>> Welcome to the Library of Congress and the historic Coolidge Auditorium. Please welcome the 14th Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden. >> Good evening. [ Applause ] >> Good evening and welcome to the Library of Congress National Book Festival Gala Celebration. Tonight is the 19th Annual Festival of Books, where you will hear from pioneers in the field of literacy, as well as from 5 of our distinguished National Book Festival authors. Never take for granted how special this event is, how it epitomizes what the Library of Congress means to nearly 200,000 people who attend the Festival. The Library of Congress is the world's largest repository of knowledge, and the book festival gives an opportunity to showcase writers and artists whose contributions are housed here, and whose work rests on the shoulders of all the writers and artists who have come before. In 2019, the Library of Congress launched a year long initiative inviting Americans to explore America's change makers. There is currently an exhibition on view, in this building, celebrating the women who changed American by securing the vote 100 years ago. That's an applause. [ Applause ] And in December, we will celebrate the transformational role that Mrs. Rosa Parks played in American history with a special exhibition featuring her own words. Those who write and illustrate books change our lives in ways both profound and everlasting. Assembled here tonight are, is an extraordinary gathering of talent from this country, and around the world, and we solute all of you. I also. [ Applause ] And I must offer a special solute to the United States Congress, the library's chief benefactor since it was established in 1800. No library in history has enjoyed such long lasting and generous support. The chief benefactor to the National Book Festival is long time Library of Congress supporter Mr. David M. Rubenstein. [ Applause ] His patriotic philanthropy is evident not only in this Festival, but also in the Library of Congress Literacy Awards. I also want to take this opportunity to thank other generous sponsors who make the Festival possible, charter sponsors, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, IMLS, the Washington Post, and Wells Fargo. Patron Sponsors, the James Madison Counsel, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Champions, Thomas Girardi, and the John Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, PBS, and the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! Program. [ Applause ] And we have many friends and media partners, including CSPAN's, too, the Book TV, the Hay-Adams Hotel, National Public Radio, the New York Times, Scholastic, Inc., Small Press Expo, Tim and Diane Naughton, and many embassies that have contributed to our International Program. The National Book Festival has been called one of the best free events in Washington, and you, our sponsors and friend, make it possible. And so does the village that it takes to put this Festival on. So we must acknowledge the more than 1,000 volunteers. Most especially, the Junior League of Washington that has supported this Festival since 2003, and the hundreds of volunteers from the general public. And please join me in a round of applause for the dedicated staff of the Library of Congress. [ Applause ] Now when you go to the convention center tomorrow, you will see more of the beautiful artwork created for the Festival. This year's poster is the extraordinary work of Marian Bantjes, a designer, illustrator, topographer and writer whose work is the embodiment of the intersection of words and graphics. And as in previous Festivals, this year's Festival is honoring one of America's most distinguished writers of fiction. We are presenting the 2019 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction to Mr. Richard Ford. He's right there. [ Applause ] A novelist who is quintessentially American, profoundly humane, and meticulous in his craft, and you will hear from him later this evening. So many people say that they love the Book Festival, and they also say that they wish it could run for more than 1 day. And I'm happy to announce tonight, that we are making this event a year round event with a new series to be called National Book Festival Presents. And starting on September 11th, the series will begin with the popular actor, television host and magician, Mr. Neil Patrick Harris. Other writers on board include our new poet laureate, Joy Harjo, tThe Tipping Point author, Malcolm Gladwell, and the creator of Captain Underpants, Mr. [ Applause ] Mr. Dav Pilkey. And this new book festival series will connect book lovers with the library on a year round basis. So please join us for these exciting events. As Frederick Douglass once said, once you learn to read, you will be forever free. And this brings us back to Mr. David Rubenstein. Thanks to his generosity and foresight, each year we present the Library of Congress Literacy Awards to acknowledge outstanding work in the field of literacy, and to inspire literacy organizations worldwide to continue working for their noble cause. I have often heard David mention his belief that books and reading are the keys to success in life. And we are fortunate to have him as a friend and supporter of the Library of Congress. So please welcome Mr. David Rubenstein. [ Applause ] >> How many people here have never been to the National Book Festival before? Anybody? Wow, okay. How many people here regard reading as an important part of their life? Okay. Well, for those who haven't been here, just briefly, when our country was first set up, there was no National Book Festival. The Library was created by an Act of Congress, and one of the last Acts of Congress