NCTV Nonprofit Videos

Opening Celebration

Annie Kamara opens the sixth annual festival by adapting John Donne: no man is an island, and no book festival is one either. Mary Haft follows with the foundation’s work in the schools, including a young writers’ competition that asked each student to examine the identity most central to them.

Nicole Dennis-Benn

Nicole Dennis-Benn discusses Here Comes the Sun, which follows three working-class Jamaican women in a small village. She explains that Jamaica is sold to the world as a paradise, and that returning home in 2010 left her determined to tell the story of the people behind that fantasy.

Andrea Cohen

Poet Andrea Cohen reads from Unfathoming, her fifth collection, published earlier that year. Wyn Cooper, a presenter since the festival’s first year, introduces poems that get straight to the point, and quotes her own account of how she began: she has always been comfortable with downward mobility, and has always organized her thoughts in verse.

Samantha Hunt

Samantha Hunt discusses Mr. Splitfoot, a novel of the motherless and the orphaned whose characters commune with the dead across New York State. Fresh from a Guggenheim Fellowship, the author of The Seas and The Invention of Everything Else notes that two of her sisters have been year-round islanders for twenty-five years.

Will Schwalbe & Michael Schulder

Will Schwalbe discusses Books for Living, a friendly manifesto for readers, with Michael Schulder of Wavemaker Conversations. One of its tenets is that truths can be found in any book, whether War and Peace or Captain Underpants; asked whether he would rather be known as the nicest guy or the greatest author, Schwalbe picks nicest.

Marie Arana

Marie Arana, senior advisor to the Librarian of Congress and director of the National Book Festival, speaks on living between hemispheres. Her introducer describes reading American Chica and recognizing her own childhood in two cultures, and the relief of learning it was all right to belong fully to neither.

Kay Jamison & Mindy Todd

Kay Redfield Jamison discusses art, illness and the manic-depressive temperament, drawing on Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire. Fairwinds’ coordinator of clinical operations introduces her by saying that, having read her first Jamison book at nineteen, this is a little like meeting Beyoncé.

Jodi Picoult

Jodi Picoult discusses Small Great Things, introduced by Alice Hoffman as the best of her novels. Hoffman praises a writer with the courage to take on ideas that are difficult, thought-provoking and important.

Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson discusses The Warmth of Other Suns, fifteen years in the making, which carries the Great Migration through three individual lives. She tells WCAI’s Mindy Todd why she settled on those three, out of the many stories she might have followed.

Laurie Halse Anderson

Laurie Halse Anderson speaks on finding a voice, introduced by a bookseller who knew her before Speak, when she was writing in longhand at the Barnes & Noble where they both were. The introduction closes on the observation that she has not changed: on arriving this year, her first words were to ask what was needed.

Carl Safina

Carl Safina discusses Beyond Words at the Atheneum. Cormac Collier of the Nantucket Land Council introduces him by way of the question his own work keeps returning to — why we go to such lengths to protect plants, animals and habitat — and answers it with intimacy between people and the natural world.

Kay Jamison, Megan Marshall, & Kate Tuttle

Kay Redfield Jamison and Megan Marshall consider Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop side by side, drawing on Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast. Kate Tuttle hosts two biographers on a pair of poets who met in 1946, and on the sharp contrasts between them.

Daniel Menaker

Daniel Menaker presents The African Svelte, a collection of the malapropisms that crossed his desk over a career editing at The New Yorker and Random House. Illustrated by Roz Chast with a foreword by Billy Collins, it is his seventh book and his second appearance at the festival.

James Gleick & Daniel Menaker

James Gleick discusses Time Travel with Daniel Menaker, who works through passages from across his books, including the talking drums that open The Information. Atheneum director Molly Anderson introduces a writer who edited the Harvard Crimson, helped found a Minneapolis alternative weekly, and spent ten years on the metropolitan desk of The New York Times.

Elliot Ackerman & Lea Carpenter

Elliot Ackerman discusses Dark at the Crossing, drawn from his reporting inside Syrian refugee camps, with Lea Carpenter, author of Eleven Days. Carpenter opens by recalling how Stephen Colbert reckoned with his record: you have a Bronze Star, a Silver Star, a Purple Heart — but do you have an Emmy?

Alice Hoffman, Samantha Hunt, Catherine Lacey & Kate Brosnan

Alice Hoffman, Samantha Hunt and Catherine Lacey take a panel on the realm that sits just beside the ordinary one. Jill Karp hands over to Kate Brosnan, who opens by saying she is here as a reader, and for the female voice.

Min Jin Lee

Min Jin Lee discusses Pachinko, a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award and a saga of one Korean family across four generations. Marianne Stanton of the Inquirer and Mirror introduces her to what the committee reckons is the festival’s biggest crowd yet.

Woody Tasch

Woody Tasch discusses Soil with documentary filmmaker John Stanton, a decade after Slow Money set investors moving capital toward local food. Sustainable Nantucket’s executive director opens with a line of his own: that we drive our Priuses to Whole Foods while our retirement accounts sit in Monsanto and Coca-Cola.

Richard Prum

Yale ornithologist Richard Prum discusses The Evolution of Beauty and the single question he found underneath everything he was curious about. His work runs from the descent of birds from theropod dinosaurs to the evolution of feathers, and to beauty as something birds themselves choose.

Louise Penny

Louise Penny discusses Glass Houses, the thirteenth of her Three Pines novels, at the seventh annual festival. Annie Kamara introduces a writer published in twenty-five languages and named to the Order of Canada in 2017, and lets slip that the next book lands on November 27.

Katherena Vermette

Katherena Vermette discusses The Break at the Atheneum, brought to the festival by Heather Reisman of Indigo Books. Writing from Winnipeg, she talks about carrying a story through many points of view at once, and about a language group whose reach stretches from the Northeast all the way to her own prairie.

John Boyne

John Boyne discusses The Heart’s Invisible Furies, his coming-of-age saga of one gay man’s life beginning and ending in post-war Ireland. Tim Ehrenberg hosts the author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, who previews A Ladder to the Sky, named for the proverb that ambition is like setting a ladder to the sky.

Joe Hagan

Joe Hagan discusses Sticky Fingers, his biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner. He describes having to write to his own subject to explain the title, which Wenner had taken badly when the publisher announced it.

Jessica Bruder

Jessica Bruder discusses Nomadland with WCAI’s Mindy Todd, who turns out to be as interested in the beat as the book. Bruder covers subcultures and economic justice, and teaches both at Columbia Journalism School.

