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Learning and Innovation Office
The Library of Congress

Happy Spring – the Season of Webinars.

Join us for our upcoming educator webinars.  All sessions are free and a certificate is available for those attending the live sessions where noted. 

March 26th 4 ET – Exploring Social Justice Through the Arts Part I

Hosted by Carolyn Bennett, our Music Teacher in Residence. 
The Library of Congress has over 900 WPA posters in its free-use online collection. Participants will explore ways to engage students in artistic inquiry through use of these rich primary sources, and strategies for increasing students’ capacity for personal artistic expression. Though the specific webinar content may be used in an elementary classroom or visual arts course, the strategies presented will help ALL students broadly use the performing and visual arts to explore primary sources. Certificate available for live attendance.

Register: https://locgov.webex.com/locgov/onstage/g.php?MTID=e1557046ca3b53943df04ee56638d679f

April 4^th 7 ET – The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AABP) in the Classroom

Join AAPB, LOC and WGBH education staff to learn about the collection and share resources on how to use with students. Former Teacher in Residence, Tom Bober, will share teaching ideas. Leave with knowledge of a digital and openly available online archival collection of historic public broadcasting programs that document important historical and culturally significant topics, events and people of the 20th and 21st centuries. Space is limited.

Register: https://wgbh.zoom.us/meeting/register/d5afddded61ad2c5dc2040ba88984b7b

April 16^th 4 ET - Exploring Social Justice Through the Arts Part II

Hosted by Carolyn Bennett, our Music Teacher in Residence.
The Library of Congress documents over a century of folk music, including diverse recordings of familiar songs.  What can students learn about the cultural, social, and historical context of musicians by comparing these recordings?  In this webinar, participants will explore several recordings of “This Little Light of Mine” to learn how inquiry leads students to learn about music and those who make it.  Though the specific webinar content may be used in a general or vocal music classroom, the strategies presented can engage students across content areas. Certificate available for live attendance.

Register: https://locgov.webex.com/locgov/onstage/g.php?MTID=e18065cd279530569dc5a29589f4bda94

April 30^th 4 ET - Creatively Exploring the 12-Bar Blues

Hosted by Carolyn Bennett, our Music Teacher in Residence. 
The 12-bar blues is a distinctively American musical form, which many diverse musicians have used to express their experiences and connect with others. Blues music provides a rich field for young musicians to create, perform, and respond. It also provides a lens to explore historical periods, and can empower students to express their own historical perspectives in an engaging, multimodal way. In this webinar, participants will experience several blues pieces from the Library of Congress. Participants will discuss how students can use these primary sources to develop musical and historical understandings, and how these understandings empower students’ own creative works. Certificate available for live attendance.

Register: :https://locgov.webex.com/locgov/onstage/g.php?MTID=ebb67ec244f884ed44ea12924542404df

We look forward to seeing you online!

The Library of Congress is continues to accept applications for our 2019 Summer Teacher Institutes for educators interested in using primary sources with their students.  Interested applicants are invited to apply by the deadline of March 10, 2019.  More information on this free professional development opportunity for educators of all disciplines, interested in using primary sources with their students, follows: 2019 Library of Congress Summer Teacher Institutes

Immerse yourself in the practice of teaching with primary sources from the unparalleled collections of Library of Congress. Held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., our Summer Teacher Institutes provide educators of all disciplines with resources and strategies to effectively integrate primary sources into K-12 classroom teaching. Each session will focus on pedagogy, with an emphasis on supporting student engagement, critical thinking, and construction of knowledge. While practicing these teaching strategies, attendees will explore some of the millions of digitized historical artifacts and documents available in the Library’s collections. They will also conduct research to identify primary sources and develop an activity related to their classroom content.

The Library of Congress Summer Teacher Institutes are appropriate for K-12 educators across many disciplines, including: Social Studies/History, English Language Arts, Science, Art, Music, or any other educators who feel that primary sources could be used with their curricula. Librarians and Curriculum/Professional Development specialists are also encouraged to apply.

Three week-long Summer Teacher Institute sessions will be offered this summer:

General Focus – open to K-12 educators across all content areas:

• July 8-July 12, 2019
• July 29-August 2, 2019

Science, Technology, and Engineering Focus – recommended for K-12 educators who teach science, technology, or engineering, or collaborate with those who do:

• July 15-July 19, 2019

Institute and instructional materials are provided at no cost. Participants will be responsible for transportation to and from Washington, D.C., and any required overnight accommodations.

Applications for the Summer Teacher Institutes are due March 10, 2019 and require a letter of recommendation. Read more and apply now

The Library of Congress is continues to accept applications for our 2019 Summer Teacher Institutes for educators interested in using primary sources with their students.  Interested applicants are invited to apply by the deadline of March 10, 2019.  More information on this free professional development opportunity for educators of all disciplines, interested in using primary sources with their students, follows: 2019 Library of Congress Summer Teacher Institutes

Immerse yourself in the practice of teaching with primary sources from the unparalleled collections of Library of Congress. Held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., our Summer Teacher Institutes provide educators of all disciplines with resources and strategies to effectively integrate primary sources into K-12 classroom teaching. Each session will focus on pedagogy, with an emphasis on supporting student engagement, critical thinking, and construction of knowledge. While practicing these teaching strategies, attendees will explore some of the millions of digitized historical artifacts and documents available in the Library’s collections. They will also conduct research to identify primary sources and develop an activity related to their classroom content.

The Library of Congress Summer Teacher Institutes are appropriate for K-12 educators across many disciplines, including: Social Studies/History, English Language Arts, Science, Art, Music, or any other educators who feel that primary sources could be used with their curricula. Librarians and Curriculum/Professional Development specialists are also encouraged to apply.

Three week-long Summer Teacher Institute sessions will be offered this summer:

General Focus – open to K-12 educators across all content areas:

• July 8-July 12, 2019
• July 29-August 2, 2019

Science, Technology, and Engineering Focus – recommended for K-12 educators who teach science, technology, or engineering, or collaborate with those who do:

• July 15-July 19, 2019

Institute and instructional materials are provided at no cost. Participants will be responsible for transportation to and from Washington, D.C., and any required overnight accommodations.

Applications for the Summer Teacher Institutes are due March 10, 2019 and require a letter of recommendation. Read more and apply now

Do you work in the field of literacy or know someone who does? Consider applying for a Library of Congress Literacy Award.

Applications will be accepted from organizations that have made outstanding contributions to increasing literacy in the United States or abroad. You may apply on behalf of your own organization or for another organization.

The Literacy Awards are made possible through the generosity of David M. Rubenstein.

The deadline for applications is March 8, 2019.

Need more information? Go to http://read.gov/literacyawards/index to learn more.

• Call for Applications 2019.pdf

The Library of Congress launched By the People in the autumn of 2018. The application invites users to transcribe, review, and tag digitized images of manuscripts and typed materials from the Library’s collections. Everyone is welcome to take part! You don't even need to create an account, but if you do you'll have access to additional features such as tagging, and reviewing other people's transcriptions.

Spend an hour with Library experts and hear how all transcriptions are made and reviewed by volunteers before they are returned to loc.gov, the Library's website. Discuss the possibilities of using this tool in your work with students. The transcriptions will improve search, readability, and access to handwritten and typed documents for those who are not fully sighted or cannot read the handwriting of the original documents.

To register for the webinar see https://locgov.webex.com/locgov/onstage/g.php?MTID=efee8818158910ccb5d645c840b1d5e2a

For more information on By the People, please see the blog post Crowdsourcing Helps to Unlock the Mystery of Cursive

The Library of Congress is now accepting applications for several professional development opportunities that will be offered this summer in Washington, D.C.  One Week Long Summer Teacher Institutes

Immerse yourself in the practice of teaching with primary sources from the unparalleled collections of Library of Congress. Held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., our Summer Teacher Institutes provide educators of all disciplines with resources and strategies to effectively integrate primary sources into K-12 classroom teaching. Each session will focus on pedagogy, with an emphasis on supporting student engagement, critical thinking, and construction of knowledge. While practicing these teaching strategies, attendees will explore some of the millions of digitized historical artifacts and documents available in the Library’s collections. They will also conduct research to identify primary sources and develop an activity related to their classroom content.

The Library of Congress Summer Teacher Institutes are appropriate for K-12 educators across many disciplines, including: Social Studies/History, English Language Arts, Science, Art, Music, or any other educators who feel that primary sources could be used with their curricula. Librarians and Curriculum/Professional Development specialists are also encouraged to apply.

Three week-long Summer Teacher Institute sessions will be offered this summer:

General Focus – open to K-12 educators across all content areas:

• July 8-July 12, 2019
• July 29-August 2, 2019

Science, Technology, and Engineering Focus – recommended for K-12 educators who teach science, technology, or engineering, or collaborate with those who do:

• July 15-July 19, 2019

Institute and instructional materials are provided at no cost. Participants will be responsible for transportation to and from Washington, D.C., and any required overnight accommodations.

Applications for the Summer Teacher Institutes are due March 10, 2019 and require a letter of recommendation. Read more and apply now !

Two and ½ day Primary Sources Workshop for Library Media Specialists

This multi-day workshop is intended especially for K-12 Library / Media Specialists. Over the 2 ½ day, hands-on session, Library of Congress education specialists will model strategies for using primary sources to engage students, build critical thinking skills, and construct knowledge, with an emphasis on supporting inquiry and research. Participants will reflect on and discuss how these strategies apply to their school libraries, considering various subject areas. While the emphasis is on learning and applying teaching strategies, participants also have opportunities to meet experts from the Library and research in the Library's reading rooms.

The session will take place from June 19 – June 21, 2019.  Institute and instructional materials are provided at no cost. Participants will be responsible for transportation to and from Washington, D.C., and any required overnight accommodations.

Applications are due February 22, 2019 and require a letter of recommendation.  Read more and apply now !

Please contact teachinglcsummer@loc.gov with any questions.

The Library’s resolution for 2019 is to offer more opportunities to engage lifelong learners like you with our unique treasures and programs. Make your gift before we close the books on 2018!

Your gift supports FREE exhibitions, events, programs, and activities that connect millions of people across the nation and around the world with our unique collections, experts, and services.

The Library of Congress is your library, your gateway to understanding the world. There is so much to discover, not only the nation’s memory, but the world’s—information from all corners of the earth, in more than 470 languages. With millions of items available online, you can access the Library’s treasures from anywhere and connect with us in ways that are personally relevant and valuable.

The Library’s resolution for 2019 is to offer more opportunities to engage lifelong learners like you with our unique treasures and programs. Make your gift before we close the books on 2018!

Your gift can:

• Inspire curiosity in children to read more books and reflect on the power of books to change their lives
• Ignite thoughtful conversation among current and future generations of students and scholars
• Illuminate the minds of people like you who use the resources of the nation's Library here in Washington or via the Internet in their own homes and communities

With the help of supporters like you, we can spark the imagination of people of all ages with programs that open the Library’s doors wide to all.

Join us TODAY by making your 2018 tax-deductible donation, and together we’ll spark a lifelong adventure of learning.

The day has arrived—#GivingTuesday—a day when your gift makes a difference and a statement.

The Library of Congress depends on donations from people like you to produce exhibitions, events, programs, and activities that connect millions of people across the nation and around the world with our unique collections, experts, and services.

Gifts bring the Library to life with music, dance, film, sound, culture, scholarship, research, discussions and ideas. Your gift, no matter the size, will support diverse programs that are entirely FREE for everyone to enjoy, and will make the Library’s treasures and services more accessible.

Help spread the word today and encourage your friends and family to make a gift to the nation’s library, your gateway to understanding the world!

#GivingTuesday is a global day of giving fueled by the power of social media and collaboration.

This year is the second year the Library of Congress is participating in #GivingTuesday—a global giving movement. On Tuesday, November 27, we are asking you to make a gift to spark a lifelong adventure of learning.

Your gift supports FREE exhibitions, events, programs, and activities that connect millions of people across the nation and around the world with our unique collections, experts, and services.

The Library of Congress is your library, your gateway to understanding the world. There is so much to discover, not only the nation’s memory, but the world’s—information from all corners of the earth, in more than 470 languages. With millions of items available online, you can access the Library’s treasures from anywhere and connect with us in ways that are personally relevant and valuable.

Save the Date to Make Your Gift!

Celebrated on the Tuesday following Thanksgiving (in the U.S.) and the widely recognized shopping events Black Friday and Cyber Monday, #GivingTuesday kicks off the charitable season, when many focus on their holiday and end-of-year giving.

Attention subscriber to bulletin services from the Library of Congress:

As you may be aware, on May 25, 2018, the EU General Data Protection Regulation EU (2016)/679 (GDPR) came into force in all EU member states. The GDPR applies to “personal data,” meaning any information relating to an identifiable person who can be directly or indirectly identified by reference to an identifier. It requires that personal data be processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner, and that personal data be collected for specified and legitimate purposes.

For those who subscribe to the Library’s email and RSS bulletins, the Library of Congress collects email addresses which can include personal data. The Library of Congress relies on its legitimate interests to process this data so that we can keep you up to date with developments for the topics to which you subscribe. The Library does not make any other use of this data.

The Library respects your personal data and takes care to maintain its confidentiality. You have the right to unsubscribe from the Library’s e-mail newsletters and alerts at any time. You can manage your subscriptions by clicking “Subscriber Preferences” in the box at the bottom of this email.

If you have any questions about the Library’s data privacy policy, please email the Library: ogc@loc.gov

K-12 educators interested in attending one of the Library of Congress Summer Teacher Institute sessions have only one week – until March 21, 2018 – to apply. 

Held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., these professional development opportunities provide educators with resources and strategies to effectively integrate primary sources into K-12 classroom teaching.  Each session will focus on pedagogy, with an emphasis on supporting student engagement, critical thinking, and construction of knowledge.

While practicing these teaching strategies, attendees will explore some of the millions of digitized historical artifacts and documents available in the Library’s collections.  Finally, they will conduct research to identify primary sources and develop an activity related to their classroom content.

