- On this episode of "American Stories," a reading road trip.

We are heading to the Pelican State.

- Come along as we celebrate the stories in bookish culture of Louisiana.

From the shadowy allure of Anne Rice's "Interview with the Vampire" to deeply reflective stories from the countryside, like Ernest J. Gaines' "Bloodline."

- We will also hear from inspiring writers who call the state home, like romance author Farrah Rochon, children's author and surrealist William Joyce, award-winning poet Julie Kane and renowned novelist Maurice Carlos Ruffin.

- I would say anybody that loves history, that loves literature, that loves architecture, if you come to the city and hang around the French Quarter or hang around uptown New Orleans, you're gonna feel that feeling immediately as you're, you know, on the street car or taking a walk down Magazine Street, it's still there to this day and it's gonna be there forever.

- Join PBS Books, the Library of Congress and the Louisiana Center for the Book on a literary adventure through Louisiana.

This is "American Stories: A Reading Road Trip."

(lively music) - Well, hello and welcome.

Hi, I'm Fred Nahhat here with Lauren Smith from PBS Books.

- Join us as we explore the storied past of the United States and celebrate the writers who continue to build our literary landscape.

Be sure to like, share and subscribe right now so you never miss an episode of "American Stories: A reading Road Trip" here on PBS books.

- Today we take a trip down south to Louisiana from the moss-draped bayous to the vibrant streets of New Orleans, Louisiana is a place where mystery and magic linger in the air.

- But what exactly is it about Louisiana's soulful spirit that inspires the voices that rise from its pages?

(screen whooshing) - What's special about Louisiana?

I mean, we've got our food, our people, our culture.

- If you can call New York a melting pot, well, New Orleans and Louisiana is a gumbo, a mixture of all kinds of flavors and ingredients.

- We have the Acadiana, the Cajuns in West Louisiana.

You have the Creoles down here in the New Orleans area.

And I think when you get all those people together, all those histories together, you can't help but have a richer environment and community.

- I love Louisiana because of the people.

I don't care what part of the state I'm in, everybody here is just so friendly.

That friendliness is a part of the work.

Even in something like a horror story, the characters are kind of charming, which is always very interesting to me.

So I love the charm of Louisiana.

- In addition to the culture, the landscape, you know, the Bayou cypress trees, live oak trees draped with Spanish moss, you know, alligators, all that too gives the state, you know, a unique, almost gothic sort of feel.

- Louisiana has, well, a verdant and atmospheric literary history.

- I mean, you can walk by Anne Rice's house, you can go through the French Quarter and imagine the stories that unfolded there.

If you're lucky, you'll catch somebody in Jackson Square yelling for Stella.

It's a living storybook city.

- You can't walk a block in New Orleans without encountering three or four novels in progress.

And if you saunter, you know, if you amble, you're likely to see something that you did not expect.

(screen whooshing) (tranquil music) - Louisiana may be famous for Mardi Gras and parades, but its true magic lies in the stories that simmer beneath the surface.

This is a state steeped in history.

It's shaped by diverse cultures and touched by the supernatural.

Let's explore how these rich ingredients have flavored the voices of its unforgettable writers.

- George Washington Cable is probably one of the better known writers out of the post-bellum period.

Two of his more noted works were his collection of short stories, the "Old Creole Days," and then his novel, "The Grandissimes," and his fiction often focused on the sites, the dialects, different peoples in Louisiana.

- Cable was really good at showing the sort of layer cake mentality of the society, which included, you know, people who were like aristocrats and people who were sort of everyday workers, people who were free Black folks of color, and people who were also enslaved.

And I think he was a very early version of let's get into the details of this very complicated culture.

And he really laid some groundwork for all of us in the future.

- He is like early Stephen King on the Bayou.

I mean, he is amazing, especially in his short stories.

There's often these Creole French aristocrats who've made their fortunes like slave trading, you know, gambling, you know, these evil, corrupt protagonists, and horrible things happen to them, often with a kind of supernatural twist.

You know, he's amazing.

(author chuckling) - Now, he did receive some criticism from those who felt that the way he portrayed Creoles, they felt it was demeaning.

And one of his critics was Grace King who became a well-known novelistic historian, but she actually started writing after being challenged by a magazine editor up in the North to counteract what they saw as the negative portrayal of Creoles in Cable's writing.

- The thing that makes Grace interesting is that she wasn't the kind of person to take writing that was complicated, but had like what she saw as errors.

She wasn't afraid to correct that.

I think that one of Cable's issues is that he was definitely writing from a white male perspective and he had some blind spots and I think that for King, she could easily see what the blind spots were and she wasn't afraid to, I guess, you know, confront those blind spots and clear things up in her own writing.

And so one of the values of her is that she said, "Hey, I know this guy created this sort of romantic writing that seemed accurate, but it really wasn't."