Jane Alexander

Jane Alexander discusses Wild Things, Wild Places, her account of wildlife and conservation around the world. A Nantucket summer child at the family cottage on Surfside Beach for fifty years, she chaired the National Endowment for the Arts from 1993 to 1997 after a Broadway debut in 1969 and some seventy-five screen roles.

James Wood

James Wood, known to most readers as The New Yorker’s critic, presents his novel Upstate. Dick Burns observes that a good part of the room has come expecting the critic and will meet the novelist instead.

Eileen Myles

Poet, novelist and art journalist Eileen Myles reads at the Atheneum. Their twenty books include Afterglow, a dog memoir, Cool for You, and I Must Be Living Twice.

Difference is What Unites Us

Mary Bergman opens the seventh annual festival at the Unitarian Meeting House with an evening titled Difference is What Unites Us. She notes that the committee plans all of it from a library basement through a Nantucket winter, where the sun sets at four — which makes a room this full of light, so near the longest day, feel like a dream.

Andrew Solomon

Andrew Solomon discusses Far from the Tree in a session sponsored by Fairwinds, the island’s counseling service. A clinical professor of psychology at Columbia, he describes setting out to understand how something once universally taken for an illness came instead to be understood as an identity.

Claire Messud & Alice Hoffman

Claire Messud discusses The Burning Girl and Alice Hoffman The Rules of Magic, her prequel to Practical Magic. Tharon Dunn opens a room too full to seat anyone else, introducing two novelists, one of them more than forty books in.

Anna Badkhen

Anna Badkhen discusses Fisherman’s Blues with Michael Schulder at the Atheneum. She describes her method plainly — she enters places and asks permission — and warns the room that she is a slow thinker and there will be pauses.

Morgan Parker

Poet Morgan Parker reads from There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, the second of her two collections. She also previews Magical Negro, due the following year, whose title runs through the book as a numbered series.

Typewriter Rodeo

The Typewriter Rodeo — four writers the festival calls its Fab Four — take requests and type poems to order in the Atheneum’s Great Hall. Teachers, professors, writers and lawyers the rest of the time, they have been doing this since 2013.

Festival Promo

Dave Cullen

Dave Cullen discusses Parkland, the book he swore he would never write after Columbine cost him ten years and two bouts of secondary PTSD. He begins with the drive out Highway 6 toward a school he had never heard of, during the first forty-five minutes of the shooting.

Charles Graeber with Robert Cocuzzo

Charles Graeber discusses The Breakthrough, on immunotherapy and the effort to unlock the body’s own power to fight cancer. Robert Cocuzzo, who likens his travel writing to Hunter S. Thompson, introduces the author of The Good Nurse and asks him to put the science in a nutshell.

Jill Abramson with Marianne Stanton

Jill Abramson discusses Merchants of Truth, her account of a decade of disruption in journalism told through BuzzFeed, Vice, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Marianne Stanton of the Inquirer and Mirror hosts, and confesses to ordering the book from Amazon to get it faster, with apologies to the island’s bookseller.

Elaine Weiss with Mindy Todd

Elaine Weiss discusses The Woman’s Hour with WCAI’s Mindy Todd, on the seven decades of work that won American women the vote. She starts with the part readers rarely know: that the movement began well before Seneca Falls, and that some of its fiercest opponents were women.

Craig Johnson

Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire novels, speaks from a Methodist church as, in his own words, a recovering Methodist whose highest sacrament was the bake sale. He lives in Ucross, Wyoming, population twenty-five — twenty-three this week, since he and his wife are away.

Madeline Miller

Madeline Miller returns to the festival with Circe, having first come for one of her earliest events for The Song of Achilles. She reads a passage in which Odysseus puts the obvious question to the first witch in Western literature: why pigs?

Kirk Wallace Johnson

Kirk Wallace Johnson discusses The Feather Thief and thanks Jill Karp, whose advocacy put the book on its first bestseller list. He declines to read at length, partly to leave room for conversation and partly because two small children have left him unable to read aloud without slipping into a singsong voice.

Nat Philbrick with Mindy Todd

Nathaniel Philbrick discusses In the Hurricane’s Eye with Mindy Todd, admitting he never expected to write about George Washington. The man who arrived after Bunker Hill was nothing like the one on the dollar bill, he says: in his early forties, red-haired, fiery, and unimpressed by New Englanders.

Corky Laing & Tuija Takala with John Shea

Corky Laing and Tuija Takala, a professor at the University of Helsinki, discuss Letters to Sarah with John Shea. They arrive admitting to nerves — Laing compares it to playing Carnegie Hall — and to a steadying shot of tequila at the Charlie Noble on the way in.

Beowulf Sheehan

Portrait photographer Beowulf Sheehan presents Author, his collection of writers’ portraits. He describes the work that precedes a sitting — reading the subject, talking with them first — and the problem of making an image that holds a viewer’s attention.

Sylvia Earle with Michael Schulder

Oceanographer Sylvia Earle discusses Blue Hope with Michael Schulder, who works through the book passage by passage. She traces it back to 1952, when she and her brother borrowed a neighbor’s copper diving helmet and gasoline compressor and walked into Florida’s Weeki Wachee River with no instruction at all.

Susan Orlean

Susan Orlean reads from The Library Book, beginning with the Shaker Heights branch library she visited several times a week as a child. She and her mother separated at the door each time, which she reckons made the library the first place she was ever given any autonomy.

Esi Edugyan with Heather Reisman

Esi Edugyan reads from and discusses Washington Black with Heather Reisman. Reisman opens by apologizing for the laryngitis she woke with, which she blames on the previous night’s music.

Rebecca Makkai with Tim Ehrenberg

Rebecca Makkai discusses The Great Believers, her novel of friendship and loss set between Chicago at the height of the AIDS epidemic and contemporary Paris. Tim Ehrenberg runs through its prizes — the Carnegie Medal, the Stonewall Book Award, a Pulitzer finalist, shortlisted for the National Book Award — and adds that it was his own book of the year.

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich with Amy Jenness

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich discusses The Fact of a Body, a hybrid of personal memoir and the account of a six-year-old boy’s murder. Amy Jenness introduces a first book that has since taken a Lambda Award, the Chautauqua Prize and France’s Elle prize for nonfiction.

Matt McCarthy with John Stanton

Matt McCarthy discusses Superbugs with John Stanton, who calls it a perfect act of populist science. The book follows a physician through the research and the century-long history of antibiotics, and ends without resolution, because the struggle has not ended.