Five five-day sessions will be offered this summer:

General Focus – open to K-12 educators across all content areas:

• June 18-June 22
• June 25-June 29
• July 30-August 3

WWI Focus – recommended for K-12 educators who teach some aspect of WWI as part of their curriculum, or collaborate with those who do:

• July 9-July 13

Science, Technology, and Engineering Focus – recommended for K-12 educators who teach science, technology, or engineering, or collaborate with those who do: 

• July 16-July 20

Professional development and materials are provided at no cost. Participants will be responsible for transportation to and from Washington, D.C., and any required overnight accommodations.

Applications are due March 21 and require a letter of recommendation. Read more and apply now:

http://www.loc.gov/teachers/professionaldevelopment/teacherinstitute/

Greetings from the Library of Congress!

We are requesting your valuable input as part of our research in envisioning the Library of Congress’ future. Please take a few moments to complete a survey about your work with K-12 students. The information you provide will help us to improve services and deliver high-quality experiences for K-12 students, librarians, and teachers.

Please begin the survey by clicking here.

If the link above does not work, copy and paste this into your browser: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Envisioning_K12.

If you know other K-12 educators interested in sharing their thoughts with the Library of Congress, please feel free to share the survey link.

Thank you in advance for your time and input. We will read every comment we receive.

The Library of Congress Educational Outreach Division is looking for a Performing or Visual Arts teacher to serve as the 2018-2019 Teacher in Residence. This is the first time the Library has specifically recruited a performing arts or visual arts teacher for this opportunity.

The selected teacher will participate in this program via an intergovernmental personnel agreement between the Library and his or her home school district. The Library will reimburse the district for salary and benefits paid to the teacher during the school year, and will release the Teacher-in-Residence for all district holidays and vacations. The term of the appointment will match the dates of the teacher's home school district's school year.

The selected teacher will receive a monthly housing stipend if he or she teaches outside of the Washington DC metropolitan area. The Library cannot pay for travel or moving expenses.

Qualifications of successful candidates include:

• knowledge about the Library's digitized primary sources with experience using them in instruction
• leadership experience, especially in designing and delivering professional development
• an innovative, flexible and collaborative work style, able to work on a team in an office environment
• excellent communication skills
• the ability to live and work in the Washington, DC, metro area for the duration of the school year

The deadline for applications is Monday, April 9, 2018. Direct any questions to edoutreach [at] loc.gov

K-12 educators interested in attending one of the Library of Congress Summer Teacher Institute sessions still have one month – until March 21, 2018 – to apply. 

Held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., these professional development opportunities provide educators with resources and strategies to effectively integrate primary sources into K-12 classroom teaching.  Each session will focus on pedagogy, with an emphasis on supporting student engagement, critical thinking, and construction of knowledge.

While practicing these teaching strategies, attendees will explore some of the millions of digitized historical artifacts and documents available in the Library’s collections.  Finally, they will conduct research to identify primary sources and develop an activity related to their classroom content.

Five five-day sessions will be offered this summer:

General Focus – open to K-12 educators across all content areas:

• June 18-June 22
• June 25-June 29
• July 30-August 3

WWI Focus – recommended for K-12 educators who teach some aspect of WWI as part of their curriculum, or collaborate with those who do:

• July 9-July 13

Science, Technology, and Engineering Focus – recommended for K-12 educators who teach science, technology, or engineering, or collaborate with those who do: 

• July 16-July 20

Professional development and materials are provided at no cost. Participants will be responsible for transportation to and from Washington, D.C., and any required overnight accommodations.

Applications are due March 21 and require a letter of recommendation. Read more and apply now:

http://www.loc.gov/teachers/professionaldevelopment/teacherinstitute/

This spring, the Library of Congress will host two free, one-day workshops for K-12 educators interested in incorporating WWI-related primary sources into their classroom instruction.

In each session, Library of Congress education specialists will model a variety of strategies for using primary sources to engage students, build critical thinking skills, and construct knowledge. Through a series of inquiry-based classroom activities, participants will work with historic photographs, prints, manuscripts, maps, multimedia, and other resources from the Library’s collections. All of these items are digitized and freely available online for teachers to use with their students after the session. Certificates are available for teachers completing the workshop.

Additional Information: 

Audience:  K-12 educators of all disciplines interested in incorporating primary sources into their classroom instruction.

When:  Two separate one-day sessions will be offered.

·         Tuesday, March 27, 2018, and

·         Thursday, April 5, 2018.

Each session will run from 9:00 am – 3:00 pm; building opens at 8:30 am.

Where:  Library of Congress; Washington, D.C.

How to register:  Register online here! Apply now, as space is limited.

Questions? Please contact teachinglcsummer@loc.gov

The Library of Congress is now accepting applications for its week-long summer institutes for K-12 educators. Held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., this professional development opportunity provides educators of all disciplines with resources and strategies to effectively integrate primary sources into K-12 classroom teaching.  Each session will focus on pedagogy, with an emphasis on supporting student engagement, critical thinking, and construction of knowledge.

While practicing these teaching strategies, attendees will explore some of the millions of digitized historical artifacts and documents available in the Library’s collections.  They will also conduct research to identify primary sources and develop an activity related to their classroom content.

Five week-long sessions will be offered this summer:

General Focus – open to K-12 educators across all content areas:

• June 18-June 22
• June 25-June 29
• July 30-August 3

WWI Focus – recommended for K-12 educators who teach some aspect of WWI as part of their curriculum, or collaborate with those who do:

• July 9-July 13

Science, Technology, and Engineering Focus – recommended for K-12 educators who teach science, technology, or engineering, or collaborate with those who do: 

• July 16-20

Institute and course materials are provided at no cost. Participants will be responsible for transportation to and from Washington, D.C., and any required overnight accommodations.

Applications are due March 21 and require a letter of recommendation. Read more and apply now!

There are still a few slots available for the Teaching with Primary Sources Face to Face workshop, scheduled for November 4,  from 9 am – 4 pm, in the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building.

In this free workshop for K-12 educators of all disciplines, Library of Congress education specialists will model a variety of strategies for using music-related primary sources to engage students, build critical thinking skills, and construct knowledge. 

Additional activities and presentations will also be led by staff from the National Association for Music Education (NAfME), as well as reference specialists from the Library’s Music Division. 

For more information and to apply, visit:  http://www.loc.gov/teachers/professionaldevelopment/webinar/musicworkshop/?rssloc=eanft
Register TODAY!!! 

On Saturday, November 4, 2017, the Library of Congress will host a free, one-day workshop for K-12 educators interested in incorporating music-related primary sources into their classroom instruction.

In this hands-on, collaborative session, education specialists from the Library of Congress will model a variety of strategies for using music-related primary sources to engage students, build critical thinking skills, and construct knowledge. Through a series of inquiry-based classroom activities, educators will experience historic audio files, sheet music, song sheets, prints and photographs, and other resources from the Library’s collections. Most of these items are digitized and will be freely available online for teachers to use with their students.

Certificates are available for teachers completing the workshop.

Additional Information:

Audience: K-12 music educators and teachers of other disciplines interested in incorporating music-related primary sources into their classroom instruction.

When: Saturday, November 4, 2017, from 9 am – 4:00 pm. Where: Whittall Pavilion, Ground Floor, Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress, 10 First St. SE, Washington, DC 20540 Directions here. The room will be open at 8:30 am. Attendees are encouraged to leave plenty of time for travel and to arrive early.

How to register: Register online here! Apply now, as space is limited.

Questions?  Please contact: teachinglcsummer@loc.gov

Teachers familiar with the instructional power of primary sources might also be interested in the opportunity to teach using authentic data and activities from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The recently updated Statistics in Schools program offers free activities and resources that can help you bring statistics into any K-12 classroom.

Statistics in Schools activities use real-life census data to help students understand statistical concepts and gain data analysis skills.

The geography, history, math and sociology activities were created by teachers and correspond with relevant education standards.

Visit census.gov/schools to explore the program and download activities you can start using in your classroom.

Sign Up and Learn More

The Library of Congress invites you and your students to join in a virtual program to celebrate El día de los niños/El día de los libros (Children’s Day/Book Day), an official literacy celebration of the American Library Association.

Author, illustrator Lulu Delacre, will lead this bilingual celebration by reading and presenting her award-winning book, “Olinguito From A- Z !” in both English and Spanish.

“Olinguito From A- Z !” will take place on Thursday, April 27 at 10:30 AM EDT, and will be streamed live at this URL: https://youtu.be/vvSRinFRAQ8

We hope you enjoy the program!

In this one-day workshop for K-2 educators, Library of Congress education staff and our current Teacher in Residence, will model a variety of strategies for using primary sources to engage young learners, build critical thinking skills, and construct knowledge. This hands-on, collaborative session will feature maps, prints and photographs, historic audio and film recordings, and other resources from the Library’s collections, all of which are digitized and readily available to teachers after the session. Participants will learn about unique children’s books from the past and ways the Library is making them more accessible. In addition, a specialist from the Young Readers Center will explain resources and non-fiction books that support the K-2 learner.

Attendees will receive a personalized certificate for professional development hours.

Audience:  K- 2 educators interested in incorporating primary sources into their classroom instruction.

When: Saturday, May 6, 2017, from 9:00 am – 1:00 pm.

Where: Room 119 in the Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress, 10 First St. SE, Washington, DC 20540. (For directions, go here:  https://www.loc.gov/visit/directions/)

Deadline to apply: April 28, 2017

Questions? Please contact: teachinglcsummer@loc.gov

Interested in attending?  Please fill out the registration form on the page following and email it to teachinglcsummer@loc.gov

• K-2+Workshop+-+Application.docx

The deadline is rapidly approaching to apply for one of the five week-long Summer Teacher Institutes being held at the Library of Congress between June and August this year.  Educators will have until March 17 at midnight Pacific Time to apply online.

Held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., these unique professional development opportunities provide educators of all disciplines with a host of resources and strategies to successfully use primary sources with their students. Each session will focus on practical teaching strategies, with an emphasis on supporting student engagement, critical thinking, and construction of knowledge.

While practicing these core strategies, attendees will also explore some of the millions of digitized historical artifacts and documents available in the Library’s collections. They will meet library experts and conduct research to identify primary sources related to their teaching, with the goal of developing an activity to use with their students in the coming school year.  See what some of our previous Institute’s participants have to say about their experience!

Five week-long sessions will be offered this summer:

General Focus – open to K-12 educators across all content areas:

• June 19-23
• June 26-30
• July 10-14

Science, Technology, and Engineering Focus – recommended for K-12 educators who teach science, technology, or engineering, or collaborate with those who do:

• July 17-21

World War I Focus – recommended for K-12 educators who teach some aspect of WWI as part of their curriculum, or collaborate with those who do:

• July 31-August 4

Institute and course materials are provided at no cost. Participants will be responsible for transportation to and from Washington, D.C., and any required overnight accommodations.

Apply by March 17!  Note that a letter of recommendation will be required.  Learn more about the program and fill out the application here.

In the novelist’s satirical reworking of Kafka’s classic story, an insect wakes up to discover to its horror that it has turned into the prime minister…

• Bill Nighy reads an extract from The Cockroach

That morning, Jim Sams, clever but by no means profound, woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic creature. For a good while he remained on his back (not his favourite posture) and regarded his distant feet, his paucity of limbs, with consternation. A mere four, of course, and quite unmovable. His own little brown legs, for which he was already feeling some nostalgia, would have been waving merrily in the air, however hopelessly. He lay still, determined not to panic. An organ, a slab of slippery meat, lay squat and wet in his mouth – revolting, especially when it moved of its own accord to explore the vast cavern of his mouth and, he noted with muted alarm, slide across an immensity of teeth. He stared along the length of his body. His colouring, from shoulders to ankles, was a pale blue, with darker blue piping around his neck and wrists, and white buttons in a vertical line right down his unsegmented thorax. The light breeze that blew intermittently across it, bearing a not unattractive odour of decomposing food and grain alcohol, he accepted as his breath. His vision was unhelpfully narrowed – oh for a compound eye – and everything he saw was oppressively colourful. He was beginning to understand that by a grotesque reversal his vulnerable flesh now lay outside his skeleton, which was therefore wholly invisible to him. What a comfort it would have been to catch a glimpse of that homely nacreous brown.

All this was worrying enough, but as he came more fully awake he remembered that he was on an important, solitary mission, though for the moment he could not recall what it was. I’m going to be late, he thought, as he attempted to lift from the pillow a head that must have weighed as much as five kilos. This is so unfair, he told himself. I don’t deserve this. His fragmentary dreams had been deep and wild, haunted by raucous, echoing voices in constant dissent. Only now, as this head slumped back, did he begin to see through to the far side of sleep and bring to mind a mosaic of memories, impressions and intentions that scattered as he tried to hold them down.

David Cameron refuses to own up to his cowardice in calling the EU referendum in this long and defensive memoir

Neville Chamberlain died in November 1940, just six months after the bankruptcy of his policy of appeasement towards Hitler had forced his resignation as prime minister. This was unlucky because he did not live long enough to write a memoir trying to justify himself. This was lucky because he was not around to hear himself being pilloried as one of the most calamitous leaders in British history.

David Cameron, who was an ex-PM at the young age of 49, is doomed to be remembered as a Chamberlain-class prime minister and fated to know it. Now and for ever more, he will be defined by the one epic misjudgment that terminated his time at Number 10 and hurled his country into the vortex of chaos in which it is still trapped more than three years later. In the unlikely event that Brexit ultimately proves to be a brilliant idea, he will not be able to claim any credit for an enterprise that he opposed. In the rather more likely event that leaving the EU proves to be the gravest error in Britain’s modern history, he will rightly shoulder a vast weight of the blame. And in the event that Brexit is reversed, Cameron will be remembered as the man who put his country through years of polarising trauma for no purpose.

Jessie Burton’s previous novel featured an artist and her muse; this follow-up concerns a writer and her amanuensis. Constance Holden is a reclusive novelist with a formidable reputation who has published nothing for more than 30 years. Now in her 70s and crippled with osteoarthritis, she employs a young woman called Laura Brown as a housekeeper and secretary. Laura assures her that she’s the patient type. “Then I’ll call you the patient typist,” Constance replies.