He got a lot of things wrong and she got a lot of things right.

- One Louisiana author that I'm sure many people are familiar with is Ernest J. Gaines who wrote "A Lesson Before Dying."

- He was the very first recipient of our Louisiana Writer Award.

He's considered really to be one of the most important Southern writers.

- I think it was my freshman year of college.

And I read "A Lesson Before Dying" and it was one of those books that kind of changed my perspective on everything.

It showed me as a writer how to develop a flawed character, but still have them just, you know, be this type of person that people could see themselves in.

- Gaines is very close to my heart.

When I was a young person, a teenager, I read his collection of short stories, "Bloodline."

I think as a young boy who would love to read so much, I couldn't find a lot of folks who looked like myself, like my parents or my other loved ones.

And so reading his work was really impressive to me.

He was also important because he was somebody who was writing about outside of New Orleans, this is sort of off the beaten path he's writing about, these are people who don't appear in many films or, you know, those sort of things, and he did it so well.

- And we've got the Pulitzer Prize-winning Shirley Ann Grau.

She explored race relations in the South during civil rights, and this garnered her some death threats from the Ku Klux Klan, which she ignored.

- She had a KKK cross burned on her lawn, and I think that is probably the highest honor that any Southern writer can get.

- One of the first books I read set in New Orleans was Shirley Ann Grau's "Nine Women," and she really was ahead of her time and provocative.

- I did read her book that won the Pulitzer Prize back in the '60s, "The Keepers of the House."

And I really like in her book how she is willing to be critical of people.

I mean, even though it's fiction, people that could have been her white ancestors and say, "Hey, the way that we treated African Americans, Native Americans, the way that we sort of hoarded wealth and we were very selfish in this family was a bad thing."

- So much of her work is really rooted in the South, but her themes of, I mean, love, power, societal conflict, I mean, it's all universal.

Anne Rice is by far one of the most popular writers of the 20th century to have come out of Louisiana.

I mean, she wrote about vampires, witches, mummies, wrote historical fiction, erotic fiction.

Her first book, "Interview with the Vampire," was written in only five weeks.

- "Interview with the Vampire" is so good, not just because of its plot but, you know, because she was pouring her soul into that book.

You know, her own daughter died of leukemia when she was, I think the same age as Claudia, the child vampire.

And I think, you know, it was Anne Rice's way of keeping her daughter alive.

- I think Anne Rice has become synonymous with New Orleans in a way.

- She is playing with some sort of cliches, you know, about the darkness of New Orleans culture and vampires and magic and these kinds of things.

And yet she's subverting about making these characters feel like they're really living, they're really real people, even though they're "the undead."

- [Speaker] And you cannot go by her house at First and Chestnut without seeing the tour guide, a pilgrim, you know, just some soul there looking for a little bit of her.

- Though Tennessee Williams wasn't a native Louisianan, he became one.

- Tennessee Williams is, you know, certainly one of the most iconic of all the New Orleans writers.

And he's somebody who speaks in a big part to how the creative culture of New Orleans can be very good at fostering creativity.

So he comes down to the city, he sort of finds out who he is.

He's able to embrace his life as a playwright, his life as a young gay man.

He's a part of the cultural and societal scene, and he's sort of, you know, absorbing all of the different characters and places.

And so he makes all these amazing plays that, you know, become these sort of pillars of not only Southern literature, but also of American literature.

- Tennessee Williams, he got the baroque end of it really well and the sort of gothic romance and hilarity and absurdity.

- One of the great things about Tennessee Williams, someone told me once that there's not a night in the world where people are not going to a production of "A Streetcar Named Desire," watching the film version or seeing some kind of Tennessee Williams play.

He has this global reach, you know, with these stories of heartbreak and neediness and love and lust.

He is part of the language in which we speak of our city.

(screen whooshing) (lively music) - Louisiana's culture is a rich tapestry woven from generations of resilience, celebration, and creativity.

One author who highlights these voices is author Maurice Carlos Ruffin, - Maurice Carlos Ruffin is a delightful person and a wonderful writer.

A New York Times reviewer once wrote of him that "at any moment, Ruffin can summon the kind of magic that makes you want to slow down, reread and experience the pleasure of him crystallizing an image again."

- My personal background is that I am somebody who was a corporate lawyer for about 16 years, but I think that Louisiana and New Orleans in particular is a sort of sirens' call towards creativity.

If you have any skills that you can use, whether it's music or filmmaking or storytelling, you're gonna do it eventually.

And so "The American Daughters" is me thinking about my ancestors and the people in their life, say around the 1840s through the 1860s.

I'm wondering about like my women ancestors and wondering what would it have been like to be an African-descended woman living in New Orleans in 1850?

Long story short, the book is about a bunch of Black women and girls who become spies.