Deborah Landau

Poet Deborah Landau reads from Soft Targets on her first visit to Nantucket, having arrived on a flight that took its pilot three attempts to land. She opens instead with a poem from The Uses of the Body, written over a summer on Martha’s Vineyard.

Elliot Ackerman with Robert Cocuzzo

Elliot Ackerman discusses Waiting for Eden and Places and Names with Robert Cocuzzo, starting from the question of why anyone chooses to serve. He traces his own decision partly to a childhood in London, which left him an American looking in on America.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Rowan Ricardo Phillips discusses The Circuit, his account of a season of professional tennis, which he set out to write as a quartet — four seasons found not in Vivaldi or Eliot but in sport. He reads the opening, which sets Wimbledon against the video the President tweeted the day before it began.

Ben Fountain with Michael Schulder

Ben Fountain discusses Beautiful Country Burn Again with Michael Schulder, and explains the title: a line from a Robinson Jeffers poem, which he came across in an essay by Joan Didion. He says he has learned to trust that titles arrive, and admits his head is already two hundred pages into the next novel.

John Burnham Schwartz

John Burnham Schwartz discusses The Red Daughter, returning to a festival he attended at its inauguration. He remembers leaving that first one at three in the morning behind a charge of writers heading for the harbor, and reflects that a place’s culture is built by the people who build events like this.

Lea Carpenter with Kate Brosnan

Lea Carpenter discusses Red, White, Blue with Kate Brosnan, and the family history that drew her to write about the CIA. Two days after her father died, the former head of the FBI arrived at her mother’s house with a newly declassified Bronze Star citation for a mission her father had led.

Ella Wall Prichard with Janet Schulte

Ella Wall Prichard discusses Reclaiming Joy with Janet Schulte, years after her husband’s death left her able to remember only the grief. She can name where the reclaiming began: Main Street, Nantucket, in 2013, on a trip she took largely to stay out of the Texas heat.

Sarah Sentilles with Michael Schulder

Sarah Sentilles discusses Draw Your Weapons with Michael Schulder on a Sunday morning, which he notes suits a former divinity student who once planned to become a priest. They begin instead with Breaking Up with God, her earlier account of losing that faith.

Opening Night Ceremony

Festival co-chair Mary Bergman opens the eighth annual Nantucket Book Festival, thanking the writers who spent the previous day stuck on the wrong side of the water — a thorough Nantucket introduction for anyone traveling from afar. She singles out the volunteers behind the local author tent at the library.

Steven Axelrod, Blue Balliett, & Cherie Burns with Nancy Thayer

Steven Axelrod, Blue Balliett and Cherie Burns take the festival’s mystery panel, hosted by Nancy Thayer. Balliett has won both the Agatha and the Edgar; Thayer, thirty-five years an islander, reports learning from Axelrod’s books that there are cockfights on Nantucket.

Opening Night Celebration: Intimate Strangers - Connection through the Power of Books

The festival opens its tenth anniversary at the Unitarian Meeting House, with Qian Julie Wang, Mitchell Jackson and Azar Nafisi on the bridge imaginative literature builds between writer and reader. The evening also honors the Young Writer Award winners and marks the last festival of Maddie Jolstrom, for seven years the foundation’s only full-time staff member.

Natalie Jacobson with N Magazine’s Rob Cocuzzo

Natalie Jacobson discusses Every Life a Story: Natalie Jacobson Reporting, which runs from an immigrant childhood to the anchor desk at Boston’s NewsCenter 5. She talks with Rob Cocuzzo of N Magazine about an era when, as she puts it, reporters were there to give you accurate information and invite you to be part of it.

Kyleigh Leddy with Mindy Todd

Kyleigh Leddy discusses The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister, about the older sister whose descent into schizophrenia ended with her disappearance in 2014. She is introduced by Amanda Wright, clinical director of Fairwinds, the island counseling center that sponsored the session, and speaks with WCAI’s Mindy Todd.

Nancy Thayer

Nancy Thayer discusses Summer Love, which follows four young people through a Nantucket summer and back to a reunion twenty-five years later. Her introducer describes finding Thayer’s first novel, Stepping, in a Princeton card catalog decades ago, and being struck that a woman was writing prolifically from Nantucket.

Martín Espada

Martín Espada reads from Floaters, winner of the 2021 National Book Award and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. More than twenty books in as poet, editor, essayist and translator, he has given much of his career to writing that gives voice to otherness, powerlessness and poverty.

Humor Panel: Dave Barry, Roy Blount, Jr, Susie Essman, and Alan Zweibel

Dave Barry, Roy Blount Jr., Susie Essman and Alan Zweibel — four friends and bandmates in the Rock Bottom Remainders — hold the festival’s first comedy panel in ten years. It is scheduled for nine in the morning, which the host explains only by noting that the eight o’clock slot was unavailable.

Jean Hanff Korelitz with Kate Brosnan

Jean Hanff Korelitz discusses The Latecomer, her eighth novel, about a family of Jewish New Yorkers whose triplets sit at the center of the story. She also revisits The Plot, which Stephen King called one of the best novels he has read about writers and writing, with Kate Brosnan of the Nantucket Project.

Ben Shattuck with Nat Philbrick

Ben Shattuck discusses Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau with Nathaniel Philbrick, whose Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy retraces a journey of its own. The two talk about walking old routes, founding a nation, and what a person finds out about himself along the way.

Mitch Albom with Mindy Todd

Mitch Albom discusses The Stranger in the Lifeboat with WCAI’s Mindy Todd, in the last author session of festival Saturday. Author of seven number one bestsellers beginning with Tuesdays with Morrie, he has also founded nine charities in Detroit and the Have Faith Haiti Mission.

Scott Turow & Greer Hendricks with Mindy Todd: Mystery

Scott Turow, an assistant United States attorney in Chicago before he wrote the first of a dozen legal thrillers, joins Greer Hendricks, who spent two decades editing at Simon & Schuster before co-writing four bestsellers. They tell WCAI’s Mindy Todd how the first career shaped the second.

Louise Penny with Mindy Todd

Louise Penny discusses The Madness of Crowds, the seventeenth Chief Inspector Gamache mystery set in Three Pines. Introduced with a litany of the crooked people, governments and companies her books contend with, she deflects that the whole thing started with croissants.