Readers of Burton’s fiction may notice the continuation of a theme, as The Muse similarly began with a young woman being employed as a typist by an inscrutable female art historian. It’s perhaps also worth noting that Burton herself worked as a PA in the City before the publication in 2014 of her million-selling debut, The Miniaturist, so has first-hand experience of supporting herself in a menial role while quietly composing a piece of art.

The White Teeth author on the pleasures of foreign fiction, millennial tales and the influence of Roald Dahl

The book I am currently reading
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. It’s 700 pages long – I’ve been reading it for a while. If a book’s importance is gauged by how effectively it describes the world we’re in, and how much potential it has to change said world, then in my view it’s easily the most important book to be published this century. I find it hard to take any young activist seriously who hasn’t at least familarised themselves with Zuboff’s central ideas. How can we live in the digital age and yet still be so innocent as to what that really means? Zuboff is concerned with the largest act of capitalist colonisation ever attempted, but the colonisation is of our minds, our behaviour, our free will, our very selves. Yet it’s not an anti-tech book. It’s anti unregulated capitalism, red in tooth and claw. It’s really this generation’s Das Kapital. Or should be. The whole argument is that there’s nothing inevitable about the ways in which the technology has been exploited. There could have been another way. There still might be.

The book I wish I’d written
Just a better version of any of my own.

Admirable intentions run up against an NHS starved of cash in a doctor-novelist’s moving chronicle of life on the wards

Stories are what medicine and novel writing share, says Joanna Cannon, bestselling author of The Trouble With Goats and Sheep and Three Things About Elsie. “We tell our stories in the hope that someone out there will listen, and we will be understood.” Breaking and Mending is an account of what nearly broke her when she was a junior NHS doctor. It also, with great respect and care, tells the stories of those she tried to mend – Paul, a 38-year-old father of two with pancreatic cancer; Joan, a blind, cantankerous and “wonderful” 79-year-old; Alex, a junior doctor who hanged himself two days after being discharged from the psychiatric ward – and I read most of them through tears.

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The bestselling author of The Testaments talks about her unusual upbringing and why it was time to revisit the dystopia of The Handmaid’s Tale

“You are in chaos,” Margaret Atwood decrees calmly over tea. “It’s Cavaliers versus Roundheads.” We meet in London, the afternoon before she is due at Waterstones in Piccadilly to sell the first copy of The Testaments, the long awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, at midnight, accompanied by women in the now globally recognised handmaids’ costumes. Further up the river, Westminster is shutting down for five weeks. Ever since Boris Johnson raised the prospect of proroguing parliament, people have been sharing a quote from The Handmaid’s Tale, published 35 years ago, just as they did in the US following the election of Donald Trump in 2016: “That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed at home at night, watching television.”

“It is another predictable mess that people have got drawn into because a big honking pack of lies was told about it,” Atwood says of Brexit. Apart from the legal questions – “actions have consequences, but what will the consequences be?” – she is most interested in “who is going to benefit from this financially? Who is shorting the pound? I can think of all kinds of people who might turn it to their advantage.”

This fractured, disparate narrative can feel like a lecture from a stoner undergraduate - but it’s also a lot of fun

The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas opens with the warning that “this book is dangerous”. But don’t let that put you off.

Its author, Daniel James – or, at least, someone claiming to be Daniel James (we’ll get to that) explains in New Writing North that this book is “an unorthodox hybrid of literary fiction, biography and detective story, written by a former journalist and told through a combination of prose fiction, biographical chapters, news clippings, academic footnotes, emails, phone transcripts and more. Given these origins, the novel occupies a unique space at the intersection between truth and fiction, history and myth.”

Do racism and sexism really exist, or are they just the creation of angry lefties? The bizarre fantasies of a rightwing provocateur, blind to oppression

Being stuck in a culture war is a bit like being a driver stuck in a traffic jam. From within one’s own car, the absurdity and injustice of the situation is abundantly plain. Other drivers can be seen cutting in, changing lanes excessively, and getting worked up. Roadworks appear needlessly restrictive. Why are there so many cars on the road anyway? Horns begin to honk. There is one question that few drivers ever consider: what is my own contribution to this quagmire?

Psychoanalysts refer to the process of “splitting”, where the self is unable to cope with its good and bad qualities simultaneously, and so “splits” the bad ones off and attributes them to other people. The result is an exaggerated sense of one’s own virtue and innocence, but an equally exaggerated sense of the selfishness and corruption of others. We are all guilty of this from time to time, rarely more so than on social media, where the world can appear perfectly split into goodies and baddies. Populism and culture warriors exploit this aspect of human psychology, reinforcing the comforting (but ultimately harmful) feeling that any conflict in the world is their fault not ours.

At the start of 2016, Patti Smith’s friend the producer, manager and rock critic Sandy Pearlman was hospitalised after suffering a brain haemorrhage. She first met him in 1971 when he attended one of her performances during which she read poetry against a backdrop of feedback, courtesy of guitarist Lenny Kaye. Pearlman approached Smith after the show and suggested she front a rock band, but, as she recalls in her new memoir: “I just laughed and told him I had a good job working in a bookstore.” Later she took his advice and went on to make the landmark punk album Horses. Their friendship endured, leading her and Kaye to his bedside nearly 50 years later as he lay in a coma. “We stood on either side of him, promising to mentally hold on to him, keep an open channel, ready to intercept and accept any signal,” Smith writes. But the signal never came; six months later, Pearlman died.

Her account of 2016 shows it was a difficult year all round. Along with the loss of friends, she is poleaxed by the rise of populism, the dirtiness of the US election battle and looming environmental catastrophe. She is also discomforted by her impending 70th birthday. And so, after a run of New Year gigs at the Fillmore in San Francisco, and a stretch back in her leaky New York flat, Smith engages in what she calls “passive wandering, a small respite from the clamouring, the cries of the world”. She travels to Arizona, California, Virginia and Kentucky.

All about power ... the reporters who broke the Weinstein story give the full account of who talked, and how #MeToo began

Three events define the #MeToo era. The first was the release, in October 2016, of the #Pussygate tape, on which presidential candidate Donald Trump was recorded boasting about his seduction technique: “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” A year later, the New York Times published a story about the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual aggression against both A-list actors and junior employees. (He lost his job, but still denies many of the allegations.) In the autumn of 2018, an academic called Christine Blasey Ford testified to a Congressional committee – and the world’s media – that the Republican supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had assaulted her at a drunken college party, in front of a male friend. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said. Kavanaugh sobbed openly, lied about small details, and denied the accusation. His nomination was confirmed.

The #MeToo movement has a mixed record, and Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who broke the Weinstein story, embrace that complexity in She Said. Painstakingly researched, their account is less interested in Weinstein the Monster than the structures that enabled him to flourish.

In the public imagination, the avant garde dancer Isadora Duncan often appears as a somewhat ridiculous figure: a tunic-wearing, self-taught dervish whose art could be almost as vulgar as it was glorious. If her death at the age of 50, when her trailing scarf became caught in the wheels of the car in which she was travelling, still seems sad and wasteful, there’s also, at this distance, something blackly comical about it: the hand-painted, floating ribbon of silk that killed her speaks of an exuberance that was never practical, and only very rarely wise.

Kathleen Jamie’s third essay collection, Surfacing, is a quieter, gentler work than her earlier volumes: 2005’s Findings and 2012’s Sightlines. It’s perhaps fitting – this is a book mostly written in, as she puts it, “late middle age”, when her children have grown and the view back is longer than the view forward. Surfacing is the literary equivalent of the slow food movement: writing that may describe momentous events – the death of Jamie’s father; her own cancer diagnosis and treatment; a 500-year-old massacre; the 1989 Chinese student demonstrations that ended in Tiananmen Square – but does so in a manner that is sidelong, subtle and requires a degree of readerly patience.

There’s no doubt that this is the work of the same author as those earlier collections, though. First, there’s the quality of the noticing eye, the poet’s ability to look deeply at a landscape, a person, a situation, and then to summon it on the page with what Robert Lowell called “the grace of accuracy”. Then there’s Jamie’s particular talent for nature writing, the way that she weaves eagles, ragwort, snow buntings, caribou and all the rest of the natural world into her prose so that they lose the otherness that can distance them from our experience. Nature in Jamie’s writing is immediate, domestic and, well, natural.

A study of how the US and Germany have dealt with their racist legacies; and a new theory of what drove Hitler

Moral legacies are hard to pin down and even harder to escape. The need to balance atonement and desire for societies to heal and move forward is a changeable alchemy. The Czech writer Milan Kundera called it the “struggle against forgetting” and two countries, both successful and prosperous democracies, provide contrasting case studies. Germany and the US treat their heritage of racially motivated evils very differently and the consequences are explored in a wide-ranging odyssey by the American philosopher and essayist Susan Neiman. Learning From the Germans: Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil is part memoir, part prescription and a project heavily influenced by her own biography.

Growing up in the American south during the civil rights era, and spending much of her adult life in and around Berlin as a Jewish woman, Neiman has a keen ear for discomforts and awkwardnesses and the small tics of guilt and avoidance.

Rich in sentiment and humour, this evocation of an Irish village in the 1970s examines grief, faith and first love

Approach with care the book that offers up a tale of Ireland in the old days. Since Patrick Kavanagh published The Great Hunger in 1942, any book about the poetry of rural life and youth’s endless summer must of necessity be acknowledged as sentimental. The best rural writers demolished these cliches long ago, and built in their place a literature that chronicled with unflinching, sorrowful honesty the world we all came from before we moved into the cities.

One thinks of John McGahern, or RS Thomas’s dismissal of those who idealised Wales: “Too far for you to see / The fluke and the foot-rot and the fat maggot”. Without great skill, the country chronicler’s work will fall into the category of tourist fodder – Scottish shortbread, English ale, Welsh rarebit and tales of green Ireland. Such books only kill the places they claim to love.

Dark humour, drunken rants and dreams of escape in a bestselling autobiographical novel from Norway

“It is terrible that someone who has been destroyed spreads destruction, and how hard that is to avoid.” There are three generations of destructive parents and children in Vigdis Hjorth’s Will and Testament. The protagonist, Bergljot, was sexually abused as a child by her rich and powerful father, who once half excused himself by alluding to the terrible experiences of his own childhood. Now in her 50s, Bergljot fears that she too has been a destructive parent, and her daughter writes a moving letter to her grandmother and aunts telling them that her mother’s childhood has impacted on her own: “I’ve seen Mum as broken and distraught as a human being is capable of without dying.”

The book was a bestseller when it was published in Norway in 2016, partly because readers recognised Hjorth’s own family in the tale of intergenerational destruction and seem to have been titillated by a story presented in the press as disguised autobiography. Hjorth’s sister was so offended by the depiction of their parents that she wrote her own more rose-tinted autobiographical novel, Free Will, and that became a bestseller as well.

Edna O’Brien’s troubling new novel, written after she travelled to Nigeria in her 80s to speak to girls who had been kidnapped by jihadist group Boko Haram, makes the recent craze for dystopia look frivolous.

It’s narrated by Maryam, whom we follow through her abduction and its aftermath. As a prisoner she’s given as a prize to a soldier, Mahmoud, whose baby she bears. The action is fast-moving: five pages take us from her arranged marriage to her pregnancy to Mahmoud returning from a battle with his leg half-blown off, at which point he shows her where he’s been stashing money and tells her to take it.

Atwood’s angry, pacy sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale admits a ray of light into Gilead’s toxic world

Those of us lucky enough to read The Handmaid’s Tale back when it first appeared in 1985 will remember the shock of a novel that felt both claustrophobically precise and shatteringly prescient. The newly born Republic of Gilead, with its abuses and abominations, its hideously misogynistic vocabulary and gruesomely rationalised constraints, was just about far enough from our own world to seem beguiling, but also close enough to feel like a wake-up call.

Still, no one could have guessed the extent to which recent history (as well as a superb TV offshoot) would bring it eerily, terrifyingly back into focus. With the implacable rise of the Christian right in the US, never has it felt more urgent for women to guard both their bodies and their reproductive systems against (some) men and the state. Who, after all, is Donald Trump if not Commander Waterford without the charm? And I can’t be the only one who, watching the Trump crowd’s chants of “Lock her up!” or “Send her back!”, found herself thinking of taser-wielding Aunt Lydia and the handmaids’ cries of “Her fault!” when one of their number “confesses” to having been gang-raped?

Just twice in Tracy Chevalier’s bittersweet new novel does its heroine, Violet Speedwell, think to herself: “I want to do that.” Her wishes are self-sacrificing enough: to embroider a kneeler in Winchester Cathedral and to ring its bells. Given that the year is 1932, the first is more easily realised than the second, yet both, in their way, are radical.

Don’t be fooled by the ecclesiastical backdrop. For Violet, who lost first her fiance and then a brother to the trenches, God died in the great war. More than 16 years have since passed but only now, as a 38-year-old spinster, has she finally plucked up the nerve to leave behind her overbearing mother and their Southampton home and make a life of her own.

The master of horror returns to favourite themes, but weaves them into a portrait of the US in crisis

“Ever been to Pleasure Island?” asks Lampwick, the rowdy, doomed delinquent from Disney’s Pinocchio, as the stagecoach spirits a cargo of children through the darkened streets and clear out of the world. At Pleasure Island, behind high, bolted gates, the town’s tearaways are promised a life free from societal interference. They can drink and smoke and shoot pool at their leisure, blissfully unaware that the theme park is, in fact, a nightmarish factory or sulphurous processing plant. Come daybreak they will have been transformed into donkeys, herded into crates and put to work in the mines.

Misguided or not, the kids in Pinocchio are at least clamouring to visit Pleasure Island, which is more than can be said for the pint-sized inmates of Stephen King’s meaty, satisfying slab of high-concept pulp fiction. Instead, its inhabitants are forcibly abducted from their homes at night and installed as laboratory rats by a shadowy government organisation. They’re plied with cigarettes and alcohol. They’re being slowly fattened for the kill. And if The Institute finally lacks the pure jolting terror of Lampwick’s transformation into a jackass, it compensates with an atmosphere of creeping dread and a keen awareness of the cogs and wheels of bureaucratic evil. King’s villains, it transpires, are a bunch of middle-management automatons, headhunted from the US military or plucked from well-paid careers at Halliburton. These people wouldn’t consider themselves to be sadists, exactly. They’re simply clocking in and out, following orders and processing kids.

