Toni Morrison
(Fiction & Mystery)
Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison made her National Book Festival debut this year. A writer, editor and teacher, Morrison learned early that “words have power.” The granddaughter of a slave, she grew up knowing of the “respect, honor, delight and reverence that my family had for reading. |
Terry McMillan
(Fiction & Mystery)
Terry McMillan treated her fans to a sneak preview of the novel she is currently writing, “Who Asked You?” She advises budding authors “to write something every day.” She added, “Writing is not about getting published. … It’s like an itch you have to scratch.” |
Laura Lippman
(Fiction & Mystery)
Laura Lippman was a Baltimore reporter, like her fictional alter ego Tess Monaghan, when she made a career switch. Instead of becoming a private eye, and the heroine of 11 stories, she became a novelist who penned the series. Becoming a mother last year “has changed the way I write about parents. I have a new appreciation.” |
Russell Banks
(Fiction & Mystery)
Russell Banks has learned in the process of having several of his novels made into motion pictures that “novelists are like actors—we inhabit the bodies and lives of our characters.” Background research can be done in a library but it is by “imaginatively inhabiting” a character that Banks can tell that person’s story. |
David McCullough
(History & Biography)
“History is much more than politics and the military,” said historian David McCullough. “We must include art, architecture, music, poetry, drama and dance as subjects in history. It’s who we are as human beings. It’s all a part of our story.” Those fields all engaged 19th-century Americans in Paris, as McCullough describes in his latest work. |
Eugene Robinson
(History & Biography)
Eugene Robinson writes of “not one black America, but four” in his new book “Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America.” These are: “mainstream” middle-class majority, the affluent “transcendent” elite, “emergent” black immigrants and blacks of biracial heritage, and the “abandoned” who “didn’t make that climb from poverty to the middle class.” |
Rita Dove
(Poetry & Prose)
A poet in a family of chemists, Rita Dove felt “like an alien” growing up. She attributes that, and “not looking like a WASP,” to her love for science fiction. But it was her love of music that led her to write poetry. “Music was a language I understood and poetry is the closest thing to music.” |
Garrison Keillor
(Poetry & Prose)
Garrison Keillor, the longtime host of “A Prairie Home Companion,” appreciates the potential of a poem to affect a life. “To have one passionate reader would be preferable to having 1,000 indifferent readers,” Keillor said. “You never know who might read a poem and take it personally. You can only hope for that.” |
Tomie DePaola
(Children)
Tomie DePaola has been delighting children for more than 35 years with his “Strega Nona” (“grandma witch”) character and many others. “I knew I wanted to write and illustrate books when I was four,” he said. Years later, while doodling Punchinello, an Italian folk character, he added a kerchief and bosom, “and the rest was history.” |
Julianne Moore
(Children)
Actress and children’s author Julianne Moore explained what books have meant to her life. “The reason I’m an actor is I love to read books. … When I started doing plays at school, it was just like reading aloud,” said the author of three books in the "Freckleface Strawberry" series. |
Katherine Paterson
(Teens)
Katherine Paterson’s “Bridge to Terabithia”—the 1977 Newbery-medal winning novel and the 2007 film—have captured the imaginations of generations of children. The plot line about a child’s death helped Paterson deal with a real-life tragedy involving a child and her own mortality. “Stories have to make sense even when life doesn’t.” |
Cassandra Clare
(Teens)
Cassandra Clare’s unique brand of fantasy fiction is inspired by “a love of old-school urban fantasy that mixes the real and the unreal as opposed to separating the two into a world of things that are not magic and things that are.” Her advice to budding authors is to “make writing part of your daily life.” |
Siddhartha Mukherjee
(Contemporary Life)
Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,” discussed the way people have understood and treated cancer. “Our knowledge of cancer is unlikely to eradicate it from our bodies or our lives,” he said, suggesting a focus on prolonging life. “Perhaps we need to redefine what victory against cancer means.” |
Amy Chua
(Contemporary Life)
Amy Chua, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, ignited a global debate on parenting with the publication of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” a memoir of the strict upbringing of her daughters and a meditation on cultural differences in child-rearing. “I am a proud, strict mom—taken down a few notches,” Chua said. |
Sarah Vowell
(Contemporary Life)
With a name like Sarah Vowell, one might be expected to have a good grasp of the language. But the author and social commentator also has a keen sense of history on which she puts her unique twist. A case in point is “Unfamiliar Fishes,” her latest work about the “annexation and Americanization of Hawaii.” |
Hoda Kotb
(Contemporary Life)
Veteran journalist and co-anchor of the fourth hour of the “Today” show, Hoda Kotb recounts “How I Survived War Zones, Bad Hair, Cancer and Kathie Lee” in her memoir. She explains how these experiences have empowered her. “When you get cancer, you get four words: you can’t scare me.” |
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