Tiya Miles with Mary Bergman

Tiya Miles discusses All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, winner of the 2021 National Book Award for nonfiction. Introduced by middle school librarian Rebecca Hickman, she unpacks a plain cotton sack carried down through three generations of Black women.

Skip Finley with Michael Schulder

Skip Finley discusses Whaling Captains of Color: America’s First Meritocracy, which recovers the lives of fifty whaling captains of color. A broadcasting executive who took up writing after retiring, he speaks with Michael Schulder of Wavemaker Conversations.

Alice Hoffman with Kate Brosnan

Alice Hoffman discusses The Book of Magic, the conclusion to her Practical Magic series, with her friend Kate Brosnan of the Nantucket Project. The session opens with thanks to the Atheneum, which kept programs, pop-ups and craft bags going through the pandemic when the festival itself could not meet.

Qian Julie Wang with Tim Ehrenberg

Qian Julie Wang discusses Beautiful Country, her memoir of an undocumented childhood in New York after leaving China in 1994. Tim Ehrenberg opens by asking the room to picture themselves at seven, moved overnight to a country whose language they barely speak and told for five years to tell no one the truth about themselves.

Azar Nafisi with Michael Schulder

Azar Nafisi discusses Read Dangerously, built around writers who serve as witnesses, with Michael Schulder. The two last spoke during the pandemic, when the festival ran online as At Home with Authors and the book still carried a different title.

Evan & Peter Osnos: In Conversation

Peter and Evan Osnos — father and son, both authors and foreign correspondents — discuss their recent books and the reporting lives behind them. Between them they covered Vietnam and Iraq, and they turn to what they call the enduring twilight struggle between democracy and authoritarianism.

Mitchell Jackson with Mary Haft

Mitchell S. Jackson discusses Survival Math, which takes its title from the calculations he and his family made to stay safe in a Black neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. Winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for his essay “Twelve Minutes and a Life,” he speaks with festival co-founder Mary Haft.

Zak Salih with Tim Ehrenberg

Zak Salih discusses his debut novel Let’s Get Back to the Party, named a must-read of 2021 by more than twenty-five publications. Tim Ehrenberg introduces it during Pride month with three gay men — sixty, forty and eighteen — who share a label and little else, which he notes is the setup rather than the joke.

Jim Sulzer

James Sulzer closes the tenth anniversary festival with Writ in Water: A Novel of John Keats, built around “Ode to a Nightingale.” A teacher in Nantucket schools for thirty years and a judge of the Young Writer Award since it began, he also wrote the middle-grade mysteries The Card People and Nantucket Daybreak.

Steve Sheppard with John Stanton

Steve Sheppard discusses Nantucket Nocturne: A Winter’s Idyll, a present-day island story with echoes of the whaling past and a decades-old robbery at its center. He talks with John Stanton — Nantucket Today editor and documentary filmmaker, just back from shooting in Belfast — about writing in and about Nantucket.

Festival Promo

Opening Night Celebration

The festival’s opening night pairs its student writing contest — judged on a prompt drawn from visiting author Kwame Alexander — with reflections on freedom from Sebastian Junger, Imani Perry, Jodi Picoult and Luke Russert. The judges read from the winning essays and poems, among them a spoken-word piece its author could not deliver because he was at his graduation.

Holly Ruth Finigan with Jenny Johnson

Holly Ruth Finigan discusses Wholeheartedly: The One You Want to Find Is You with Jenny Johnson, who has known her for more than two decades. It is a full-circle session: Finigan helped put the festival on the island’s radar when it launched, and returns in its eleventh season as one of its authors.

Climate Panel: Tiya Miles, Sarah Stodola, Jessie Greengrass with Mary Bergman

Jessie Greengrass, Sarah Stodola and Tiya Miles discuss the literature of climate change, from journalism to fiction, in a panel billed as Rising Seas, Writing Stories. Mary Bergman of WCAI’s A Cape Cod Notebook hosts a conversation ranging across The High House, The Last Resort and The Cherokee Rose.

Luke Russert

Luke Russert discusses Look for Me There, his account of the travels he undertook after his father’s death and what they taught him about grief. He is joined by Robert Cocuzzo, then editor of Nantucket Magazine, in a session tied to Fairwinds, the island’s counseling center.

Wyn Cooper

Poet Wyn Cooper reads from his work, talks about his craft, then changes gear to read from Way Out West, his first novel. Five books of poetry in, he opens with a story about a poet who collected blurbs from three dead writers, Sigmund Freud among them.

Sally Bedell Smith with Mary Haft

Biographer Sally Bedell Smith discusses George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Saved the Monarchy with Mary Haft, not long after covering the coronation of King Charles as a CNN royal correspondent. She has written on Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles and Princess Diana, as well as the Kennedys, the Clintons and Pamela Harriman.

Emma Straub with Tim Ehrenberg

Emma Straub discusses This Time Tomorrow with Tim Ehrenberg, a novel she calls a sad book about death that turns out to be about a good deal else. The daughter of a novelist and co-owner of two bookstores with her husband, she describes a childhood in which books covered every surface of the house.

Betsy Tyler & Julie Gerstenblatt with Mary Bergman

Betsy Tyler discusses A Thousand Leagues of Blue, drawn from the life of Susan Veeder, among the first wives to sail aboard a Nantucket whaleship, and Julie Gerstenblatt discusses Daughters of Nantucket, set against the Great Fire of 1846. Mary Bergman of the Nantucket Preservation Trust hosts two novels built from underexplored corners of island history.

Imani Perry with Michael Schulder

Imani Perry, professor of African American studies at Princeton, discusses South to America on the day before Juneteenth. She opens by explaining what the day marks — the belated announcement of emancipation at Galveston in June 1865 — and why the celebration has always carried tension alongside it.

Kirk Wallace Johnson with Mindy Todd

Kirk Wallace Johnson discusses The Fishermen and the Dragon: Fear, Greed, and a Fight for Justice on the Gulf Coast, on the Vietnamese refugee fishermen of the Texas coast and the Klansmen who set out to drive them off the water. He tells Mindy Todd the book began with a Bruce Springsteen song heard on the radio as he drove into the Sierra Nevada on the day his father died.

Stacy Schiff with Nat Philbrick

Stacy Schiff discusses The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams with Nathaniel Philbrick, whose own Bunker Hill covers the same period from another angle. She describes finding Adams lurking at the edges of her Benjamin Franklin book, and starting the project in 2016 while wondering what words like republic and patriot had come to mean.