Poetry is changing. And it’s not just spoken word and Instapoets who are changing it: at long last, diverse voices and experiences are getting a proper hearing. Across the English-speaking world, new work in every genre is demonstrating impatience with older, static verse forms. The best new writing has a kind of velocity that seems to burst open the traditional idea of single poems pinned and mounted on the page.

In a week of LGBTQ-hostile news, the £5,000 Klaus Fugge award for illustrated books goes to Jessica Love’s Julian Is a Mermaid

In Julian Is a Mermaid, a little boy riding the New York City subway with “his nana” dreams of looking like the spectacularly dressed women they see – and ends up, with his grandmother’s help, joining the iconic Mermaid Parade. Author and illustrator Jessica Love, who was partly inspired by a trans friend to create the picture book, never expected it to be published after five years of work.

On Wednesday night, Love was named winner of the prestigious Klaus Flugge prize, which goes to the most exciting and promising newcomer to picture book illustration. Judge and former children’s laureate Anthony Browne called the book “astonishingly beautiful”, saying it was amazing that it was her first attempt to write and illustrate a picture book.

Is there a single celebrity who hasn’t written a children’s book? Madonna alone has published a dozen. Unwholesome curmudgeons, venal narcissists, the 1% – the Queen of Jordan is in on the act – all believe they are entitled to cobble together a mothwing of a plot whose holes are magically filled in by fairy dust. Moral high-ground natives such as Keith Richards and smiley, personable types like Bob Dylan have picture books on shelves.

Paul McCartney got in early – Hey Grandude! is not the former Beatle’s first foray into young minds. A decade ago, alongside Philip Ardagh and Geoff Dunbar, he put out High in the Clouds. Although the title may have suggested a lysergic post-Dr Seuss romp, High… was an environmental parable starring Wirral the Squirrel. A film has recently been green-lit after a decade languishing in pre-production. Although Ardagh must have had some input, the book’s plucky orphaned protagonist and its anti-consumerist tilt felt very McCartney.

She was 10 when she first decided to distribute children’s books with black girl leads – a campaign that has taken her to the White House. Now she’s written a book of her own

When I arrive at the photography studio to meet the education activist Marley Dias, I am surprised to find the shoot is long over. The 14-year-old is sitting patiently, her luggage packed, coat neatly slung over her lap, waiting. The photographer explains the early finish is because they got all the pictures they needed with Dias near-immediately; that she is the perfect subject to work with.

This was perhaps the first inkling of what would become abundantly clear during our interview: Marley Dias is a pro. Despite her tender years, the campaigner for diverse children’s books – which took her from her New Jersey home town to the White House – carries herself with a mature confidence, and a wherewithal perhaps born from deeply held conviction.

The No Logo author talks about solutions to the climate crisis, Greta Thunberg, birth strikes and how she finds hope

• Read an extract from her new book, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal here

Why are you publishing this book now?
I still feel that the way that we talk about climate change is too compartmentalised, too siloed from the other crises we face. A really strong theme running through the book is the links between it and the crisis of rising white supremacy, the various forms of nationalism and the fact that so many people are being forced from their homelands, and the war that is waged on our attention spans. These are intersecting and interconnecting crises and so the solutions have to be as well.

The book collects essays from the last decade, have you changed your mind about anything?
When I look back, I don’t think I placed enough emphasis on the challenge climate change poses to the left. It’s more obvious the way the climate crisis challenges a rightwing dominant worldview, and the cult of serious centrism that never wants to do anything big, that’s always looking to split the difference. But this is also a challenge to a left worldview that is essentially only interested in redistributing the spoils of extractivism [the process of extracting natural resources from the earth] and not reckoning with the limits of endless consumption.

The world’s getting nastier, says the writer, and Britain no longer cares. So he’s hitting back – with a Gulliver’s Travels update that targets Trump, Brexit and the refugee crisis

Michael Morpurgo has all the trappings befitting a prolific, bestselling and beloved children’s author. There is the National Theatre production (War Horse, still touring the globe) and its Spielberg movie adaptation; the stint as children’s laureate (a post he helped create); the gold Blue Peter badge and the knighthood. But as a vocal campaigner against Brexit, he is getting used to rather a different kind of reception.

“I’ve been spat at,” Britain’s storyteller-in-chief says nonchalantly over lunch at his local pub in an idyllic Devon village. “I went to Sidmouth folk festival – quite a peaceable part of the world, you would have thought.” The trouble began when he bought one of the “little blue badges with stars around it”. Clare, Morpurgo’s wife of 56 years, interjects. “No, it said, ‘Bollocks to Brexit.’”

In her new book, the undertaker and YouTube star answers children’s questions about mortality. She explains why we shouldn’t fear talking about it

When faced with the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?”, very few kids would answer “undertaker”. Caitlin Doughty, perhaps most famous for her YouTube channel Ask a Mortician, certainly wouldn’t have. “I never had any sense of the funeral industry as anything other than this dark, archaic hole with a man in a suit putting electric green fluid through a tube into a corpse. It never even occurred to me that I could be a part of it,” she says.

But maybe that is about to change. Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? answers 35 questions about death, sourced from curious children. From “Will I poop when I die?” to “Can I use bones from a human cremation as jewellery?”, it gets down to the morbid questions we all have – asked by children unburdened by shame. “The kids make it clear that we’re not being direct enough in how we talk about death,” Doughty says. “I think that a lot of adults never really got the kind of death education that they need.” She compares the silence about death to the reticence around sex: “My parents weren’t necessarily talking about it, but I was watching porn at my friend’s house when I was nine because her older brother had it. There’s always going to be these things slipping in somehow.”

At 19, Legler broke the Olympic freestyle swimming record. But she was also an alcoholic and drug dealer who had suffered years of abuse from her trainers. She is surprised she is still alive, she says

One day, when she was a teenager, Casey Legler woke up with a hangover, then jumped into a pool and broke the Olympic freestyle swimming record. The year was 1996 and Legler was in Atlanta, a member of the French team, having a practice session as she awaited the Olympic finals the next day. Legler, at 6ft 2in, was built to swim. She had been groomed to be an Olympian from the age of 12. But when the finals came – the biggest day of her professional life – she bombed, coming 29th in the women’s 50m freestyle. She spent the next day drunk and dealing cocaine – to Olympic teammates and teenage members of other international teams.

That is perhaps the most troubling aspect of Legler’s new memoir, which charts her time as one of the fastest female swimmers in the world. This isn’t just the story of an alcoholic girl who, under the supposedly protective wing of coaches and doctors, was sexually abused and given performance-enhancing drugs. It’s how her experience was not unusual among her female peers. She remembers, for instance, a teenage member of the British Olympic team asking her to buy drugs. Alcohol and drug use, she says, were commonplace among top-level child athletes, not just in celebratory post-competition blow-outs but every night. From the age of 12, “I swam for every chance to get wasted,” she writes.

This week, the former prime minister David Cameron finally emerges from the cosy confines of his hand-built shepherd’s hut to deliver his memoirs. Sian, Richard and Claire talk to Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff about the history of political memoirs in the UK and what we can expect from Cameron’s.

Brian Catling tells Sian about the dark recesses of his imagination that have made him a cult fantasy novelist, while Richard quizzes Karen Olsson on whether maths and fiction are complementary – or complete opposites.

Attica Locke was born in Houston, Texas, in 1974, now lives in Los Angeles and is the author of five novels including Bluebird, Bluebird, a thriller that won both the Edgar and the Anthony award in 2018. Her new novel, Heaven, My Home, is the sequel to Bluebird, Bluebird and part of her Highway 59 series exploring race, power and freedom and featuring the black Texas ranger Darren Mathews; in the new novel, he is searching for missing nine-year-old Levi, who comes from a family of white supremacists. Locke is also a screenwriter and producer, including for Empire, When They See Us and Little Fires Everywhere.

What inspired you to write about a Texas ranger?
I’d been working in television and got to know how much fun it could be hanging out with a character over a series. I came up with this idea that it would be a Texas ranger. I like underdogs and outsiders and I found a way he could be both and that is his fundamental contradiction: Darren is an authoritarian figure, but at the same time he’s conflicted about it. When I ended Bluebird, Bluebird on a cliffhanger, I knew I had to come back and finish the story.

The writer on his new book about a camp for telekinetic children, being a national treasure and listening to rock music as he works

Born in Maine in 1947, Stephen King wrote his first published novel, Carrie, in 1974 and has spent the subsequent half-century documenting the monsters and heroes of small-town America. His rogues’ gallery of characters runs the gamut from killer clowns and demonic cars to psychotic fans and unhinged populist politicians.

His best-loved books include The Stand, It, The Dead Zone and Pet Sematary. King’s latest novel, The Institute, revolves around a totalitarian boot camp for telekinetic children. The kids check in – but don’t check out.

Winifred Watson’s daffy characters are inclined to cheerful antisemitism, at a time when Nazism was taking over Europe. Can we still enjoy it?

In last week’s article on Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, I started with a silly but sweet bit of innuendo. It seemed a good way to introduce a book that is, for most of its 233 pages, a light, frothy delight and widely loved as a feelgood read, so much so that it was chosen as our “fun” book for September.

I understand readers’ affection; for the most part, I share it. But there’s no getting around the feel-bad aspects of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, specifically – as a few of you have pointed out – some distinctly racist passages.

Traditionally ascribed to King Solomon, these rich allegorical verses are ripe with sensuous passion

1. I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.

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Welcome to this week’s blogpost. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.

Let’s start with a Canadian writer. No, not that one. Brooke Sherbrooke actually recommends Michael Crummey’s The Innocents:

Q: How can I wean myself off classics and on to something more contemporary?
Anna Morton, 49, Oxfordshire

A: Claire Armitstead, writer and critic, says:
There are three possible prescriptions for your addiction. The first is the methodone approach: find a substitute that satisfies, without actually feeding, the urge. Alan Hollinghurst writes in an elegant classical style about inheritance and ill-advised alliances, for all that they are predominantly gay. The Sparsholt Affair should do the trick, with its chronicle of art, love and shifting loyalties in the second half of the 20th century. It is, as one critic remarked, “embedded in tradition but entirely new in final effect”. If your taste veers towards the 18th century – replete with long dashes and semi-colons – Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill offers a deliriously funny pastiche that also bears its own witness to the birth of the New World. For a gentler remedy, try Michèle Roberts’s The Walworth Beauty, which evokes the spectre of Dickensian London through the story of a house and its centuries of residents, or Elizabeth Macneal’s The Doll Factory, a delicately drawn feminist art thriller involving the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, taxidermy and wombats.

To coincide with publication of For the Record, a round-up of the best career reckonings by politicians

Ken Clarke did it over late-night brandies and cigars. Tony Blair needed someone standing over him to make him knuckle down. David Cameron reportedly shut himself away in an excruciatingly tasteful shepherd’s hut to write For the Record. But grinding out a political memoir shouldn’t be an entirely painless process – the best involve an honest reckoning with mistakes as well as the inevitable recital of triumphs.

Some of the most interesting recent political autobiographies come from those who might have led their parties but never did, and thus are less obsessed with creating legacies. Alan Johnson’s extraordinary trilogy, starting with This Boy and ending with The Long and Winding Road, revealed a natural writer with a remarkable life story to tell (orphaned at 13, he was raised by his older sister and worked as a postman before falling into politics via the union movement). Harriet Harman’s A Woman’s Work concludes with a heartfelt admission that after years of mockery she didn’t have the confidence to run for the leadership, which raises important questions about who rises to the top of politics – regardless of whether you think her reticence was the Labour party’s loss or gain. Ken Clarke’s witty, gossipy Kind of Blue takes on a new poignancy now he has lost the whip. He never seems to doubt the Tory party was mad to keep rejecting his offer to lead it, but it gives intriguing glimpses of an alternative path for the Tories that might have unfolded had he beaten William Hague in 1997.

From Black Lives Matter to the south London modelling circuit, the tangled mess of real life provides plenty of raw material for YA fiction

Newspapers and novels – fact and fiction – are often seen as polar opposites. But as a writer of both, I have come to find that fiction and non-fiction are simply two sides of the same coin.

My YA Nordic thriller, The Sharp Edge of a Snowflake, was inspired by two of the biggest news stories of last year and the fearless women behind them. In 2018, the journalist Carole Cadwalladr revealed that a British company called Cambridge Analytica had harvested the personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent and used it to influence elections. Around the same time the #MeToo movement was gaining momentum. In 2018, the actor and activist Rose McGowan released her captivating book, Brave, in which she exposed the predatory misogyny within the film industry and told of how the most influential man in Hollywood sexually assaulted her.

After two years of careful reading, moving backwards through time, Robert McCrum has concluded his selection of the 100 greatest nonfiction books. Take a quick look at five centuries of great writing

• Robert McCrum reflects on his 100 greatest nonfiction books list
• The 100 best novels written in English: the full list
• What did Robert miss? Leave your thoughts in the comments

1. The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)
An engrossing account of the looming catastrophe caused by ecology’s “neighbours from hell” – mankind.

2. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2005)
This steely and devastating examination of the author’s grief following the sudden death of her husband changed the nature of writing about bereavement.

After two years of careful consideration, Robert McCrum has reached a verdict on his selection of the 100 greatest novels written in English. Take a look at his list

• Robert McCrum reflects on his choices
• One in five doesn’t represent over 300 years of women in literature: a response
• What is missing: readers’ alternative list
• The world’s 100 greatest novels of all time (2003)

1. The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (1678)

A story of a man in search of truth told with the simple clarity and beauty of Bunyan’s prose make this the ultimate English classic.

A new exhibition at the Library of Congress explores the fascinating evolution of visual storytelling styles in comic art – from panels in early newspapers to contemporary images of some of the most famous and funny characters in print. “Comic Art: 120 Years of Panels and Pages” opens Sept. 12 and will be on view for a year in the Graphic Arts Galleries of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building.

