Téa Obreht’s most recent book, “Inland,” is a historical novel set in the drought-ridden Arizona Territory in 1893. Washington Post fiction critic Ron Charles interviewed the author during this year’s National Book Festival.
Colson Whitehead, author of the Pulitzer-winning “The Underground Railroad” and “The Nickel Boys,” discusses his work and receives the 2020 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction at this year’s National Book Festival.
Joy Harjo is the 23rd and current United States Poet Laureate — the first Native American to receive the honor. A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, her most recent poetry collection is “An American Sunrise: Poems,” from which she here reads the poem “Running.”
America has been founded not once, but twice, according to Eric Foner, one of the nation’s foremost historians. At this year’s festival he discusses his newest book, “The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution.”
John Grisham is America’s most popular writer of legal thrillers. “The Guardians” is his hair-raising thriller about wrongful convictions, and “Camino Winds” is a light-hearted novel about a murder investigation undertaken by a bookseller.
Chelsea Clinton discusses her new book, “She Persisted in Sports: American Olympians Who Changed the Game,” which features women athletes who overcame odds and inspired the world.
N.K. Jemisin’s newest fantasy novel, “The City We Became,” is very much a New York story. The author notes in her festival video that, despite being an enormous city spread out over five boroughs, “New Yorkers look out for each other.”
James McBride discusses his newest novel, “Deacon King Kong,” in which the author “wanted to create a world that most people only see from behind the wheel of a tightly locked car… to let the wider world see how people in the projects live.”
Two-time Newbery Medal winner Kate DiCamillo (“Stella Endicott and the Anything-Is-Possible Poem”) and Pulitzer Prize finalist for adult fiction Ann Patchett (“The Dutch House”) talk about their literary friendship and the ways they feed each other’s creativity.
One of America’s most respected and eloquent historians is Jon Meacham. In “His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope,” Meacham writes about the civil rights icon and longtime member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and about Lewis’s lifelong quest for racial justice.