historian. His latest biography, published in 2022, is "Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln's Vital Rival," a look at the influential treasury secretary and later chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court during the mid 19th century.