The exhibition draws from the Library’s extensive collection of comic art, which includes some of the earliest comics, including the first successful newspaper comic strip featuring Richard Outcault’s “The Yellow Kid,” early drawings of “Peanuts,” superheroes including Batman, Superman and the Incredible Hulk in modern comic books, and much more.

“The Yellow Kid,” first published in a panel in the New York World newspaper in 1895, is credited with sparking the rise of comics as a new American art form. By the middle of the 20th century, a growing number of diverse comic artists were examining their own life stories and commenting on culture and politics while expanding into graphic novels, fanzines and web comics. Comic art characters and narratives have also spread across film, television, books and marketing to reach even more people.

Click here for more information.

The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress has announced its schedule of fall conversations featuring renowned scholars and authors. All events will be held in the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C. The events are free and open to the public. However, tickets are suggested and available via Eventbrite.

Click here for more information.

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

Tickets are still available for the first three events in the new National Book Festival Presents series, to be held throughout the year at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.:

• Sept. 11 – Neil Patrick Harris on his new book, “The Magic Misfits.” Harris is an accomplished actor, producer, director, television host and author. The “Magic Misfits” series is his debut for middle school children. Click here for ticket information.
  
  
• Sept. 19 – Joy Harjo begins her formal duties as the new U.S. poet laureate with an inaugural reading of her work at the Library, including from her new book of poetry, “An American Sunrise.” Harjo is an enrolled member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, and her Native American identity is central to her work. Click here for ticket information.
  
  
• Sept. 24 – Edwidge Danticat on her new book, “Everything Inside: Stories.” Danticat, a prominent Haitian-American writer, is the author of numerous books, including “The Art of Death,” “Claire of the Sea Light” and “I’m Dying.” Click here for ticket information.

The advent of medical evacuations by air has saved the lives of countless American soldiers. From the Vietnam War to Iraq and Afghanistan, medevac aircraft and crews have provided rapid medical evacuations enabling crews to rapidly move wounded soldiers out of the front lines and into hospital facilities for treatment.

On Tuesday, Sept. 10, the Library of Congress Veterans History Project will bring together a panel of U.S. Army medevac pilots for an unprecedented discussion. The event will explore ways that Army medevac technology, safety, quality of care and culture has evolved over time.

Click here for more information.

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

Awarding-winning poet Joy Harjo will give her inaugural reading as the 23rd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 19. A member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, Harjo is the first Native American to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate.

Click here for more information.

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

Clockwise: Midori (photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders), Asko | Schönberg, Chucho Valdés (photo by Carol Friedman) and Jörg Widmann.

The Library of Congress is launching a spectacular and richly diverse 2019-2020 season with a concert by jazz icon and master pianist Chucho Valdés on Oct. 12, 2019. Marking the 95th season of the “Concerts from the Library of Congress” series is an impressive roster of more than 95 free events features classical music, jazz, pop, musical theater and dance. Concerts, lectures, film screenings and conversations with artists and scholars will connect concertgoers with the 25 million-plus treasures of the Library’s extraordinary music collections.

Click here for more information.

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

The Library of Congress National Book Festival will expand to include a yearlong series of events – to be known as National Book Festival Presents – featuring high-caliber authors, their books and related Library treasures beginning this fall, following the signature daylong festival on Aug. 31, the Library announced today.

Neil Patrick Harris, an accomplished actor, producer, television host, author and magician, will kick off the new series at the Library on Sept. 11 with his new book, “The Magic Misfits,” a bestselling series that is his debut for middle school children. In addition, on Sept. 24 prominent Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat will discuss her new book, “Everything Inside: Stories." Also, Joy Harjo begins her formal duties as the new U.S. poet laureate Sept. 19 with an inaugural reading of her work, including from her new book “An American Sunrise.”

Click here for more information.

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

The exclusive screening of the newly released GKIDS animated film “Okko’s Inn” will highlight the Library of Congress’ “Anime for All” series, which is being presented in conjunction with Otakon, Washington, D.C.’s annual convention celebrating Asian pop culture (anime, manga, music, movies, video games, etc.) and its fandom.

Click here for more information.

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

The Library of Congress and the Washington Performing Arts’ Mars Arts D.C. project will co-host the “Summer Concerts on the Lawn” outdoor musical performance series. The performances take place Thursday evenings at 7 p.m. from July 11 through Aug. 15 on the north lawn of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building, across the street from the U.S. Capitol. 

Tonight's performance features Saxophonist Brent Birckhead. Due to the anticipated inclement weather, the location of the performance has moved inside the Thomas Jefferson Building to the Coolidge Auditorium. 

The performances will be presented in conjunction with “LOC Summer Movies on the Lawn,” a six-film series that showcases iconic films from the Library’s National Film Registry. Each film screening will follow the musical performances at sundown.

Due to the expected inclement weather, the "Summer Movies on the Lawn" screening of Mary Poppins (1964) scheduled for tonight, July 11 has been rescheduled to Thursday, Aug. 22. 

Click here for more information.

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

Music and theatrical performances, an outdoor film screening, tours and gallery talks this summer will accompany the new exhibition “Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight For the Vote” at the Library of Congress, along with a full day of family activities during a Community Day on July 13 and a featured author at the National Book Festival on August 31.

Click here for more information.

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

 On Tuesday, July 16, the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, in conjunction with the Daniel K. Inouye Institute, invites the public to attend the 2019 Daniel K. Inouye Distinguished Lecture. The fifth and final event of the series will feature political strategists David Axelrod and Karl Rove, who will discuss leadership, public discourse, political parties and campaigns in a changing world. Former White House correspondent Ann Compton will moderate the conversation. The event begins at 6:30 p.m. in the Coolidge Auditorium in the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C. The event is free and open to the public, however, tickets are recommended and available at https://roveaxelrod.eventbrite.com.

The conversation will be live-tweeted by both the Kluge Center and the Inouye Institute at @KlugeCtr and @DKIInstitute with the hashtag #Inouye, and the event will be live-streamed on YouTube and Facebook to the University of Hawaii and for the general public.

Click here for more information.

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

The Library of Congress and the Washington Performing Arts’ Mars Arts D.C. project will co-host the “Summer Concerts on the Lawn” outdoor musical performance series. The performances take place Thursday evenings at 7 p.m. from July 11 through Aug. 15 on the north lawn of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building, across the street from the U.S. Capitol. The performances will be presented in conjunction with “LOC Summer Movies on the Lawn,” a six-film series that showcases iconic films from the Library’s National Film Registry. Each film screening will follow the musical performances at sundown.

Click here for more information.

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

Featured Events 

Friday, June 21
7 p.m.
Presented part of LGBTQ Pride Month.
James Madison Building- West Dining Room 

For a complete list of events happening at the Library between June 17 - June 22: Click here for more information.

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

Featured Event 

Thursday, June 13
6 p.m.
Changemaker Conversation 

Conversation with the Librarian: Women in Leadership

Please join the John W. Kluge Center and the Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden for a Changemaker Conversation with the Librarian: "Women in Leadership, Featuring Drew Gilpin Faust."

Drew Gilpin Faust is the 2018 recipient of the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity. As the first female president of Harvard University, Drew Gilpin Faust has led one of the most esteemed educational institutions in the world through a period of intense growth and transformation. 

This event will be livestreamed from both the Library's Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/libraryofcongress and the Library's YouTube site (with captions) at https://www.youtube.com/user/LibraryOfCongress.

For a complete list of events happening at the Library between June 10 - June 15: Click here for more information.

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

The Library of Congress will host the third annual “LOC Summer Movies on the Lawn” outdoor film festival this summer. The six-film series — which showcases iconic films from the Library’s National Film Registry — will be presented on Thursday evenings at sundown from July 11 through Aug. 15 on the north lawn of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building, across the street from the U.S. Capitol. 

Click here for more information.

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

On Thursday, June 13, the Library of Congress invites the public to attend a Changemaker Conversation with Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden: “Women in Leadership, Featuring Drew Gilpin Faust.” Faust is the 2018 recipient of the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity. As the first female president of Harvard University, Faust led one of the most esteemed educational institutions in the world through a period of intense growth and transformation.

Click here for more information.

Festival Lineup on Aug. 31 Features José Andrés, Barbara Kingsolver, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Among Dozens of Authors

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be among the featured speakers at the 2019 Library of Congress National Book Festival, along with dozens of best-selling authors, novelists, historians, poets and children’s writers, the Library announced today. This year’s festival will be held Saturday, Aug. 31, from 8:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C.

Ginsburg will discuss her book “My Own Words,” a collection of writings and speeches from throughout her life, discussing gender equality, the workings of the Supreme Court, interpreting the U.S. Constitution, being Jewish, and the law and lawyers in opera. The book, written with her authorized biographers, was Ginsburg’s first book since becoming a Supreme Court justice in 1993. It’s been called witty, engaging, serious and playful.

The 2019 festival will invite visitors to Explore America’s Changemakers, part of a yearlong initiative coinciding with a series of exhibitions, events and programs at the Library. Exhibitions opening this year will explore the fight for women’s voting rights and Rosa Parks’ groundbreaking role in civil rights history. Changemakers are everywhere. Everyday citizens become trailblazers and history makers, shaping America.

Among numerous festival programs dedicated to the theme of Changemakers, a special panel will feature new books on Winston Churchill by Andrew Roberts, Frederick Douglass by David Blight and visionary women including Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall and Alice Waters, by Andrea Barnet.

Click here for more information.

The Library of Congress will present a conversation with Singaporean American novelist and changemaker Kevin Kwan, known for his satirical novels “Crazy Rich Asians,” “China Rich Girlfriend” and “Rich People Problems,” who seeks to introduce contemporary Asian culture to an American audience. This event is presented as part of the Library’s Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month programming. 

Click here for more information.

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

Upcoming next week at the Library...

Monday, April 29
10 a.m.
SPECIAL EVENT
To recognize and promote this new Digital Collection as well as Children’s Book Week, local authors and illustrators will each read a select book from the historical collection out loud.

Tuesday, April 30
10 a.m.
Research Orientation 
Designed as a basic introduction for researchers and staff.  Tour the reading room and learn about our favorite databases.

This course is taught by our reference specialists and is designed as a basic introduction for researchers using the Newspaper & Current Periodical Reading Room's collections and resources. Each hour-long session includes a tour of the N&CPR Reading Room, procedures on how to locate and request materials, and using various equipment such as microfilm machines and scanners. 

Register by phone: (202) 707-5690 or online loc.gov/rr/news/classes.html.

11:30 a.m.
Science Talk
Dr. Noah Petro will discuss re-evaluating those samples in a local and regional context which provides improved understanding for what those samples represent. The lecture will celebrate "Appollo at 50" and is being presented part of the annual Earth and Space Science lecture series, now in its fourteenth year. The series is presented in partnership with the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Science, Technology, and Business Division at the Library of Congress. The talk will take place in the Pickford Theater, James Madison Memorial Building. 
Contact: (202) 707-1192. 

Wednesday, May 1
1:30 p.m. 
Law Day Event 
Join Law Librarian Jane Sánchez in a conversation with American Bar Association President, Bob Carlson on this year’s Law Day topic. The 2019 Law Day theme—Free Speech, Free Press, Free Society—focuses on these cornerstones of representative government and calls on us to understand and protect these rights to ensure, as the U.S. Constitution proposes, “the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.” 

This event will take place in room LJ119, Thomas Jefferson Building. Contact: (202) 707-1990. 

Friday, May 3
1 p.m.
ART SHOWCASE
A display and workshop with Chicano Artist Mario Torero. A political activist and muralist from the San Diego area, Torero has taught at several schools and colleges and his work has been exhibited around the world. He is the co-founder of the San Diego Commission of Arts and Culture, el Centro Cultural de la Raza, the Chicano Park Murals Outdoor Museum.  San Diego's Chicano Park, which contains a number of Torero's murals, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2016.  The Library of Congress has acquired more than 20 prints, drawings and posters by the artist dating from 1967 - 2016. 

Activities will take place inside the Hispanic Reading Room. Contact: (202) 707-5397. 

9 p.m. 
YOU CAN WATCH!

EMILIO & GLORIA ESTEFAN: THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS GERSHWIN PRIZE FOR POPULAR SONG, a PBS music special honoring Emilio and Gloria Estefan’s receipt of the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, will premiere nationwide Friday, May 3, 2019 at 9:00 p.m. ET on PBS, and on PBS.org and the PBS Video App (check local listings). The program will also be broadcast at a later date via the American Forces Network to American service men and women and civilians at U.S. Department of Defense locations around the world. This is the first time the Gershwin Prize has been awarded to a married couple or to musicians-songwriters of Hispanic descent.

Saturday, May 4
2 p.m.
Baseball Talk 
A conversation between Baseball Americana curator Susan Reyburn and Bill James, the baseball analyst who coined the term and popularized “sabermetrics,” the method of statistical analysis that has revolutionized Major League baseball. The talk will take place in room LJ119, Thomas Jefferson Building. 

Tickets are recommended but not required, and seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. Contact: (202) 707-8000. 

6:30 p.m.
Pre-concert Lecture
A conversation with David Plylar, PhD, Music Division. Tickets are not required. Contact: (202) 707-5502. 

8 p.m.
Concert
The dynamic sibling duo of Tanja and Christian Tetzlaff is joined by pianist Lars Vogt to form a superstar trio. Tickets are required via Eventbrite.

Planning Your Visit 

The Library of Congress is open Monday-Saturday, 8:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.

https://www.loc.gov/visit/ 

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

Upcoming next week at the Library...

Tuesday, April 23
10 a.m.
Research Orientation 
Designed as a basic introduction for researchers and staff.  Tour the reading room and learn about our favorite databases.

This course is taught by our reference specialists and is designed as a basic introduction for researchers using the Newspaper & Current Periodical Reading Room's collections and resources. Each hour-long session includes a tour of the N&CPR Reading Room, procedures on how to locate and request materials, and using various equipment such as microfilm machines and scanners. 

Register by phone: (202) 707-5690 or online loc.gov/rr/news/classes.html.