passed by Congress before it moved from Philadelphia down to Washington. In about 1800, the Act was passed, signed by John Adams, and $5,000 was appropriated for the Library of Congress, that enabled them to buy about 300 books. And the Library of Congress was then in the Congress building itself. And amazingly, the Library of Congress was there for much of our history. It wasn't until the late 1800s, 1987 or so, that this building was actually built. But I have it on good authority that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson wanted there to be a National Book Festival, but they just couldn't get around to organizing it. And as some of you probably know, in 1814, when the British, are now our good friends, but not so much then, they burned down the White House and the Congress, they burned down all of the books of the Library of Congress. So Thomas Jefferson sold his library, he needed the money actually, as well, to the Library of Congress, and ultimately that became our library. And now we have pretty much replaced all of the volumes that were, at one point, were burned here as well, and the Library has the Thomas Jefferson collection pretty much intact now, the books that he had in his collection, and is available for people to see. Now how did we get to a National Book Festival? Well, what happen is it wasn't in the Constitutional Convention, it wasn't in the authorizing legislation. When Laura Bush became First Lady, at the inaugural event, she said to then Librarian of Congress Jim Billington, do you have a National Book Festival similar to the one I have in Texas? And he said, well we don't now, but we will. And so, that first year, 2001, one was set up, it was in the Mall, and it was a terrific place to have it. Weather intervened from time to time, and the National Park Service wasn't thrilled with it because it destroyed some of the grass. Ultimately, it became too big for the Mall, and we moved to the Convention Center, which worked quite well for the last couple of years. The first couple of years, we probably had 40 or 50,000 people, now we're going to have 200,000 people, 200,000 people there tomorrow. And amazingly, there are people standing outside right now, waiting to get in tomorrow morning, and they'll wait through the night. And so it's an incredible thing for America. It's a great gift, to all the sponsors that have given to our country, and I want to thank all the sponsors for what you've done. For all the authors here, those people who are waiting outside, are waiting for you. There's no doubt. Yes. [ Applause ] So, to all of you here, reading is an important part of your life. But it's sad that in the wealthiest country in the world, we are 16th in the world in literacy, 16th in the world I literacy. Right now, in our country, there are roughly 32 to 33 million people who cannot read past the 3rd grade level. These are adults. So about 13 to 14% of our entire population cannot read. I mean, not foreigners who come here knowing how to read their own language, but can't read English, they can't read any language. So about 13% of our population is functionally illiterate. If you are functionally illiterate, the chances that you are going to have as pleasant a life is not as good as it is if you could read, because those people who are functionally illiterate obviously can't get as good jobs, they earn much less, a much lower percentage than people who are literate. They also get involved, unfortunately, with our criminal justice system. 80% of the people in the federal prison system are functionally illiterate. 67% of those people in our juvenile delinquency system are functionally illiterate. And if you are functionally illiterate, the chances of your really ever making your life as pleasant as the life all of you have is very, very slim. There's another problem in our country, which is aliteracy, which is that people don't read as much as they should. Think about this, the average person in this country reads for pleasure, roughly 16 minutes a day, that's it, 16 minutes a day. The average person in this country doesn't really read as much, in terms of books, as they should. 25% of Americans, last year, did not read a single book. And 30% of college graduates never read another book in their life. This is a sad commentary on our country in many ways. So what I think the National Book Festival does, and what our literacy wards try to do is this, tell people how important it is to read, get children to read. The best way to get a child to read is to have the parent or guardian to read to them. That is one of the best ways, and we encourage that, and many of the literacy groups that we give awards to encourage that, as well. We also believe that more and more people, if they see the excitement of the National Book Festival, they will want to come to it. And if those people can't read, maybe they'll be inspired to learn how to read. So for the last number of years, we have prizes at the Library of Congress to reward those people a modest token of our appreciation for what they've done, and to try to show to other people around the country, and around the world, that it is possible to make a difference in literacy, but we need to make sure, certain that all the groups that are doing this are given proper attention, and also rewarded from time to time. So what I'd like to do is to have the Librarian of Congress come up and we'd like to announce the award winners. We have a little video to show about them first. [ Music ] >> Launched with the creative vision and generosity of David M. Rubenstein, the Library of Congress Literacy Awards recognize and promote the achievements of organizations who innovative, research based