They form a spy ring to fight the Confederates and create more freedom for people in their community.

And so it was really fun writing the book.

It's my first national bestseller and I really enjoyed it and people seem to like the book a lot.

I spent about 20 years doing research on that book.

But you have to keep in mind that being a New Orleanian, again, this city that is a very old city, and we've kept a lot of our history alive.

We still have a lot of the old buildings, a lot of the old landscapes.

So I wasn't really forced to like have to do too much research.

It's right there in front of my face.

The city, it really helped me to write the book and make it very vibrant and full of history and full of great tension and plot.

It's very much intentional that I try to seek out voices that are underrepresented in fiction and give them a place in my work.

It's about the people that I have met and loved in my life and give them a chance to have their places in the stories.

And so when I do that, I find it's actually a lot easier to write stories because the stories exist.

I seek to both entertain and educate, as well as create empathy.

And what happens is that people who read my books are often delighted and surprised by the characters, the plots and the details because they've never seen anywhere else.

- While Maurice Carlos Ruffin brings Louisiana to life through bold prose, Julie Kane offers a different lens, one shaped by poetry.

(screen whooshing) - Julie Kane is actually a native of Boston, but she moved to Louisiana almost 50 years ago, and she has served as the Louisiana Poet Laureate.

That was from 2011 to 2013.

- It definitely shifted my writing.

I arrived in Baton Rouge at first, and initially, I was sort of in culture shock.

I got to New Orleans and oh my God, you know, just the magnificence, you know, the music began creeping into my poems.

You know, I started writing blues poems.

I had a whole series about the Maple Leaf Bar in New Orleans, "Rhythm & Booze," which is my National Poetry Series winning book.

And also, I would say "Jazz Funeral."

You can tell just from the title, that book is very much about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, and some other losses that I had gone through at the time.

That book is structured like a New Orleans jazz funeral with, you know, the march to the graveyard, you know, kind of poems that are about those losses.

And then in the middle, the eulogy.

And then the last part, once the person is, you know, buried and, you know, all that mourning, graveside is over, the band starts playing kind of celebratory music on the way back.

And people start, you know, twirling their umbrellas, you know, 'cause the soul has gone to heaven.

And, you know, life goes on, life goes on.

You've gotta value every moment.

So, you know, the poems at the end are more, you know, uplifting.

(screen whooshing) - While Julie Kane explores themes through poignant poetry, William Joyce brings a surrealist lens to childhood, infusing imagination with vibrant color and whimsical storytelling.

- William Joyce is a native of Shreveport, Louisiana, where he still lives and works.

He's won an Academy Award, multiple Emmy awards.

He's won several Society of Illustrators awards.

He was a 2008 recipient of the Louisiana Writer Award.

In fact, he was the first children's author to win that award.

- I was five years old when my parents took me to Mardi Gras for the first time in New Orleans.

It's like somebody kicked over the TV set and all the cartoons spilled out.

And that's, you know, the universe I was living in for that week or so was free of the usual constrictions.

Like, grownups were acting more like children than children.

As a cultural experience at an early age, and then one that you repeat over and over again, There's nothing that can turbocharge a surrealist more than Mardi Gras.

And I guess that's it.

In essence, what I am is a homegrown surrealist, right?

Anything can happen in a children's book and in fact, it's better if it does.

But where it's really, really like become central to the story in the world, it's probably the most vivid example of that is a book I did called "The Fantastic Flying Books "of Mr.

Morris Lessmore," which I also made into a short film.

And we won an Oscar for that short film.

The book is the most successful of my books and it is the most surreal in many ways.

But it's all sort of a series of responses to my childhood growing up here and what happened in Hurricane Katrina.

And then, I don't know, I guess it was part of my way of helping without even realizing what I was gonna do.

I mean, I didn't know that this would help people, I just wanted to know what had happened.

But I think it helped people to tell their stories.

And then if I was gonna talk about one book and how being from Louisiana has affected my work, it would be that, "The Fantastic Flying Books "of Mr.

Morris Lessmore."

(screen whooshing) - From the whimsical imagination of William Joyce, we turn to Farrah Rochon whose contemporary romance has shined with heart, humor and a strong sense of place.

- I was born and raised in Louisiana.

Even though I did a small stint in Austin, Texas for just a few years, I had to run back home because I am a Louisiana girl.

I have accepted it.

I love to set books in Louisiana and in New Orleans because I always think it's a character in and of itself.

I've done multiple series that have been set in Louisiana.

My very first series, my Holmes Brothers series was set in New Orleans.

I've done my Bayou Dream series that is my love letter to my small hometown, which is a small town on the Louisiana Bayou.

But my more recent romance series, I set it in New Orleans, but I purposely set it outside of the French Quarter.

We call it the doggy series, "Pardon my Frenchie" and "Pugs & Kisses" because it's centered around dogs.