Tracy Kidder & Dr. Jim O’Connell with Rob Cocuzzo

Tracy Kidder and Dr. Jim O’Connell discuss Rough Sleepers, Kidder’s account of O’Connell’s decades of care for Boston’s homeless population. Rob Cocuzzo hosts a conversation that turns toward Nantucket’s own unsheltered community and the Warming Place that serves it through the winter.

Sebastian Junger with Michael Schulder

Sebastian Junger talks with Michael Schulder about Freedom, and about Tribe before it, starting from the hitchhiking trip across the Northwest he took after college looking for what he calls the real me. He describes growing up with privilege outside Boston, the son of a father who fled the fascists in Spain and then the Nazis in Germany.

Jessie Greengrass with Mary Bergman

Jessie Greengrass reads from The High House, her novel of four people sheltering in a remote house on the English coast as climate change unravels the world around them. She tells Mary Bergman the book is set during that unraveling rather than after it.

Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Dolen Perkins-Valdez discusses Take My Hand, winner of the 2023 NAACP Image Award for outstanding literary work in fiction and of a prize from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Introduced by school librarian Jill Supernant, who describes reading it with anger and then gratitude, she turns to the real case that inspired it.

Danielle Trussoni with Tim Weed

Danielle Trussoni discusses The Puzzle Master, a novel about a puzzle solver named Mike Brink, with Tim Weed. A New York Times bestselling author of seven books and a former chair juror of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, she is introduced by Sara DiVello of Mystery and Thriller Mavens.

Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan with Tim Ehrenberg

Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan discuss Mad Honey, the novel they wrote together, which spent more than six months on the New York Times bestseller list. Picoult has written 28 novels; Boylan, author of eighteen books, wrote the 2003 memoir She’s Not There, the first bestselling work by a transgender American.

Samantha Hunt

Samantha Hunt reads from The Unwritten Book, her uncategorizable investigation of ghosts, which begins at a library circulation desk. She explains that its structure came from W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn — ice chunks held together, as he has it, by gravity or by magic.

Sarah Stodola

Sarah Stodola discusses The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach, a history of the beach resort and its prospects in a warming world. Mindy Todd of WCAI asks how an industry that began with eighteenth-century English wellness retreats became what it is now.

Tiya Miles

Harvard historian and MacArthur fellow Tiya Miles begins with All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake before moving toward her newer work. The only current two-time winner of Yale’s Frederick Douglass Book Prize, she is introduced by Sarah Bois of the Linda Loring Nature Foundation.

Ilyon Woo with Mary Haft

Ilyon Woo discusses Master Slave Husband Wife, the story of the Crafts’ escape from slavery by hiding in plain sight. Mary Haft explains how she tracked Woo down through a childhood connection with Imani Perry, and notes the thread the book runs back to Nantucket.

Festival Promo

Opening Remarks by Tim Ehrenberg

Book Foundation president Tim Ehrenberg opens the 2024 festival with the question he stops people on Nantucket streets to ask: what are you reading? He suggests that trading small talk about the weather for talk about books would leave all of us a little more connected, and quotes Alice Hoffman — books may well be the only true magic.

Young Writers, Kwame Alexander & Safiya Sinclair

The festival honors its Young Writer Award winner and finalists, with Kwame Alexander and Safiya Sinclair joining the evening. Mary Haft describes the visiting author program, which brings writers into every island school and picks them from the names students themselves ask for.

Trish O’Kane & Kitty Pochman

Trish O’Kane discusses Birding to Change the World, her memoir of becoming what she calls an accidental ornithologist after a career as an investigative human rights journalist. She tells Kitty Pochman of the Linda Loring Nature Foundation how Hurricane Katrina destroyed her New Orleans neighborhood and turned her toward the environmental justice she now teaches at the University of Vermont.

Tara Karr Roberts & Mary Bergman

Tara Karr Roberts discusses Wild and Distant Seas, her debut novel, which grows out of a minor character from Moby-Dick — the Nantucket innkeeper who ladles out the chowder. She talks with Mary Bergman, executive director of the Nantucket Preservation Trust, about research she had to begin from a distance when the 2020 festival was called off.

Sara DiVello & Mary Haft

Festival co-chair Sara DiVello discusses Broadway Butterfly, her true-crime novel of a murder in 1920s Manhattan, with co-founder Mary Haft. The book was a CBS New York Book Club pick and drew starred reviews from Booklist and Library Journal.

Safiya Sinclair & Mary Haft

Safiya Sinclair discusses How to Say Babylon, her memoir of a childhood inside a strict Rastafarian household in Jamaica. She is introduced by a reader who grew up Rastafarian in Montego Bay herself, and who asks the whole room to stand and call out the word Babylon.

Rob Benchley, Jim Patrick & John Stanton

Rob Benchley and Jim Patrick discuss Scallop Season: A Nantucket Chronicle, made from a full season aboard the boats — Benchley’s photographs and Patrick’s text, laid out side by side over six months. John Stanton, editor of Nantucket Today and director of the documentary The Last Bay Scallop, calls it long-form journalism that gives fishermen a voice and measures how much the island has changed in 25 years.

Paul Harding & Ann Sullivan

Paul Harding discusses This Other Eden, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and nominated for the National Book Award. He tells Ann Sullivan, vice president of the Book Foundation, how an idle question about racially integrated communities after the Civil War led him to Malaga Island off the coast of Maine, whose residents were forcibly removed in 1912.

Nancy Thayer & Meg Ruley

Nancy Thayer discusses The Summer We Started Over with her literary agent Meg Ruley, who has been reading her since Stepping and Three Women at the Water’s Edge. Forty-two years a Nantucket resident, Thayer traces it all back to a friend’s phone call telling her she had to come see the island.

Manni, Reuben & Nathan Coe

Manni and Reuben Coe discuss their book brother. do. you. love. me. — written by Manni, illustrated by Reuben — whose title is the five-word text Reuben sent from a care home during lockdown, and the rescue it set in motion. Their brother Nathan, a Nantucket photographer, leads them through the eighteen months Reuben spent non-verbal, the twenty-six weeks in a Dorset cottage that brought him back, and why Reuben would rather call Down syndrome “Up syndrome.”

Lara Love Hardin & Tim Ehrenberg

Lara Love Hardin discusses The Many Lives of Mama Love, her memoir of addiction, incarceration and what followed. A six-time New York Times bestselling collaborator who co-wrote the Oprah’s Book Club pick The Sun Does Shine with Anthony Ray Hinton, she talks with Tim Ehrenberg, who says the book made him judge her, then himself, then the systems around them.