4 p.m.
Lecture 
Join Bruce Clarke, Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, as he moderates a discussion on the rich cultural impact of the photo on the US space program and the environmental movement. "Earthrise: Celebrating the Photograph that Changed (How we View) the World" will take place in room LJ119. The event is free, but tickets are required, and there may be special restrictions. Click here for more information and to secure your ticket. Contact: (202) 707-3302. 

Wednesday, April 24
Noon
Folklife Talk
In his talk, folklorist and ethnomusicologist Langston Collin Wilkins will discuss how "screw" and "slab" combine form a unique local tradition that has affirmed and empowered working class Black Houstonians across several generations."Street Folk: Hip Hop, Car Culture, and Black Life in Houston, TX" will take place in the Whittall Pavilion. Contact: (202) 707-1743. 

5 p.m. 
Lecture 
Author and diplomat James Ford Cooper worked at the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki during the Cold War, first as Political Counselor and later as Deputy Chief of Mission. He was subsequently Director of the State Department Office of Northern European Affairs. Mr. Cooper’s discussion about Finland and the Cold War is on an important topic given the current international political situation. "On the Finland Watch: An American Diplomat in Finland during the Cold War" will take place in the Whittall Pavilion. Contact: tspi@loc.gov.

Thursday, April 25
2 p.m. 
Symposium 
The U.S. Copyright Office will celebrate World Intellectual Property Day with a special event. This year’s theme, as announced by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), is “Reach for Gold: IP and Sports.”

The Copyright Office’s program will explore the unique and sometimes surprising relationship between sports and copyright. We will look at different points at which sports and copyright intersect, including how people watch games from home, the various ways athletes work with copyright to develop merchandise and more, and the burgeoning world of esports.

Featured speakers include Derrick Heggans, founder and CEO of Global Sports and Entertainment Business Academy (GSB Academy); Delara Derakhshani, counsel, tech policy, Entertainment Software Association; and Robert Garrett, senior counsel, Arnold & Porter.

The event will also be live-streamed on the Copyright Office YouTube site (with captions) at youtube.com/uscopyrightoffice.

“Reach for Gold: IP and Sports” will take place in the Coolidge Auditorium. Contact: (202) 707-0956. 

4 p.m.
Lecture 
Stephen Houston, Dupee Family Professor of Social Science, Brown University, and Library of Congress Kislak Chair for the Study of the History and Cultures of the Early Americas, will discuss ancient Maya warfare and the meanings of conflict and its aftermath.

Drawing on recent explorations, Prof. Houston will showcase the lidar technology now revolutionizing the study of Pre-Columbian civilizations.

"Flint, Shield, and Fire: Exploring Ancient Maya Warfare" will take place in room LJ119. The event is free, but tickets are required, and there may be special restrictions. Click here for more information and to secure your ticket.

A reception will follow. Guests are also invited to visit the “Exploring the Early Americas” exhibit, which displays artifacts from the Jay I. Kislak Collection at the Library of Congress. View the collection online here.

Contact: (202) 707-3302. 

Friday, April 26
1 p.m.
Gallery Talk
Join members of the Library's Preservation Directorate as they discuss conservation and preservation techniques that have been used to restore, refresh and provide long-term access to unmatched collections by evaluating, managing, and responding to the risks and challenges associated with the wide variety of baseball-related materials in the Library’s care.

Experts will be on hand to provide tips on caring for your artifacts and ephemera. Presented part of the Library's 2019 Preservation Week activities. 

"Preserving the Game" will be held inside the Baseball Americana exhibition. Contact: (202) 707-1120.

Saturday, April 27
10:30 a.m.
Led by Young Reader's Center volunteers and staff, the Story Time will focus on books such as My Pen by Christopher Myers, I Have an Idea! by Herve Tullet, The Dot by Peter Reynolds, and Niko Draws a Feeling by Bob Raczka, all of which center on kids taking their ideas and making them into creative works. A puppet show will feature characters working together to create something, debating on who owns the work (children will interactively take sides), and then resolving the conflict through joint ownership and sharing. Songs will be on the themes of writing, drawing, and making ideas into creative products.

This event is great for families with children from 5 to 10 years old. Taking place inside the Library's Young Readers Center. 

This event is an adjunct to the Copyright Matters lecture that will be held April 25, the Copyright Office’s official recognition of World Intellectual Property Day. 

The event is free, but due to expected demand, tickets are recommended, and there may be special restrictions. Tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis. Click here for more information and to secure your ticket. Entry is not guaranteed. Contact: (202) 707-1950. 

2 p.m.
It is exceptionally rare that we have the opportunity to hear a previously unknown work by a major composer, but that is precisely what the Library will offer in its presentation of the piano/vocal version of Franz Liszt’s Sardanapalo. 

The concert is free, but tickets are required, and there may be special restrictions. Click here for more information and to secure your ticket.

Pre-Concert Lecture will be held at 12:30 p.m. in the Whittall Pavilion. Tickets are not required. 

Contact: (202) 707-5502. 

Planning Your Visit 

The Library of Congress is open Monday-Saturday, 8:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.

https://www.loc.gov/visit/ 

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

]

Award-winning author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o presents his recently released publication titled, “Minutes of Glory And Other Stories” at the Library of Congress.

Click here for more information.

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

Walt Whitman in his younger years, as shown in this 1854 engraving by Samuel Hollyer used in the 1855 first edition of "Leaves of Grass." Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The Library of Congress will celebrate the 200^thanniversary of American poet and changemaker Walt Whitman’s birthday in spring 2019 with a series of exhibits, public programs and a digital crowdsourcing campaign to showcase the Library’s unparalleled collections of Whitman’s writings and artifacts.

Click here for more information.

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

Upcoming next week at the Library...

For a complete list of events happening next week, visit the Library's Public Event Calendar. 

Planning Your Visit 

The Library of Congress is open Monday-Saturday, 8:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.

https://www.loc.gov/visit/ 

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

Photo Credit: Benda, Wladyslaw T. (Wladyslaw Theodore), 1873-1948., artist

This month, the Library of Congress will kick off the annual Earth and Space Science lecture series, now in its fourteenth year. The series is presented in partnership with the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Science, Technology, and Business Division at the Library of Congress.

The first lecture of the series will be held on Tuesday, April 30 and will celebrate the 50 year anniversary of the Apollo mission.

Click here for more information.

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress invites the public to attend two events hosted by its renowned scholars in residence in April.

Click here for more information.

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

In celebration of Constitution Day, the Library of Congress is launching a new website – constitution.congress.gov – for the Constitution Annotated, the authoritative source for how the Supreme Court has interpreted the nation’s governing document over the years.

With advanced search tools and a modern user-friendly interface, the new website makes the 3,000 pages of the Constitution Annotated fully searchable and accessible for the first time to online audiences – including Congress, legal scholars, law students and anyone interested in U.S. constitutional law.

Click here for more information.

The Library of Congress has restored and made available online the Gandhara Scroll, a manuscript dating back to around the first century B.C., that offers insight into the initial years of Buddhism. The scroll is one of the world’s oldest Buddhist manuscripts.

The scroll originates from Gandhara, an ancient Buddhist region located in what is now the northern border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The scroll tells the story of buddhas who came before and after Siddhartha Gautama, the sage who reached enlightenment under the Bodhi tree in eastern India around the fifth century B.C. and the religious leader on whose teachings Buddhism was founded.

Click here for more information.

The papers of President James A. Garfield, who was assassinated in the first year of his short presidency, have been digitized and are now available online for the first time from the Library of Congress.

The Garfield collection includes approximately 80,000 items, mostly dating from 1850 to 1881. The collection is online at: loc.gov/collections/james-a-garfield-papers/about-this-collection.

Garfield’s papers include correspondence, diaries, speeches, records of his Civil War military service, legal records, genealogical material, college notebooks, tributes, scrapbooks and other materials relating to Garfield’s life, career and death. Subjects in the collection include Ohio and national politics, the disputed election of 1876, tariffs and national finance, Garfield’s family life, as well as details of the shooting of President Garfield at a Washington, D.C., train station, his medical care and the national drama surrounding his death.

Click here for more information.

The Library of Congress Web Archiving Program has updated the United States Elections Web Archive to release content archived during the 2016 U.S. Elections, as well as some campaign websites from special elections in 2015 and 2017. As with prior election releases, this release contains campaign sites archived weekly prior to the elections, documenting sites associated with presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial elections. The sites archived in this collection typically include social media channels as well, in order to provide a fuller representation of how candidates presented themselves via the Internet to the electorate.

Just in time for the 100^th anniversary of Children’s Book Week, Children's Book Selections brings together a sampling of digitized children’s books, including rare and beloved titles, that reflect three general themes: Learning to Read, Reading to Learn, and Reading for Fun. The presentation includes both classic works that are still read by children today, and lesser-known treasures drawn from the Library’s extensive collection of historically significant children’s books. It is accompanied by a new guide to help researchers find historical children’s materials on the Library’s web site: Children's Book Selections: Resource Guide

In celebration of the Persian New Year, also known as Nowruz, the Library of Congress has digitized and made available online for the first time the Rare Persian-Language Manuscript Collection, which sheds light on scientific, religious, philosophical and literary topics that are highly valued in the Persian speaking lands.

This collection, including 150 manuscripts with some dating back to the 13^th century, also reflects the diversity of religious and confessional traditions within the Persian culture.

From the 10^th century to the present, Persian became the cultural language for a large region stretching from West Asia to Central and South Asia. Today, Persian is the native language spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and some regions of Central and South Asia and the Caucasus.

Click here for more information.

The papers of suffragist and political strategist Carrie Chapman Catt, including her time as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, have been digitized and are now available online for the first time from the Library of Congress.

The collection includes about 9,500 items dating primarily from 1890 to 1920 as Catt helped lead the fight for a federal suffrage amendment. The Catt Papers are online at: loc.gov/collections/carrie-chapman-catt-papers/about-this-collection/.

Click here for more information.

Women's Suffrage in Sheet Music

The Library of Congress just released Women's Suffrage in Sheet Music, a selection of more than 200 pieces of sheet music spanning the years 1838-1923, over half of which highlight women's emerging voices and suffrage efforts. The collection includes published rally songs and songsters written and compiled by notable composers and suffragists, as well as music manuscripts submitted for copyright deposit by everyday citizens. Anti-suffragists raised voices in song as well, and popular music of the era echoed anti-suffrage sentiments of the day with specific references to the movement. Read more and browse the entire collection or take a quick look at the fascinating cover art. 

Joe Smith Collection

The Joe Smith Collection provides recordings of interviews conducted by Smith, a retired music executive, between 1986 and 1988, with musicians, producers, and other music industry icons. He spoke with everyone from Aerosmith to Yoko Ono about different genres of music, the industry, and how it had changed. The contributors are a virtual who’s who from the mid-to-late 20th century and the discussions provide a glimpse behind the curtain.

Lowell Folklife Project

The Lowell Folklife Project from the American Folklife Center (AFC) is the fifth of AFC’s ethnographic field projects to be digitized in full and presented online. The collection is the result of a year-long study conducted between 1987-1988 by AFC fieldworkers. The collection documents contemporary ethnic neighborhoods, occupations, and community life related to the history of industrialization in Lowell, Massachusetts. So much rich material: French, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, Greek, Cambodian, Irish, Polish, Laotian, Vietnamese and Italian communities; work, weddings, sports, parades and festivals; music, winemaking, teens hanging out, and Jack Kerouac’s birthplace are all here.

The Library of Congress has acquired and made available online the Omar Ibn Said Collection, which includes the only known surviving slave narrative written in Arabic in the United States. In 1831, Omar Ibn Said, a wealthy and highly educated man who was captured in West Africa and brought to the United States as a slave, wrote a 15-page autobiography describing his experiences.

Read more about the extraordinary Omar Ibn Said Collection.

Happy New Year! We have new collections and resources to tell you about in this update. 

Occupational Folklife Project

The Occupational Folklife Project began in 2010 as a multi-year project to document the culture of contemporary American workers during an era of economic and social transition. To date, fieldworkers have recorded more than 600 interviews with workers in many areas. The interviews feature workers discussing their current jobs and formative work experiences, training, challenges, rewards, and aspirations. The latest set of interviews added to the site features home health care workers. For example, Nargiza Turanova describes her experiences as a home care worker, what caregivers discuss when they talk to each other, and her job satisfaction.

Nargiza Turanova, home health care worker.

Federal Theatre Project

This collection for theater lovers is now available in a much improved format and features stage and costume designs, photographs, posters, playbills, and playscripts from 1935-1939 including productions of Macbeth and The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus as staged by Orson Welles. 

   
Costume designs from Macbeth and A Christmas Carol.

116th Congress

Did you know that the Library of Congress manages Congress.gov, the official site for U.S. legislation? On this site you can track legislation and find current members of Congress.

Thanks for reading and happy browsing!

The Library’s resolution for 2019 is to offer more opportunities to engage lifelong learners like you with our unique treasures and programs. Make your gift before we close the books on 2018!

Your gift supports FREE exhibitions, events, programs, and activities that connect millions of people across the nation and around the world with our unique collections, experts, and services.

The Library of Congress is your library, your gateway to understanding the world. There is so much to discover, not only the nation’s memory, but the world’s—information from all corners of the earth, in more than 470 languages. With millions of items available online, you can access the Library’s treasures from anywhere and connect with us in ways that are personally relevant and valuable.

The Library’s resolution for 2019 is to offer more opportunities to engage lifelong learners like you with our unique treasures and programs. Make your gift before we close the books on 2018!

Your gift can:

• Inspire curiosity in children to read more books and reflect on the power of books to change their lives
• Ignite thoughtful conversation among current and future generations of students and scholars
• Illuminate the minds of people like you who use the resources of the nation's Library here in Washington or via the Internet in their own homes and communities

With the help of supporters like you, we can spark the imagination of people of all ages with programs that open the Library’s doors wide to all.

Join us TODAY by making your 2018 tax-deductible donation, and together we’ll spark a lifelong adventure of learning.

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced today the annual selection of 25 of America’s most influential motion pictures to be inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress because of their cultural, historic and aesthetic importance to the nation’s film heritage. These films range from Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” and Paul Newman’s unforgettable “Hud” to the opulent musical “My Fair Lady” and the rocking sounds of “Monterey Pop.” Selection to the registry will help ensure that these films will be preserved for all time.