practices are increasing literacy worldwide. A committee of literacy experts evaluated nominations for their innovation and sustainability, replicability, measurable results, and use of evidence based practice. The judges presented their findings to the Librarian of Congress, who selected the winners. [ Music ] The $50,000 International prize goes to ConTextos, Chicago, Illinois. Founded in 2010, ConTextos brings literacy to schools, prisons, and communities in El Salvador. To date, ConTextos has created 84 libraries across El Salvador, 11,092 students have access to high quality books, 853 young authors have published their memoirs. The $50,000 American prize goes to the American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults, Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1919, AAF provides free Braille materials to blind and deaf blind children and adults. Central to AAF's work over the last 100 years has been a commitment to Braille literacy, and the knowledge that Braille is the only true means for literacy for the blind. And the $150,000 David M. Rubenstein prize goes to ProLiteracy Worldwide of Syracuse, New York. Founded in 2002, ProLiteracy Worldwide advances and supports programs to help adults acquire literacy skills needed to function more effectively in their daily lives. ProLiteracy Worldwide has 1,000 member programs across 50 states, and works with 30 partners in 25 countries, annually reaching hundreds of thousands of adult learners. Thank you to our Literacy Awards Program advisory board for judging and recommending this year's winners. And thank you to Mr. David M. Rubenstein for so generously supporting the awards. Once again, congratulations to our 2019 Literacy Award winners. [ Applause ] >> Ladies and gentlemen, accepting the 2019 International Prize for ConTextos is founder and executive director, Debra Gittler. [ Applause ] Accepting the 2019 American Prize for the American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults is executive director Mark Riccobono. [ Applause ] Accepting the 2019 David M. Rubenstein Prize for ProLiteracy Worldwide is president and CEO, Kevin Morgan. [ Applause ] [ Applause ] >> And thank you, very much, to our deserving winners, and to Mr. Rubenstein for this wonderful opportunity to celebrate excellence in the field of literacy. And now, ladies and gentlemen, we are proud to present our author's program. >> Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome journalist, historian, Evan Thomas. [ Applause ] >> When I got out of college, I tried to write the great American novel, and I wrote about 80 pages, and I gave it to my father, who was a book editor. And I came down for breakfast the next morning, and he looked at me and he said, it's awful. I applied to law school that afternoon. It, a different style of parenthood in those days. But actually it was a mercy killing. It really was going to be a terrible book. I liked law school, mostly I liked it because I met my wife Osceola, who's sitting right there, in civil procedure class. But I didn't really want to be a lawyer, I wanted to be a writer. Now fiction did not look so promising, so I though, well nonfiction. So I had worked for a law firm that represented the Wall Street Journal, and so I wrote the editor of the Wall Street Journal, Arthur Taylor, asking him for a job. I thought his name was Arthur Taylor. I checked the masthead after I wrote the letter, and his name was actually Frederick Taylor. So I wrote him a letter saying how embarrassed I was, and I got back a 1 sentence letter that said, Dear Mr. Thomas, you also misspelled embarrassed. [ Laughter ] And so I've learned a few things. One is the importance of editors. And not just to keep you from getting the guy's name wrong, but for everything else. I've been literally changed by editors. Great editors in news magazines, Jon Meacham, Steve Smith, and Dorothy Wickenden, who's now at the New Yorker. Great editors in the publishing world, Alice Mayhew, Simon and Schuster, Kate Medina at Random House. But mostly, actually, by the best editor I have, my wife. Because editing is a very human thing, and that she, the person who knew my flaws was the best person able to edit me, to keep me from being too full of myself, or too snarky, to help me with tone. And that's the most important editing that you can get. I also learned, over time, to appreciate libraries and archives. When I was a young reporter at Time Magazine, just starting a book with Walter Isaacson, the Wise Men, I had a shelf here, at the Library of Congress. I would go, I covered the Capitol, I covered Congress for Time, but I would sneak over here to my shelf at the Library of Congress and read about the Cold War. And I was amazed at what I found here, things like the private diary of a secret society, I thought man, this library really does have every book. And I learned that, you know, you can talk to people but you have to have the paper. This was brought home to me when Walter and I went to see McGeorge Bundy, who was the, had been the National Security adviser for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. And Walter and I wanted to talk to McGeorge Bundy about the foreign policy establishment, and Bundy said oh, come on, there's no such thing as an establishment. And we said, well you know, we read an article that said its chairman is John McCoy and Bundy said, nonsense. Well a couple of months later, I was in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library going through the files of McGeorge Bundy, and I found a memo from Bundy to the president, the title of it was Backing from the Establishment, the key to these men is John McCoy. I gave out a yelp, I had to be hushed. It's amazing what you can find if you just look. I've had incredible help over the years from so many people. What I really had learned, more than anything else, is to be grateful. To be grateful to Jeff Flannery, I've been working over here at the, mostly I've been working at the Library of Congress reading room with Jeff Flannery, that had a reading room who's a national treasure. Any author would tell you that. We've been working for, he helped us with our book about Sandra Day O'Connor, and we're about to do a book about dropping the atom bomb, and he'll be helping us with that. So what I've learned is to be thankful to Jeff. And to Osceola, thank you. [ Applause ] >> Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome novelist R.O. Kwon. [ Applause ] >> Hi, hello. Hi. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you to the National Book Festival. Thank you to the Library of Congress. Thank you to their interpreters. I'm so excited to be here. So I'm here with, and because of my first novel, the Incendiaries. And what I usually tell people it's about is I say it's about a woman who gets involved with a group of fundamentalist Christians, the group turns out to be a cult, and they end up bombing abortion clinics, health care clinics, in the name of faith. It's always wild for me when I can actually like see people's faces as I give this description, because people's eyebrows go like a little wider, a little wider, a little wider, like what is going on? So I worked on this book for 10 years, which means that for 10 years I attended a lot of parties and dinner parties and, worst of all, Thanksgivings, at which people would ask what I do. And I would say, I write, I'm working on a novel. And naturally enough they would ask what it as about. So I would tell them pretty much exactly what I told you, for those 10 years. And by far, the most common follow up question was is your novel autobiographical, which I never quite knew what to do with. Because I think on the face of it, people were asking have you been involved in a violent, extremist cult? Have you, yourself, led a violent, extremist cult? And or have you blown up any buildings? A friend was like, you should just start telling people, I'm no longer at liberty to talk about these things. But I haven't tried that just yet. But the, so the straight answer is no, I haven't led any cults. But there is a longer possible answer about what obsessions and losses led to this book. And I grew up so religious that my entire life plan, until I was 17, was to become a pastor. And then I lost that faith. And the loss was devastating in so many ways that I'm still grappling with, still contending with, still have trouble even talking about. And so I think I wanted to write a book about that, about the enormity of that loss. But also about how wonderful it was to believe. Because in a lot of ways, and I think a lot of people who haven't experienced this kind of all encompassing belief don't really, can't really understand is I love being Christian, I loved having, I loved believing in something so large, and so consuming. And so I wanted to write a book, I think, that could perhaps serve as as a kind of imaginative bridge between different parts of the faith spectrum, across which is can be very difficult to speak sometimes. But another question that people often ask is how did you keep going for 10 years, which is a very real question. And I've been thinking lately about what it takes to not just write, but also to have faith that perhaps, if you write and you write and you write, and if you work very hard, and if you have some luck, that you might have something worth saying. You might have something that others might want to hear. And I wonder about that, I wonder about how I had that faith. And I think a lot of that came from how long and avidly I was a reader. Because I was a reader first, I still am a reader first. If I'm not reading well, deeply, seriously, then my writing's not going well at all. As a kid, my parents didn't like to leave me with babysitters, so I was famous, as like a tiny child, for showing up at people's houses with 10 books at a time in my arms. For me I think it was like a vertical fence against the world. So I was always reading. And I'm from an immigrant family. I moved from Korea to the United States when I was 3, and money could be tight. So libraries were a God send, a lifeline. My like wildest childhood fantasy was to be, just to be able to be locked in a library for one night so I could read all the books I wanted to read. I think this is like still a fantasy, and it still hasn't happened. So you know maybe I'll, like tonight, maybe here, maybe I'll just hang out. I don't know. I don't know if I could do that. We'll see. And I think, part of what books have given me, and part of what libraries have given me is as a woman, as an Asian person, as an immigrant, as a queer person, there are a lot of ways in which I could hear the message that I don't belong. That I don't belong in this country. That I don't belong in American letters. And I never really heard that message, somehow. In so far as I heard it, I didn't believe it. And part of this is because I knew I belonged with books, I knew I belonged with literature, with the words, and with language, which were and are a part of my birthright. There's something Toni Morrison said that I think about often, she says, I stood at the border, stood at the edge, and claimed it as central, claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was. I love that so much. And this is something I encourage writers and readers in general to do. Imagine that you can be at the center, imagine you're already at the center. It's wild. It's