Kwame Alexander

Newbery Medalist Kwame Alexander returns to the island a year after touring its schools, to discuss Why Fathers Cry at Night. The memoir braids poetry, prose, letters and family recipes into a book written toward his daughters and his late mother.

Kerri Greenidge & Kaley Kokomoor

Historian Kerri Greenidge discusses The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family, named a best book of the year by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe. A professor at Tufts who co-directs its African American Trail Project, she speaks with Book Foundation executive director Kaley Kokomoor.

Katherine Howe & Tim Ehrenberg

Katherine Howe discusses A True Account, her mystery set in the golden age of piracy, with Tim Ehrenberg. A descendant of both a sailor who fought pirates and three women tried for witchcraft at Salem, she wrote The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and edited the Penguin Book of Witches and the Penguin Book of Pirates.

Gabriella Burnham & Jason Graziadei

Gabriella Burnham, a 2005 graduate of Nantucket High School, discusses her novel Wait, set on the island and reviewed in The New York Times and The Boston Globe. Bookseller Wendy Hudson introduces it as bringing the island’s immigrant community and housing crisis into Nantucket literature; Jason Graziadei of the Nantucket Current leads the conversation.

Erik Larson & Linda Henry

Erik Larson discusses The Demon of Unrest, his account of the months leading to the Civil War, to a packed nine o’clock Friday room. Linda Henry, chief executive of Boston Globe Media, opens by asking how a writer who swore he would never write about the Civil War came to change his mind.

Christy Cashman & Jane Seymour

Christy Cashman discusses her novel The Truth About Horses with Jane Seymour, who confesses she first used the unpublished manuscript to prop up her laptop for Zoom calls while filming in Dublin. She read it eventually, and says she could not believe how extraordinary it was.

Casey Sherman & Sara DiVello

Casey Sherman discusses A Murder in Hollywood, his account of the killing of Lana Turner’s boyfriend Johnny Stompanato by her fourteen-year-old daughter. He tells Sara DiVello that his attention to victims began with his aunt Mary Sullivan, the last victim of the Boston Strangler, whose case he reinvestigated as a young journalist.

Bill Janovitz & Donick Carey

Bill Janovitz discusses his biography of Leon Russell, in a session that doubles as a week-one celebration of Jump Rope, the new album by his band Buffalo Tom. Emmy-winning writer Donick Cary, whose credits run from Letterman and The Simpsons to Parks and Recreation, leads the conversation.

Bianca Bosker & Michael Schulder

Bianca Bosker discusses Get the Picture, her immersion in the art world, with Michael Schulder of Wavemaker Conversations. A reporter so thorough she jokes she would fact-check a love letter, Bosker also wrote The New Yorker’s account of the cheating scandal among master sommeliers.

Ben Mezrich & Linda Henry

Ben Mezrich discusses Breaking Twitter, his account of Elon Musk’s takeover of the company, with Linda Henry of Boston Globe Media. The author of 25 books, he also wrote The Accidental Billionaires, which spent 18 weeks on the bestseller list and became the film The Social Network.

Adrienne Brodeur & Mary Bergman

Adrienne Brodeur discusses Little Monsters, her novel about the Gardner family and its secrets, set on Cape Cod in the summer of 2016. Mary Bergman offers a local coincidence: Nantucket was settled by two Gardner families known as the seeing and the blind, and Brodeur’s are blind to what is happening among them.

Steven Rowley & Tim Ehrenberg

Steven Rowley discusses The Guncle Abroad at the end of a four-week book tour and on his first visit to Nantucket. His earlier novel The Guncle won the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and his fiction now appears in 20 languages.

Festival Promo

Opening Celebration

Book Foundation president Tim Ehrenberg opens the 2025 festival by listing the lives he lived inside the 27 books its 28 authors brought to the island. He frames the weekend around the first line of Ocean Vuong’s new novel — that the hardest thing in the world is to live only once.

Bob Woodward with Linda Henry

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Bob Woodward, more than 50 years into his tenure at The Washington Post, talks with Linda Henry about a career spent holding power to account. He opens with the five microphones Nixon concealed in the Resolute desk, then turns from Watergate to the present moment.

Carl Hiaasen with Elin Hilderbrand & Tim Ehrenberg

Carl Hiaasen, the bestselling novelist and journalist whose books for adults and young readers carry a sharp environmental conscience, joins Elin Hilderbrand and Tim Ehrenberg. The session doubles as the first live recording of their podcast, Books Beach and Beyond, and opens with the Hardy Boys and sports biographies Hiaasen read as a boy.

Charmaine Wilkerson with Mary Haft

Charmaine Wilkerson discusses Good Dirt, her follow-up to the debut novel Black Cake, a Read with Jenna pick that became a Hulu series. Arriving from Rome on the eight o’clock ferry after a delayed flight, she tells Mary Haft how a circuitous route through journalism led her to fiction.

Jason Reynolds with Mary Haft

Jason Reynolds, appointed National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature in 2020, returns to the island to discuss his young adult novel 24 Seconds from Now. He tells Mary Haft that despite a career built on books for young readers, he was not a bookworm as a boy.

Jennifer Finney Boylan

Professor Jennifer Finney Boylan is a Writer in Residence at Columbia’s Barnard College. She has written 18 books, including her memoir, She’s Not There: a Life in Two Genders, which was the first bestselling work by a transgender American. In this video, she talks about her most recent book, Cleavage, which is a memoir-in-essays.

Lisa Genova with Sara DiVello

Neuroscientist and novelist Lisa Genova discusses More or Less Maddie, released in January 2025 and an instant number one bestseller in Canada. She and festival co-chair Sara DiVello, who read an early draft, go behind the writing of a story rooted in a neurological condition.

Patti Callahan Henry with Heather Reisman

Patti Callahan Henry, New York Times bestselling author of 19 novels including Becoming Mrs. Lewis and Surviving Savannah, discusses The Story She Left Behind. Heather Reisman leads the conversation, opening with the one book of hers she keeps returning to.

Suzy Welch with Linda Henry

Suzy Welch, an NYU Stern professor and three-time New York Times bestselling author, discusses Becoming You: A Proven Method for Crafting Your Authentic Life and Career. She talks with Linda Henry about a path that ran from crime reporting in Miami through Bain & Company to the classroom.