Read more about this year's selections and find out how we're celebrating the 30th year of the National Film Registry!

Watch Dr. Hayden introduce the 2018 registry and see film clips on our YouTube channel.

Hello subscribers! We have a few quick updates for your weekend browsing. 

Watch: A Conversation with Rod Serling

In our last update we announced the National Screening Room which makes rare movies available on the Library's website and on our YouTube channel. We are still discovering treasures from this collection like this conversation with Rod Serling from 1968 in which he discusses television as a medium for literary writers and artists. Check it out.

In related film news, on Wednesday, December 12, we will announce the 2018 National Film Registry selections. We've been highlighting films previously added to the registry as we get ready for the big reveal! 

World War I: 400 Volumes of WWI Newspaper Content are Now Online

Read all about this extraordinary collection of newspaper front pages, illustrated feature articles, editorial cartoons, and more in a post from our Headlines & Heroes blog. You can also go straight to the collection and start exploring yourself. 

Thanks for reading! Let us know if you have any feedback at news@loc.gov. 

The day has arrived—#GivingTuesday—a day when your gift makes a difference and a statement.

The Library of Congress depends on donations from people like you to produce exhibitions, events, programs, and activities that connect millions of people across the nation and around the world with our unique collections, experts, and services.

Gifts bring the Library to life with music, dance, film, sound, culture, scholarship, research, discussions and ideas. Your gift, no matter the size, will support diverse programs that are entirely FREE for everyone to enjoy, and will make the Library’s treasures and services more accessible.

Help spread the word today and encourage your friends and family to make a gift to the nation’s library, your gateway to understanding the world!

#GivingTuesday is a global day of giving fueled by the power of social media and collaboration.

This year is the second year the Library of Congress is participating in #GivingTuesday—a global giving movement. On Tuesday, November 27, we are asking you to make a gift to spark a lifelong adventure of learning.

Your gift supports FREE exhibitions, events, programs, and activities that connect millions of people across the nation and around the world with our unique collections, experts, and services.

The Library of Congress is your library, your gateway to understanding the world. There is so much to discover, not only the nation’s memory, but the world’s—information from all corners of the earth, in more than 470 languages. With millions of items available online, you can access the Library’s treasures from anywhere and connect with us in ways that are personally relevant and valuable.

Save the Date to Make Your Gift!

Celebrated on the Tuesday following Thanksgiving (in the U.S.) and the widely recognized shopping events Black Friday and Cyber Monday, #GivingTuesday kicks off the charitable season, when many focus on their holiday and end-of-year giving.

Hello subscribers. We have big news to share with you in this update!

crowd.loc.gov

We recently launched crowd.loc.gov, an exciting new crowdsourcing project. Volunteer to transcribe, tag, or review documents to make them searchable for everyone and get a front row seat to history while you’re at it. Choose which project to work on -- letters sent to Abraham Lincoln or Clara Barton's diaries among others. If you’re a baseball fan you can examine Branch Rickey’s scouting reports to see how he sized up players. Who knows what you’ll discover? Follow the project on Twitter at Crowd_LOC.  

Watch Live on Nov. 19 at 10 a.m. ET: Tune in for a livestreamed event to commemorate the 155^th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address and to kick off the #LettersToLincoln transcription challenge. Watch the #LettersToLincoln event on YouTube or on loc.gov.

Watch Movies on loc.gov in the National Screening Room

The National Screening Room showcases the riches of the Library’s moving image collection and makes otherwise unavailable movies, both copyrighted and in the public domain, freely accessible to viewers worldwide. The films range from fiction and non-fiction to home movies to newsreels, covering a period of more than a hundred years. More content will be added every month. Watch home movies from George and Ira Gershwin to get started!

Personal Snapshots: Picturing the Vietnam War

The Library’s Veterans History Project (VHP) just launched “Personal Snapshots: Picturing the Vietnam War.” This curated presentation features images of the Vietnam War from those who served in it. One of the collections is from G. Mike Mabe, a self-described “low-rank infantryman” who served with the 101st Airborne Division. Mabe’s photographs depict scenes of his everyday life in Vietnam: pulling kitchen patrol duty, interactions with Vietnamese civilians and eating c-rations on the hood of his jeep.

Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories

This collection is now available in a new and improved format. These extraordinary recordings of former slaves took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine states. Twenty-three interviewees discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom. The individuals documented in this presentation have much to say about living as African Americans from the 1870s to the 1930s, and beyond.

Mary Church Terrell Papers

The papers of educator, lecturer, suffragist, and civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) are now online! The collection consists of approximately 13,000 documents and includes diaries, correspondence, speeches and writings primarily focusing on Terrell's career as an advocate of women's rights and equal treatment of African Americans. You can explore Mary Church Terrell's life and work further by helping to transcribe her papers in our new crowdsourcing project!

What would you like to see in these "New on the Web" updates? Let us know at news@loc.gov.

Ever wanted to explore the Library’s collections but didn't know where to start? Join us and Library of Congress Innovator-in-Residence Jer Thorp in a Twitter takeover as he takes a #SerendipityRun through the collections on our Twitter account from 1-4 PM ET, Thursday, November 8.

What’s a #SerendipityRun? Click here to find out – and join us this Thursday!

The largest collection of the papers of President Theodore Roosevelt, documenting his extraordinary career in the White House and as vice president, governor of New York, and as a naturalist, writer and reformer, has been digitized and is now available online from the Library of Congress.

The digitization of the massive collection comes just before the 160^th anniversary of Roosevelt’s birthday. The nation’s 26^th president was born Oct. 27, 1858, and died nearly 100 years ago on Jan. 6, 1919.

The Roosevelt papers are one of the largest presidential collections held by the Library, consisting of about 276,000 documents and comprising about 461,000 images. It includes letters, speeches, executive orders, scrapbooks, diaries, White House reception records and press releases of his administration, as well as family records.

Click here for more information.

Reports from the Library’s Congressional Research Service — objective information on policy, regulation & important issues before Congress — are now available to the public online.

Click here for more information.

The Veterans History Project (VHP) in the Library of Congress today launched a website feature, titled “Cold War Dispatches: Service Stories from 1947-1991,” as part of its “Experiencing War” online series. The feature highlights the stories of veterans who served in non-combatant roles within the military between 1947 and 1991, commonly referred to as the Cold War era.

Click here for more information.

Writings and personal records of the founder of American landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted, known for his work on New York’s Central Park, the U.S. Capitol grounds in Washington, the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina and many other landscapes, have been digitized and are now available online from the Library of Congress. The archive was digitized to serve as a resource in advance of the bicentennial of Olmsted’s birth, which will be celebrated with partner organizations in 2022.

Click here for more information.

Home to one of the most prominent North Korean collections in the Western Hemisphere, the Library of Congress has rolled out the North Korean Serials Database, an online indexing tool that offers researchers enhanced access to periodicals and articles published as far back as the 1940s.

Click here for more information.

Attention subscriber to bulletin services from the Library of Congress:

As you may be aware, on May 25, 2018, the EU General Data Protection Regulation EU (2016)/679 (GDPR) came into force in all EU member states. The GDPR applies to “personal data,” meaning any information relating to an identifiable person who can be directly or indirectly identified by reference to an identifier. It requires that personal data be processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner, and that personal data be collected for specified and legitimate purposes.

For those who subscribe to the Library’s email and RSS bulletins, the Library of Congress collects email addresses which can include personal data. The Library of Congress relies on its legitimate interests to process this data so that we can keep you up to date with developments for the topics to which you subscribe. The Library does not make any other use of this data.

The Library respects your personal data and takes care to maintain its confidentiality. You have the right to unsubscribe from the Library’s e-mail newsletters and alerts at any time. You can manage your subscriptions by clicking “Subscriber Preferences” in the box at the bottom of this email.

If you have any questions about the Library’s data privacy policy, please email the Library: ogc@loc.gov

The papers of President Woodrow Wilson, from his time in the White House and as a scholar and governor of New Jersey, have been digitized and are now available online from the Library of Congress 100 years after his presidency.

Click here for more information.

A poem by Tom Wayman from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Theodore Roethke from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Jason Bredle from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by William E. Stafford from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Leanne O'Sullivan from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Mary Cornish from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Ron Koertge from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Brian Turner from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Yusef Komunyakaa from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by May Swenson from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Natalie Diaz from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Tracy K. Smith from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Billy Collins from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Dorianne Laux from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

This is the final Poetry 180 poem of the season. This service will resume distributing Poetry 180 poems on Tuesday, September 3, 2019.

A poem by Laura Kasischke from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Phillis Levin from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Robert Francis from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Anna Denise from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Andrea Hollander from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Jeffrey Harrison from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Lisel Mueller from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Major Jackson from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Dana Gioia from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Linda Gregg from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by R. S. Gwynn from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

Tuesday, September 24, 7:00 PM
NATIONAL BOOK FESTIVAL PRESENTS: EDWIDGE DANTICAT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author Edwidge Danticat will discuss her new short story collection, Everything Inside. This event is free and open to the public. Free tickets required; signed copies are also available for pre-purchase. Presented in partnership with National Book Festival Presents.

Location: Coolidge Auditorium, ground floor, Thomas Jefferson Building
Contact: specialevents@loc.gov

Wednesday, September 11, 7:00 PM
LIFE OF A POET: CARMEN GIMÉNEZ SMITH

Poet Carmen Giménez Smith will discuss her work with Ron Charles, book critic at The Washington Post. This event is free and open to the public. Reservations are required. Co-sponsored by the Hill Center and The Washington Post.

Location: Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital (921 Pennsylvania Ave. SE)
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please visit the Poetry and Literature Center's website for more information on upcoming events.

Thursday, September 19, 7:00 PM
POET LAUREATE INAUGURAL READING

Joy Harjo will give her inaugural reading as 23rd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. She will be joined by Howard Cloud and Robert Muller in a special musical performance. Free tickets required. Book sales and signing to follow. Co-sponsored by Library of Congress National Book Festival Presents.

Location: Coolidge Auditorium, ground floor, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please visit the Poetry and Literature Center's website for more information.

Saturday, August 3, 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
2019 ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE FESTIVAL

Four events at the Library of Congress celebrating Asian American literature during second day of city-wide, three-day festival (read full schedule of events):

• 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM: Novelist Monique Truong gives a personal tour of Asian American literature through a mix of social/intellectual history, anecdotes, and short readings by writers both celebrated and overlooked.
• 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM: Poets Jennifer Chang and Cathy Park Hong uncover the work of lesser-known senior poets who have importantly shaped Asian American literary culture. Mini-lectures will be followed by readings of poets’ own work inspired by these secret histories.  
• 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM: Poet Arthur Sze gives a personal tour of Asian American literature through a mix of social/intellectual history, anecdotes, and short readings by writers both celebrated and overlooked.
• 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM: Poets Kazim Ali and Ching-In Chen uncover the work of lesser-known senior poets who have importantly shaped Asian American literary culture. Mini-lectures will be followed by readings of poets’ own work inspired by these secret histories.

Free tickets strongly encouraged. Books sold before/after day-long event; book signing after day-long event only. Co-sponsored by Library of Congress Asian Division and Asian American Association. Presented in partnership with Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center and the Poetry Foundation.

Location: Room 119, First Floor, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Saturday, August 3, 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
2019 ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE FESTIVAL

Four events at the Library of Congress celebrating Asian American literature during second day of city-wide, three-day festival (read full schedule of events):

• 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM: Novelist Monique Truong gives a personal tour of Asian American literature through a mix of social/intellectual history, anecdotes, and short readings by writers both celebrated and overlooked.
• 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM: Poets Jennifer Chang and Cathy Park Hong uncover the work of lesser-known senior poets who have importantly shaped Asian American literary culture. Mini-lectures will be followed by readings of poets’ own work inspired by these secret histories.  
• 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM: Poet Arthur Sze gives a personal tour of Asian American literature through a mix of social/intellectual history, anecdotes, and short readings by writers both celebrated and overlooked.
• 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM: Poets Kazim Ali and Ching-In Chen uncover the work of lesser-known senior poets who have importantly shaped Asian American literary culture. Mini-lectures will be followed by readings of poets’ own work inspired by these secret histories.

Free tickets strongly encouraged. Books sold before/after day-long event; book signing after day-long event only. Co-sponsored by Library of Congress Asian Division and Asian American Association. Presented in partnership with Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center and the Poetry Foundation.

Location: Room 119, First Floor, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Saturday, June 8, 1:00 PM
RHYMING THE ARCHIVES: YOUTH POETRY SHOWCASE

Members of the Washington, D.C. Youth Slam Team will perform poems inspired by recordings, photographs, and field notes from the American Folklife Center archive. Free tickets recommended. Co-sponsored by the Library of Congress American Folklife Center and presented in partnership with Split This Rock.

Location: LJ-119, first floor, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Monday, June 3, 2:30 PM - 5:00 PM
WALT WHITMAN OPEN HOUSE

To celebrate the 200th birthday of Walt Whitman, the Library of Congress will present an open house featuring rarely seen collection items including draft poems, artistic renderings, and rare editions of Leaves of Grass. Filmmaker Haydn Reiss will also screen the short film “Walt Whitman: Citizen Poet,” featuring 22nd U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith and 8th U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass. This event is free and open to the public; tickets are not required. Co-sponsored by the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Rare Book & Special Collections Division, Music Division, Prints & Photographs Division, Serials and General Collections Division, and presented in partnership with Zinc Films, the Poetry Foundation, the Whitman 200 Festival, and Folger Poetry.

Location: LJ-119, first floor, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please visit the Poetry and Literature Center's website for more information on upcoming events.

Monday, June 3, 2:30 PM - 5:00 PM
WALT WHITMAN OPEN HOUSE

To celebrate the 200th birthday of Walt Whitman, the Library of Congress will present an open house featuring rarely seen collection items including draft poems, artistic renderings, and rare editions of Leaves of Grass. Filmmaker Haydn Reiss will also screen the short film “Walt Whitman: Citizen Poet,” featuring 22nd U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith and 8th U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass. Co-sponsored by the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Music Division, Prints and Photographs Division, Serials and General Collections Division, and presented in partnership with Zinc Films, the Poetry Foundation, and the Whitman 200 Festival.  