very strange to put a book out into the world. The Incendiaries has been out a little longer than a year, and I'm so grateful to the people who have helped make this possible. But also, I have a much longer lasting debt, a life long debt to the people who helped bring me to books, and to the libraries and librarians and what they make possible, which is perhaps everything. Thank you, so much. [ Applause ] >> Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome memoir writer, Casey Gerald. [ Applause ] >> Good evening, you all. It will appall, I'm sure, Mr. Rubenstein that I did not begin to read until after I graduated from college, with a Yale degree, no less, which says a great deal about our higher education regime. And I was a young Washington staffer, a very poor, very poor, living just across from the Library of Congress. And so, I thank you all for giving so much money to this institution that I could look out of my window and see, and feel just a bit more opulent, despite my depravity. People, people ask me often, they say, well my cousin wants to write a memoir, do you have any advice for them? And I say, absolutely, don't do it unless your life depends on it. And that certainly was the case for me. I had achieved, by my late 20's, about everything a kid is supposed to achieve in this society. I had gone from this little kind in a forgotten world of Oak Cliff, Texas, and had done the whole Horatio Alger song and dance, and had done it. But despite doing it all, and achieving what they call the American dream, I was very cracked up. Not necessarily having a nervous breakdown, but not too far off. And so I set out initially just to trace those cracks with words. And what came out on the page was just as strange as I felt at the time. And this alarmed some people, at first. I sent a few chapters to a very esteemed writer friend of mine, and he wrote back, when can you hop on the line, which is always a bad sign, as you know. And so we hopped on the line, and he said, what is this? You've been hired to write an autobiography. That's a straightforward exercise. It's got a beginning, middle and end. It's grounded in the facts of real life. And there's a great tradition, by the way, of autobiography in this country led by people on the margins of society who write to assert that they exist. You should go read Frederick Douglass, read Maya Angelou, learn from them, because you're going in the wrong direction. Now as the writers in the room will know, I did not send my friend any more pages of my, and I did not speak to him for months, actually. But I didn't need to write a book to know that I existed. And even though I had grown up and lived grown up, poor, black, queer, near orphan, I hadn't lived on the margins of anything, actually. I thought of what Kendrick Lamar, Pulitzer Prize winner Kendrick Lamar, by the way, says on his mixed tape, section 80, he says, I'm not on the outside looking in, I'm not on the inside looking out, I'm in the dead center looking around. That's the place from which I wanted to write. And I also knew that the right direction was a bit like that cry that Toni Morrison writes about in Sula. I'm so glad my colleague invoked our dear ancestor now. That cry that had no bottom and no top, but was just circles and circles of sorrow. So when I finally did get to Mr. Douglass's narrative, there was one passage, more than any other, that just knocked me out. And it's a passage that we all should consider tonight, and always, as we mark the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans who were brought to this land of Point Comfort Virginia, not far from here, in 1619. And Mr. Douglass writes about his grandmother's fate after her master's death, and he says, she has served old master faithfully from youth to old age. She had been the source of all his wealth, she had people his plantation with slaves. She rocked him in infancy, attended him in childhood, serviced him through life, and at his death, wiped his icy brow from the cold death sweat, and closed his eyes forever. She was, nevertheless, left a slave. They took her to the woods, built her a little hut, put up a little mud chimney, and they made her welcome to the privilege of supporting herself, there in perfect loneliness. And now when weighed down by the pains and aches of old age, when the head inclines to the feet, when the beginning and ending of human existence meet in helpless infancy and painful old age combined together, at this time, this most needful time, my poor old grandmother is left all alone in yonder little hut before a few damned embers. She stands, she sits, she stagger, she falls, she groans, she dies. And there are none of her children, or grandchildren present to wipe from her wrinkled brow the cold sweat of death, or to place beneath the sod her fallen remains. Mr. Douglass asks, will not a righteous God visit for these things? Those of us who labor in the venue of language, might do no better to visit for the things that our country has done and not done, that we have done and not done, it is not a straightforward exercise. It's beginning is uncertain, it's middle is unnerving, it's ending is unclear. It is not marginal. It is very dangerous. And it's a hell of a lot of fun. So I will leave you with the comfort of the extraordinary Miss Lucille Clifton, former poet laureate of Maryland, not far from here, who knew so well why some people be mad at me sometimes. She says, they ask me to remember, but they want me to remember their memories, and I keep on remembering mine. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome children's book writer, R.J. Palacio. [ Applause ] >> Oh, Lord, let me have the eloquence of the, oh, am I saying that out loud? Sorry. I have to follow that. I first of all, want to thank you all for inviting me here to speak on how and why I became a children's book writer, as well as some of the influences or change makers who helped me along the way. I should note that I have challenged myself to avoid inserting anything at all controversial into my talk. Because as I reflected on the things that I wanted to talk about, I realized that even though I'd never really thought of myself as a particularly political person, these days my life, and my existence as a first generation American, the daughter of two immigrants from Latin America, has become kind of, you know, a hot topic. So as I think about the change makers in my life, I have to acknowledge that I'm here today as a result of a lot of political decisions that were made decades ago, decisions that allowed my parents to come here, that gave them the green cards they needed to work, and pay their taxes, and become citizens of this country, decisions that helped fund the public schools I attended so I could get a top notch education from teachers who never judged my potential based on how well my parents spoke English, and school librarians who fed me books with thought and care, knowing that a child's outcome has nothing whatsoever to do with their family's income. Those political decisions were the change makers of my life. So as I stand here, now, in front of this very distinguished group of people, it's hard for me not to note that I'm here because I was given opportunities that, right now, are being denied to children just like me. But, I promised no politics. So, let me talk about my parents a bit. Marco Jaramillo, Marco Jaramillo, and Nelly Palacio. Absolutely the two most well read people I've ever known. They came to New York City from Colombia in 1962, not for economic reasons. In fact, they left behind a world far more comfortable than the tiny apartment that awaited them in the Bronx. But they came to this country because of love. My mother had married when she was young, and although she had been separated from her first husband for almost 10 years when she met my father, divorce was not a legal option in those days. For my mother to start a life with my dad out in the open, the way she wanted, she would have to leave her country. There were other reasons, too. My mother had a very, very bohemian streak to her, which was considered a little scandalous for her family. Being a single woman by choice back then raised a lot of eyebrows. This was before Mary Richards, you know, and all of that. Her friendship with a group of writers and artists in her home town of Barranquilla, which included Gabriel Garcia Marquez before 100 Years of Solitude fame, was definitely frowned up on her circles. So, my mother left Colombia and a life of relative privilege to be with my father, not only for love but for freedom, the freedom to live the way she wanted to live. That's ultimately what she came to love the most about this country. The opportunity it gave people to be who they want to be, free from judgement, free from religious appropriation, free from politics. It was not of course an easy transition for my parents. Choosing to become an immigrant in someone else's country is always a fraught decision, weighing the life you have against the life you might have. It's a gamble and it was hard for them. My father, who had been a journalist in Colombia, became a typesetter here, linotype operator. He worked the lobster shift on Crosby Street setting copy for the New York Times among other journals. If it's surprising to hear that a recent immigrant to the country who spoke English with a very thick Spanish accent was able to set copy for one of the most prestigious newspapers in the world, you didn't know my dad. He spoke multiple language, could read in Latin and Greek, completely self-taught. When I was growing up, I never saw him not reading. My image of him will always be at our kitchen table, several tomes spready out in front of him, taking notes. A walking encyclopedia of history. Very much a man from a different century with his Marcus Aurelius and Blaise Pascal. My mother on the other hand was more avant-garde in her literary tastes, Oscar Wilde, Faulkner, her beloved Heinrich Boll. I grew up in a house full of my parent's books, walls covered floor to ceiling with a collection of titles in Spanish that I can still remember vividly. Las Uvas de la Ira, El Tambor de Hojalata, La Montana magica. They were a couple in love with books, so I really had no choice in the matter of loving back myself. Children learn what they live after all. If you want to raise a reader, be a reader. If you want to raise a writer, be a reader. Because, while I know many readers who don't ultimately become writers, I don't know any writers who are not first readers. I became a writer because of my mom and dad. They were the reason I chose a career in books first as an art director in book publishing, then as an author with a publication of my first novel, Wonder. That I became a writer for children was because of the many authors that my parents and teachers and librarians shared with my over the years, Antoine de Saint Exupery, the Dolere's, Judy Bloom, James Berry, Louisa May Alcott, so many others. I take great pride and much joy in knowing that Wonder has become part of this cannon of children's literature and that its message of choosing kindness continues to spread around the world. I draw hope from the young readers who everyday email me or write to me to tell me that they understand the power of kindness, not as a platitude but as an instrument of change. They understand that there is actual strength in kindness as it encompasses