Ann Leary with Lisa Genova

Ann Leary discusses I’ve Tried Being Nice, her new collection of essays, in the closing event of the festival’s first day. Lisa Genova interviews — returning the favor from January, when Leary interviewed her — and likens the collection to David Sedaris.

Dawn Tripp with Sara DiVello

Dawn Tripp opens the 2025 festival with Sara DiVello, discussing Jackie, her novel about Jacqueline Kennedy. The author of five novels, including the award-winning Georgia and The Season of Open Water, she reads a passage on why the power of words feels more profound in a divided world.

Jenny Johnson & Billy Costa

Jenny Johnson and Billy Costa, the longest-running television duo in Boston and winners of some ten Emmy awards between them, discuss their cookbook A Taste of Boston. Rob Cocuzzo interviews the pair, who host Dining Playbook on NESN and Food for Thought on WBZ radio.

Meenakshi Ahamed with Michael Schulder

Meenakshi Ahamed discusses Indian Genius: The Meteoric Rise of Indians in America with Michael Schulder. Her previous book, A Matter of Trust: India-US Relations from Truman to Trump, was a finalist for the Council on Foreign Relations book award.

Alice Hoffman with Sara DiVello

Alice Hoffman discusses When We Flew Away, her novel of Anne Frank’s life before the diary and before the family went into hiding. The author of more than 30 works of fiction, including Practical Magic and The Dovekeepers, she is joined by festival co-chair Sara DiVello.

Victor Luckerson with Shantaw Bloise-Murphy

Journalist Victor Luckerson discusses Built From the Fire, his history of Tulsa’s Greenwood district and a neighborhood that refused more than once to be erased. A former staff writer at The Ringer, he was nominated for a National Magazine Award for his reporting on the 1923 Rosewood massacre.

Imani Perry with Mary Haft

National Book Award winner and MacArthur fellow Imani Perry discusses Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People. She traces the book to her late grandmother’s blue-painted bedroom and a conversation there with her young cousin.

Wally Lamb with Tim Ehrenberg

Wally Lamb discusses The River Is Waiting, released that week and named the 115th Oprah’s Book Club selection. Tim Ehrenberg opens on trying to smuggle the 900-page I Know This Much Is True into his college lectures; Lamb also spent 20 years leading a writing workshop at a Connecticut women’s prison.

Kim Coleman Foote with Kaley Kokomoor

Kim Coleman Foote discusses her debut novel Coleman Hill, a finalist for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and an NAACP Image Award. Drawn from her own family’s move north during the Great Migration, it grew out of a writing life that began when she was seven.

Chris Sheppard with Rob Cocuzzo

Chris Sheppard, who teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago after years teaching the great books at the University of Chicago, discusses a book that reads Greek mythology through baseball. Rob Cocuzzo — his cousin, and the former editor of Nantucket Magazine — leads a Father’s Day conversation dedicated to Sheppard’s late father.

Patrick Radden Keefe

New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe discusses Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks, drawn from his magazine reporting — work his longtime editor once described by saying that in Keefe’s hands an abyss becomes a mirror. He traces a path from a first book on eavesdropping by the NSA to the podcast Wind of Change and the screen adaptation of Say Nothing.

Loretta Ross with Michael Schulder

Loretta Ross discusses Calling In: How to Start Making Change, and why the emphasis belongs on the word start. Michael Schulder, a Book Foundation board member and the host of Wavemaker Conversations, leads the festival’s final daytime session.

The Next Chapter: Inspiring A New Generation

The festival honors the winner and finalists of its Young Writer Award, an essay competition held across the high school, together with the Dunn scholarship. Mary Haft thanks the island’s English teachers and school librarians, whose partnership carries the Book Foundation’s work through the school year.

Molly Jong-Fast with Kate Brosnan

Vanity Fair special correspondent Molly Jong-Fast discusses How to Lose Your Mother, her memoir of a year in which her mother, the novelist Erica Jong, declined into dementia while her husband was diagnosed with cancer. Kate Brosnan, co-founder of the Nantucket Project, leads the conversation.

Ocean Vuong with Tim Ehrenberg

Ocean Vuong discusses The Emperor of Gladness, an Oprah’s Book Club pick that arrived to reviews placing him among the great American novelists. Tim Ehrenberg opens on the book’s own instruction to read slowly — to put it down after ten minutes and look out the window.

Jonathan Waterman with Patti Callahan Henry

Adventurer, naturalist and former park ranger Jonathan Waterman discusses Into the Thaw, his account of a changing Arctic. He tells Patti Callahan Henry that he knew at sixteen he wanted to travel and test himself physically, and found his calling as a writer while photographing expeditions forty years ago.

Adam Ross with Elin Hilderbrand

Adam Ross discusses Playworld, the novel that followed his debut Mr. Peanut and which Ron Charles of The Washington Post called good enough to give readers hope for the year ahead. Elin Hilderbrand, who asked to take over the interview after reading it, calls it the best book she has read in decades.

Wright Thompson with Luke Russert

Wright Thompson discusses The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, his account of the killing of Emmett Till and the building where it happened. A Mississippian who never heard Till’s name until college, he reads Luke Russert the single paragraph the state’s current history textbook gives the murder.

Festival Promo

15th Annual Celebration Evening

Co-founders Wendy Hudson and Mary Haft open the fifteenth-anniversary evening with the story of how the festival began, from a tattered notebook of ideas to a foundation of its own. Tayari Jones, Patrick Ryan, Julian Brave NoiseCat and Ann Patchett then speak on how reading and writing shape their understanding of the world.

Tim Ehrenberg’s Opening Speech

Book Foundation president Tim Ehrenberg opens the 15th annual festival with a rhyming roll call of the weekend’s 32 visiting authors. He then turns to crystal, the traditional fifteenth-anniversary gift, as a figure for the way a good book leaves the world a little clearer.

Adriana Trigiani with Sara DiVello

New York Times bestselling author Adriana Trigiani discusses The View From Lake Como with Sara DiVello on festival Saturday. Her 21 books of fiction and nonfiction have been published in 38 languages, and the two writers, both from Appalachia, open by tracing the region’s literary lineage.

Ann Patchett with Tim Ehrenberg

Ann Patchett joins Book Foundation president Tim Ehrenberg to discuss Whistler, her new number one New York Times bestseller, on shelves this month. A Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Dutch House and the owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, she has received the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Humanities Medal.

Julian Sancton with Sara DiVello

Julian Sancton discusses Neptune’s Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire, his account of the hunt for the San José. On his first visit to Nantucket, the author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth tells Sara DiVello that his fascination with the sea began with a childhood favorite — Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.