Location: LJ-119, first floor, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Saturday, June 8, 1:00 PM
RHYMING THE ARCHIVES: YOUTH POETRY SLAM

Members of the Washington, D.C. Youth Slam Team will perform poems inspired by recordings, photographs, and field notes from the American Folklife Center archive. Co-sponsored by the Library of Congress American Folklife Center and presented in partnership with Split This Rock.

Location: LJ-119, first floor, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Tuesday, May 14, 7:00 PM
LIFE OF A POET: DIANE SEUSS

Poet Diane Seuss will discuss her work with Ron Charles, book critic at The Washington Post. This event is free and open to the public. Reservations are required. Co-sponsored by the Hill Center and The Washington Post.

Location: Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital (921 Pennsylvania Ave. SE)
Contact: (202) 707-5394

For more information about upcoming events, please visit the Poetry and Literature Center's website.

Saturday, May 11, 4:00 PM
WORDPLAY FESTIVAL: NATASHA TRETHEWEY IN CONVERSATION

19th U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey will discuss her work with Rob Casper, head of the Poetry and Literature Center. Tickets required. Book sales and signing to follow. Presented in partnership with The Loft Wordplay Festival.

Location: Guthrie Theater, Dowling Studio, 818 S 2nd St, Minneapolis, MN 55415
Contact: loft@loft.org

Tuesday, May 14, 7:00 PM
LIFE OF A POET: DIANE SEUSS

Poet Diane Seuss will discuss her work with Ron Charles, book critic at The Washington Post. This event is free and open to the public. Reservations are required. Co-sponsored by the Hill Center and The Washington Post.

Location: Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital (921 Pennsylvania Ave. SE), Washington, DC 20003 
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please visit the Poetry and Literature Center's website for more information. 

Monday, April 15, 7:00 PM
AMERICAN CELEBRATION: POET LAUREATE CLOSING EVENT

22nd U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith will celebrate the conclusion of her laureateship in a conversation with state, city and county poets laureate Jeanetta Calhoun Mish (Oklahoma), Kealoha (Hawaii), Adrian Matejka (Indiana), Tina Chang (Brooklyn, NY) and Vogue Robinson (Clark County, NV). Conversation will be moderated by Jennifer Benka, president and executive director of the Academy of American Poets. Book sales and signing to follow. Free tickets required. Presented in partnership with the Academy of American Poets.

Location: Coolidge Auditorium, ground floor, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please visit the Poetry and Literature Center's website for more event information. 

Monday, April 15, 7:00 PM
AMERICAN CELEBRATION: POET LAUREATE CLOSING EVENT

22nd U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith will celebrate the conclusion of her laureateship in a conversation with state, city and county poets laureate Jeanetta Calhoun Mish (Oklahoma), Kealoha (Hawaii), Adrian Matejka (Indiana), Tina Chang (Brooklyn, NY) and Vogue Robinson (Clark County, NV). Conversation will be moderated by Jennifer Benka, president and executive director of the Academy of American Poets. Book sales and signing to follow. Free tickets required. Presented in partnership with the Academy of American Poets.

Location: Coolidge Auditorium, ground floor, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please visit the Poetry and Literature Center's website for more event information. 

Thursday, April 4, 6:30 PM
NATIONAL YOUTH POET LAUREATE COMMENCEMENT

The 2019 National Youth Poet Laureate will be announced. Regional Youth Poets Laureate Kara Jackson (Chicago, IL), Haviland Nona Gai Whiting (Nashville, TN), Jackson Neal (Houston, TX) Azura Tyabji (Seattle, WA), and Maren Wright-Kerr (Baltimore, MD) will participate. Event will be hosted by Mahogany L. Browne and feature Washington, D.C./Prince George's County Youth Poets Laureate. Book sales and signing to follow. Free tickets required. Presented in partnership with Urban Word.

Location: Mumford Room, sixth floor, James Madison Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Monday, April 8, 5:00 PM
INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE: ANA LUÍSA AMARAL

Poet Ana Luísa Amaral will share her work and participate in a moderated discussion with Talía Guzmán-González, Luso-Brazilian Specialist in the Hispanic Division. Book sales and signing to follow. Co-sponsored by the Hispanic Division.

Location: Hispanic Division Reading Room, second floor, Thomas Jefferson Building, LJ-240 <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5397

Monday, April 15, 7:00 PM
AMERICAN CELEBRATION: POET LAUREATE CLOSING EVENT

22nd U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith will celebrate the conclusion of her laureateship in a conversation with state, city and county poets laureate Jeanetta Calhoun Mish (Oklahoma), Kealoha (Hawai'i), Adrian Matejka (Indiana), Tina Chang (Brooklyn, NY), and Vogue Robinson (Clark County, NV). Conversation will be moderated by Jennifer Benka, president and executive director of the Academy of American Poets. Book sales and signing to follow. Free tickets required. Presented in partnership with the Academy of American Poets.

Location: Coolidge Auditorium, ground floor, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Tuesday, April 23, 7:00 PM
POETRY OFF THE SHELF: NATASHA TRETHEWEY & CHARLES WRIGHT

19th U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey and 20th U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Wright will read and discuss their prize-winning work. Free tickets are first come, first served. Co-sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.

Location: Poetry Foundation, 61 W Superior St, Chicago, IL 60654
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Monday, April 29, 6:30 PM
LIBRARIAN AND LAUREATE: A CONVERSATION

Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Kevin Young will lead a conversation between 22nd U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith and Librarian of Congress Carla D. Hayden. Free tickets are not required but strongly recommended; ticketed guests are given priority. Co-sponsored by Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Location: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Langston Hughes Auditorium (515 Malcolm X Blvd, New York, NY 10037)
Contact: (202) 707-5394; nyplevents@nypl.org

For more information about upcoming events, visit the Poetry and Literature Center's website.

Wednesday, March 20, 7:00 PM
CLIMATE CHANGE, NATURE, AND THE WRITER’S EYE

Science writer Peter Brannen and internationally acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh will join 2018 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction winner Annie Proulx to discuss pressing issues of environmental change and a writer’s responsibilities to them. Book sales and signing to follow. Free tickets required.

Location: Coolidge Auditorium, ground floor, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

For more event information, visit the Poetry and Literature Center's website.

Thursday, March 14, 12:00 PM
CONVERSATIONS WITH AFRICAN POETS AND WRITERS: MAKENA ONJERIKA

Kenyan author and 2018 Caine Prize winner Makena Onjerika will read from her prize-winning short story “Fanta Blackcurrant” and will participate in a moderated discussion with Eve Ferguson, Africa Area Specialist in the African and Middle Eastern Division. Co-sponsored by the Library of Congress African and Middle Eastern Division. Presented in partnership with the Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa, the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Center for African Studies at Howard University, the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, and Department of English at Georgetown University.

Location: Mary Pickford Theater, third floor, James Madison Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Wednesday, March 20, 7:00 PM
CLIMATE CHANGE, NATURE, AND THE WRITER’S EYE

Science writer Peter Brannen and internationally acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh will join 2018 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction winner Annie Proulx to discuss pressing issues of environmental change and a writer’s responsibilities to them. Book sales and signing to follow. Free tickets required.

Location: Coolidge Auditorium, ground floor, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

For more event information, visit the Poetry and Literature Center's website.

Note: Due to a scheduling conflict, Billy-Ray Belcourt is unable to participate in this event as originally announced. Poet Aisha Sasha John has been added to the program. 

Thursday, February 28, 6:30 PM 
US/CA CAPITAL POETRY EXCHANGE

Canadian poets Aisha Sasha John, Brecken Hancock, and Erín Moure will share their work and participate in a moderated discussion with Rob Casper, head of the Poetry and Literature Center. Presented in partnership with the Embassy of Canada, Washington, D.C. and VERSeFest Ottawa.

Location: Mumford Room, sixth floor, James Madison Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

For more event information, visit the Poetry and Literature Center's website.

Thursday, February 28, 6:30 PM 
US/CA CAPITAL POETRY EXCHANGE

Canadian poets Billy-Ray Belcourt, Brecken Hancock, and Erín Moure will share their work and participate in a moderated discussion with Rob Casper, head of the Poetry and Literature Center. This event is free and open to the public. Presented in partnership with the Embassy of Canada, Washington, D.C. and VERSeFest Ottawa.

Location: Mumford Room, sixth floor, James Madison Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please visit the Poetry and Literature Center's website for more information.

Wednesday, February 6, 7:00 PM
LIFE OF A POET: ROSS GAY

Poet Ross Gay will discuss his work with Ron Charles, book critic at The Washington Post. This event is free and open to the public. Reservations are required. Co-sponsored by the Hill Center and The Washington Post.

Location: Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital (921 Pennsylvania Ave. SE)
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Tuesday, February 12, 4:00 PM & 7:30 PM
WHAT WAS, WHAT IS, AND WHAT WILL BE: A CROSS-GENRE LOOK AT AFROFUTURISM

• 4:00 PM

Author/playwright Tananarive Due, novelist N.K. Jemisin, and poet Airea D. Matthews will discuss the origins and extensions of Afrofuturism in a conversation moderated by Sheree Renée Thomas. Free tickets recommended, but not required.

Location: Mumford Room, sixth floor, James Madison Building, Library of Congress <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

• 7:30 PM

Tananarive Due, N.K. Jemisin, and Airea D. Matthews will read their work. Tickets required.  

Location: Folger Theatre, Folger Shakespeare Library
Contact: (202) 544-7077

Co-sponsored by the Library of Congress Center for the Book. Presented in partnership with Folger Poetry and PEN/Faulkner Foundation.

For more information about these events, please visit the Poetry and Literature Center's website or call (202) 707-5394.

The following event has been postponed to tomorrow, Wednesday, January 30 at 7:00 PM due to inclement weather. All tickets will be honored. 

Tuesday, January 29, 7:00 PM Wednesday, January 30, 7:00 PM
LIFE OF A POET: ADA LIMÓN

Poet Ada Limón will discuss her work with Ron Charles, book critic at The Washington Post. This event is free and open to the public. Reservations are required. Co-sponsored by the Hill Center and The Washington Post.

Location: Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital (921 Pennsylvania Ave. SE)
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please visit the Poetry and Literature Center's website for more information.

Tuesday, January 29, 7:00 PM
LIFE OF A POET: ADA LIMÓN

Poet Ada Limón will discuss her work with Ron Charles, book critic at The Washington Post. This event is free and open to the public. Reservations are required. Co-sponsored by the Hill Center and The Washington Post.

Location: Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital (921 Pennsylvania Ave. SE)
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Wednesday, February 6, 7:00 PM
LIFE OF A POET: ROSS GAY

Poet Ross Gay will discuss his work with Ron Charles, book critic at The Washington Post. This event is free and open to the public. Reservations are required. Co-sponsored by the Hill Center and The Washington Post.

Location: Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital (921 Pennsylvania Ave. SE)
Contact: (202) 707-5394

For more information, please visit the Poetry and Literature Center's website.

The Library’s resolution for 2019 is to offer more opportunities to engage lifelong learners like you with our unique treasures and programs. Make your gift before we close the books on 2018!

Your gift supports FREE exhibitions, events, programs, and activities that connect millions of people across the nation and around the world with our unique collections, experts, and services.

The Library of Congress is your library, your gateway to understanding the world. There is so much to discover, not only the nation’s memory, but the world’s—information from all corners of the earth, in more than 470 languages. With millions of items available online, you can access the Library’s treasures from anywhere and connect with us in ways that are personally relevant and valuable.

The Library’s resolution for 2019 is to offer more opportunities to engage lifelong learners like you with our unique treasures and programs. Make your gift before we close the books on 2018!

Your gift can:

• Inspire curiosity in children to read more books and reflect on the power of books to change their lives
• Ignite thoughtful conversation among current and future generations of students and scholars
• Illuminate the minds of people like you who use the resources of the nation's Library here in Washington or via the Internet in their own homes and communities

With the help of supporters like you, we can spark the imagination of people of all ages with programs that open the Library’s doors wide to all.

Join us TODAY by making your 2018 tax-deductible donation, and together we’ll spark a lifelong adventure of learning.

The day has arrived—#GivingTuesday—a day when your gift makes a difference and a statement.

The Library of Congress depends on donations from people like you to produce exhibitions, events, programs, and activities that connect millions of people across the nation and around the world with our unique collections, experts, and services.

Gifts bring the Library to life with music, dance, film, sound, culture, scholarship, research, discussions and ideas. Your gift, no matter the size, will support diverse programs that are entirely FREE for everyone to enjoy, and will make the Library’s treasures and services more accessible.

Help spread the word today and encourage your friends and family to make a gift to the nation’s library, your gateway to understanding the world!

#GivingTuesday is a global day of giving fueled by the power of social media and collaboration.

Thursday, December 6, 6:30 PM
BOBBITT PRIZE READING: JORIE GRAHAM

Jorie Graham, winner of the 15th Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, will read selections of Fast. Book sales and signing to follow. Free tickets required.

Location: Mumford Room, sixth floor, James Madison Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

For more information, please visit the Poetry and Literature Center's website.

This year is the second year the Library of Congress is participating in #GivingTuesday—a global giving movement. On Tuesday, November 27, we are asking you to make a gift to spark a lifelong adventure of learning.

Your gift supports FREE exhibitions, events, programs, and activities that connect millions of people across the nation and around the world with our unique collections, experts, and services.

The Library of Congress is your library, your gateway to understanding the world. There is so much to discover, not only the nation’s memory, but the world’s—information from all corners of the earth, in more than 470 languages. With millions of items available online, you can access the Library’s treasures from anywhere and connect with us in ways that are personally relevant and valuable.

Save the Date to Make Your Gift!

Celebrated on the Tuesday following Thanksgiving (in the U.S.) and the widely recognized shopping events Black Friday and Cyber Monday, #GivingTuesday kicks off the charitable season, when many focus on their holiday and end-of-year giving.