not only the ability to reach other human beings with love and compassion, but to stand up for them, to take a knee for them, to march for them, to fight for them, to use whatever soap box you're given to speak up for them. Which is why as I stand here tonight, I can't not point out the irony of my quote, unquote, success without remembering the kindness with which this country welcomed my parents once upon a time and wonder aloud when this kindness will return because I do believe in the power of human kindness. I believe it's far stronger than intolerance, that it transcends politics, that it will outlast these times and these tiny, tiny [inaudible] power these days. I believe in kindness because I've seen it, I know it exists and it's why I write about it, so that kids will know it to so that kids will believe in it and fight for it and I hope for the sake of children everywhere, but especially for those who are right now suffering from the lack of kindness shown them, that we adults continue to fight for kindness too. Thank you. [ Background noise ] >> Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the winner of the Library of Congress prize for American fiction, Richard Ford. [ Background noise ] >> Thank you very much. Thank you Dr. Hayden, Mr. Rubenstein. Thanks to everybody for showing up to support this remarkable festival and to honor the library and all libraries. A special word of appreciation to [inaudible] for pretty much everything we're experiencing this weekend. [ Background noise ] >> I have to put my specs on here. Was it Franklin said, all would live long but none would be old. He was half right. I don't mind being old, it just takes so long. MY great respect goes to my colleagues whom you've just heard and who've given us all a vivid primer into the sources of literary arts. Literature comes from attention to life, not from college degrees or MFA's or necessarily either from great learning, it comes from taking life seriously enough to make it a great subject and by insisting with what we write, that life's worth our close attention. And by doing that, we can see the future that where our writing, where our writing would be useful to others and their life's worth living on a little bit longer. This is why literature always optimistic no matter how gloomy it might be on the page. Yates wrote, the arts lay dreaming of what is to come. We're living in a country that posses the will and the history and investment in the future sufficient for us to have a national library and even a national book festival, as if some great intelligence knew we all hungered for these things. A lot of us on a daily basis now, me included, begin many with our sentences with a rather bewildered citizens lament. I live in a country where, I live in a country where my elected representatives wont vote to protect my children from harm. I live in a country where our court system has concluded it's a matter of free speech, for great wealth to buy elections and discourage citizens from voting. I live in a country where our chief executive. [ Background noise ] >> I understand that if we see something, we're supposed to say something, and we all see something but, on this subject, I don't know what to see. And yet, partly. [ Background noise ] >> And yet, partly because of this national treasure where we're gathered at this moment, which encourages possibility and the imagination and freedom and truth and sponsors letting in the light and invests mightily in our future as Jefferson and Adams intended, there is a hope we'll find ourselves soon and find our way. So, Dr. Hayden, thank you again for this great service and for, your [inaudible] for all of us in this library. [ Background noise ] >> I was a child at the library, the Carnegie Public Library in Jackson, Mississippi. My mother used to dump me there before I was even 8 years old. It was kind of a daycare with books. The library was a safe place to leave me, a haven. It was cool in the summers. My mother was in essence a single parent and I was not a child who took naturally to supervision and she knew, she knew those old timey lady librarians could deal with me. Eudora writes about these ladies in One Writer's Beginning, which I hope you'll read. Eudora and I were often in there together in the 50's. It was also not an uneventful place to be an unobserved observer at age 7 and a half. The library was a well known and fairly well accepted [inaudible] gay men's meeting place in those days when being gay meant you were encouraged to stay out of the light. The library was their haven too. I was a dyslexic boy just as I'm a dyslexic grown up. So, I don't know if I ever actually read much of anything in the library. It may be, I only managed to make it out, books were treated as special things by adults, as objects to be respected and preserved, preserved for me not from me. You had to be quiet in there and though I didn't think it then, this enforced stillness. I realized now it was a gesture of reverence for books and for reading. You could say these dim realizations were for me an inchoate form of literacy. In that library, there were many, many things for one's eye to fall upon, many magazines. I remember particularly, Paris Match with those exotic, sometimes saucy photographs of around the world. It was also interestingly an English language copy of Mein Kampf, which I did open and tried unsuccessfully to read. It wasn't long after world war 2 then and my mother who was a former convent girl had a pious sensitivity to the variegated incarnations of evil, which she believed needed to be relentlessly outed. Here therefore was an evil who'd written a book. For [inaudible] appearance is just like all the other