Nicholas Boggs with Mitchell Jackson

Nicholas Boggs discusses Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in more than 30 years, told through four of the people closest to him. He is joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Mitchell Jackson, author of The Residue Years, Survival Math and Fly.

Tayari Jones with Tim Ehrenberg

Tayari Jones talks with Tim Ehrenberg about Kin, her fifth novel and an Oprah’s Book Club selection, in the closing session of festival Saturday. Her earlier novel An American Marriage won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and an NAACP Image Award and has been published in two dozen countries.

Richard Russo with Chrissy Brown

Richard Russo marks the 25th anniversary of Empire Falls, the novel that won him the Pulitzer Prize, in conversation with the Book Foundation’s Chrissy Brown. He describes where the book came from and looks ahead to Under the Falls, his novel due out in August.

Mitchell Jackson, Marlon James, and Lisa Genova

Pulitzer Prize winner Mitchell Jackson, Booker Prize winner Marlon James and neuroscientist Lisa Genova share a stage to answer why each of them writes. The conversation ranges across identity, language and the ways storytelling shapes how we understand one another.

John Vaillant

John Vaillant, author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce, discusses Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World. The book opens with one of the most destructive wildfires in Canadian history and widens into an account of what a hotter, more fire-prone world means for everyone.

Angela Flournoy with Shantaw Bloise Murphy

Angela Flournoy discusses The Wilderness, which follows a group of Black women friends across 20 years, from their early twenties into their forties. She tells Shantaw Bloise Murphy she set out to write a coming-of-age novel about becoming an adult rather than simply leaving adolescence.

Patrick Ryan with Ann Patchett

Patrick Ryan, editor-in-chief of the literary magazine One Story and author of the collections The Dream Life of Astronauts and Send Me, discusses his novel Buckeye. He is joined by his closest friend, Ann Patchett, who called the book a glorious sweep of a novel.

Dr. Joshua Bennett

Poet and scholar Joshua Bennett, distinguished chair of the humanities at MIT, presents We the People of the United States, a book-length poem marking the country’s 250th anniversary. Built around people and inventions drawn from each of the 50 states, he describes it as an ode to invention and to the right to read and to dream.

Julian Brave NoiseCat with Mary Haft

Writer and Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat discusses We Survived the Night, named one of 2025’s best books by The New Yorker. He speaks with co-founder Mary Haft about telling Indigenous stories that reach past loss toward survival and reclamation.

Jenna Bush Hager with Tim Ehrenberg featuring Shannon Garvey, Juliet Faithfull, and Emma Brodie

Jenna Bush Hager, founder of the Read with Jenna book club and co-host of Today with Jenna and Friends, talks with Tim Ehrenberg about championing new writers. She is joined by Shannon Garvey, Juliet Faithfull and Emma Brodie, three authors published through her Thousand Voices imprint.

Alice Hoffman with Laura Zigman, and Adriana Trigiani

Alice Hoffman, Laura Zigman and Adriana Trigiani gather for a session given over entirely to dogs and the writers who love them. Hoffman describes assembling The Best Dog in the World: Essays on Love, writing to friends about their dogs and finding that even relationships she thought she knew surprised her.

Isaac Fitzgerald with Wendy Hudson

Isaac Fitzgerald discusses American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed, which follows both the real-life John Chapman and the myth he became. A familiar book recommender on the Today show and a contributor to The New York Times and The Atlantic, he is joined by Wendy Hudson, who owns Mitchell’s Book Corner and Nantucket Bookworks and co-founded the festival.

Jamie Siminoff with Kate Brosnan

Jamie Siminoff, the inventor and founder of Ring and the proprietor of Nantucket’s Handlebar Cafe, discusses his book Ding Dong with Kate Brosnan. He revisits building the company that transformed home security after becoming one of the best-known rejections in Shark Tank history.

Vanessa Riley with Dawn Tripp

Vanessa Riley, author of Island Queen and Queen of Exiles, brings the seventeenth-century pirate Jacquotte Delahaye to the page. She talks with Dawn Tripp about recovering the life of a woman who took to the sea at a time when women could not own land or hold a bank account.

Liaquat Ahamed with Michael Schulder

Liaquat Ahamed, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Lords of Finance, returns with 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World. He tells Michael Schulder, founder of the Wavemaker Conversations podcast, why he believes the fault lines of that first global financial crisis still run through the modern economy.

Ruta Sepetys with Mary Haft

Internationally bestselling novelist Ruta Sepetys discusses A Fortune of Sand, introduced by the island’s middle school and high school librarians. Sepetys visited Nantucket schools the previous fall through the festival’s visiting author program, which reaches every student from prekindergarten through twelfth grade.

Lois Romano with Kathleen Matthews

Washington journalist Lois Romano, a veteran of The Washington Post and Politico, discusses The Inconvenient Widow: The Torment, Trial, and Triumph of Mary Todd Lincoln. Television journalist Kathleen Matthews joins her for a conversation about a first lady history has largely misread.

Laura Zigman with Sara DiVello

Laura Zigman, whose novel Animal Husbandry became the film Someone Like You, discusses her seventh novel, The Author Weekend. She and Sara DiVello talk about writing comedy set inside the publishing world, with its jealousies and its frenemies.

Belle Burden with Elin Hilderbrand

Belle Burden discusses Strangers, her memoir of marriage, which Vogue called the memoir of the year and which Netflix is adapting with Gwyneth Paltrow in the starring role. She is joined by Elin Hilderbrand, Nantucket’s own New York Times bestselling novelist.

Norah O’Donnell with Linda Henry

CBS News senior correspondent Norah O’Donnell discusses We the Women, her New York Times bestseller recovering the women who shaped the nation’s founding ideals. She speaks with Linda Henry, chief executive of Boston Globe Media Partners and a four-time Emmy-winning television producer.

Rick Tulsky with Adam Nee

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Rick Tulsky, a lawyer who founded the nonprofit newsroom Injustice Watch, discusses a career spent fighting injustice. Book Foundation executive director Adam Nee leads the conversation on the closing morning of the festival.

Young Writer Award with special guest, Ruta Sepetys & Tharon Dunn Scholarship

The festival honors the winner and finalists of its Young Writer Award, an essay competition held across Nantucket High School. Ruta Sepetys, whose books set this year’s essay theme, tells the students how she lost her nerve as a young writer and did not publish her first novel until her forties.