books on the shelves. I didn't really understand how such things went together, evil encased in a respectable book, but I was free to try to understand it in my slow way in the library. The Carnegie Public was also a place where African Americans definitely could not come, at least if they weren't cleaning the floor or taking out the trash. I sensed this was plainly inequitable, only I wasn't smart enough or aware enough or brave enough to recognize this is a crippling civil wrong, though I should've. I don't blame my parents and I don't blame the country for that, I blame me. For me, the library, as Franklin also said about the library he founded in Philadelphia, for me, the library was free and energetic, its spirit crafted to encourage curiosity and wide interests and awareness that even the librarians might not have approved of, but it wasn't free to everybody. The institution of that library, as is true we know now of all institutions, was precarious. It stood for abysmal wrong and heartless restraint upon liberty, but it also stood staunchly for my freedom to read and think whatever I wanted. I know with certainty that my first fully free exposure to the grave incongruities and complexities and frailties of human life and its resulting institutions, occurred in the library and that years later, this experience would set a course for me as a writer. How do you, in an utterance, make peace between the apparently incompatible urge to blame and condemn and the wish to thank and revere? Such attempts at composition are where much great imaginative literature arises, joining the apparently un-joinable, saying the unsayable. When people ask me now, why are there so many American writers who come from the south and specifically from Mississippi? I say it's because we who are form there have so much account for which conventional wisdom and language simply cannot say. Some kind of other language, some other access to wisdom are required. [ Background noise ] >> This is the role of imaginative literature. And yet of course, we all want the books we write to become institutions even knowing that what we do know about institutions, that they can turn brittle and defective. We want our compositions and their truths to be set in granite as a measure of their excellence but what we quickly discover is that the readers of our books actually think of them as provisional and not permanent at all. The social Theorist Daniel Bell wrote that conceptual schemes are neither true or false, but are either useful or not useful, novel. And what are novels if they're not conceptual schemes? Novels get used by readers. Readers have conversations with our books. They pick apart our compositions. Novelistic truths get supplanted, denounced, reversed, added on to, imbedded. The only true function of a writer may be to write a masterpiece, but provisional may be as close as we get to mastery, at least over our readers. What we're allowed to do instead is to venture a shapely and enlightened inquiry about in congress human matters of indisputable but seemingly insoluble value and importance. What is good? What is bad? And are these often not joined, like the 2 faces of drama and if they are joined, what are the consequences of that joining? This debate is imbedded in the institution of imaginative literature and it's enshrined in this institution where we are tonight. Both in their way are safe havens for such inquiry and just as 1 book we write follows and seeks to exceed the previous one, both institutions, our literature and our library, must be vigorously reappraised and they better so they can go on being useful as we dream of what is to come. We may for instance think we no longer have to worry about an entire race of Americans being blocked at the library's door, but who would trust that in the world today? Not long ago I was in Great Falls, Montana, in the library. I was actually working on a novel in there using the computer, which is a service the library offers free to nonmembers. This machinery gets a lot of use by people who don't have computers available to them, use in applying for jobs, use to contact attorneys or to look up the symptoms of some disease they might be terrified they're suffering but have no access to crucial information about. I was sitting next to this native kid, a young man, and at a certain moment and seemingly without hesitation, he leaned over to me close and said in a soft voice appropriate to the setting, hey bro, he said, can you spell. I said yes, because I still could at that time. He said, I'm writing a birthday email to my mother over in Spokane. Does heart have an e in it? I don't want to screw this up. I said yes, heart definitely has an e in it. We all have our dilemmas, opposites that won't resolves, truths that won't reconcile with other truths, ideas we know but don't know quite well enough to be well expressed, words we can't spell. These dilemmas can leave us feeling alone and unprotected and in jeopardy of failure. The library, even this [inaudible] library is a haven for facing such dilemmas. It's a place that recognizes us, all of us, and it's founded on the same resources and the same convictions that good government is founded on, that life's worth our closest attention and is worth being lived a little longer, if only to see what good might happen and in that way, it's like a story. Thanks. [ Background noise ] >> Thank you and thank you to all of our extraordinary festival authors to all of the distinguished authors in the audience and to our sponsors. I hope you had a wonderful, wonderful time this evening and please join me in the great hall now for a special reception and enjoy the festival tomorrow. [ Background noise ]