But I set it in other parts of the city.

So it's set in the uptown area around Audubon Park and St.

Charles Avenue.

And, you know, I have the streetcar going along the cover of one of them because they too, they are rich in their own history.

And I just think that New Orleans and Louisiana is so much more than just that one area that Hollywood tends to focus on in other books.

So it was just an honor to showcase more of the state to my readers.

(lively music ending) (screen whooshing) (happy music) - Where great writers emerge, great libraries often stand behind them.

Louisiana's libraries are more than shelves of books, they're gateways to imagination, learning and community.

- Louisiana, unlike any state in the country, doesn't have counties, but it has instead parishes.

There are 64 parishes, and beyond, that there are 68 Louisiana Library systems.

In every one of those libraries, there is something special for its people.

- The East Baton Rouge Parish Library, it has been repeatedly named one of America's Star Libraries by Library Journal for many consecutive years.

They've got an award-winning main library branch.

It's the main library in Goodwood here in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

It's a spectacular facility.

All libraries really for, you know, whether they've got a ton of money in the budget or just a little bit, what they're able to bring to their communities is phenomenal for any library.

So sometimes I feel disingenuous talking about the big ones because they're doing a ton of work, but so are those small ones.

- I don't know if other states are as dependent on Bookmobiles.

You know, there's still large parts of Louisiana that are rural, you know, that even here in Natchitoches Parish, you know, we depend on Bookmobiles to go out from the library, you know, to reach those parts.

It's a huge parish.

- In the early days of libraries being established in Louisiana, the state library being established, there were demonstration libraries set up throughout the state, and there are wonderful pictures of the Bookmobiles out in the country and children lined up waiting their turn to go into the Bookmobile and pick books for them to read until the Bookmobile comes back again and they're all dressed up as if they were going to church.

Those pictures are just phenomenal.

- It's like a great big van, you know, with lots of books inside and, you know, people that go up inside and can actually browse the books.

But, you know, the Bookmobiles are very, very important, you know, for reaching, especially kids.

- The Milton Latter Library is my neighborhood branch and I'm very attached to it because it is, you know, you drive down St.

Charles Avenue or you take the streetcar and you see all these big, beautiful houses.

And there is a library in one of those houses and it's purely aspirational 'cause anyone could go into this mansion.

You know, it's the people's mansion.

- I promise you, you walk through the doors and it's like, you could feel the history, you can feel the stories in there.

And it's such a unique place because it is an old house.

So you feel like you're in this old house and you're surrounded by books.

What could be better than that?

- It's got quite a storied and tragic past and it is beautiful.

You ought to look it up.

- There's a library in the French Quarter that is not a part of the main system.

It's the Williams Research Center.

It's a block from the Supreme Court.

And actually, a lot of my research for "The American Daughters" in that building about 20 years ago, and they have these amazing archives of hard-to-find documents and, you know, articles, that sort of thing.

- It is such a serene and beautiful library and it's attached to an exhibit space, so there's always something to look at.

It's a non-circulating library, so you do your work in that wonderful research center.

And the librarians there are so helpful and can lead you to things you didn't know existed.

So that is always worth a visit.

- The Shreve Memorial Library in Shreveport, Louisiana in all its incarnations.

The old downtown library was my favorite.

It was built in the 1920s and had that Moorish architecture thing going on.

I just love libraries that are like that, that have that old piles of books feel.

They have a smell that no other libraries have.

It just has this, like, you know it in a heartbeat when you go back into one of those old buildings.

It's the smell of stories.

(William chuckling) (lively music) (screen whooshing) (tranquil music) - Libraries may spark a love for reading, but Louisiana's bookstores keep that flame burning.

Let's take a look at some of the local gems that serve as gathering places for stories, community and discovery.

- I jokingly refer to New Orleans as America's smallest major city.

We only have about 330,000 people in the city, so it's pretty small compared to say New York or Los Angeles.

But we have an amazing array of bookstores.

So my favorites, I mean, they're kind of all my favorites, but I'll mention a few of 'em that I love so much.

Baldwin & Company.

Baldwin & Company is a Black-owned bookstore that is sort of in the downtown area near Treme.

It's been around for a few years now.

They are the absolute best bookstore in the entire state for events.

You will see writers who are coming from all over the country, all over the world, and the turnout is always spectacular.

Sometimes it's 100 people show up for it, 500.

There's a built-in coffee shop, there's a podcast studio, there's an outdoor courtyard, fantastic bookstore.

- Faulkner House Books is another wonderful bookstore in the French Quarter.

- It's so tiny that they only let six people at a time into it.

And it's the actual building where William Faulkner lived in New Orleans when he was writing "Soldiers' Pay."

And it's tiny, but has, you know, antiques, chandelier, pictures, photographs, you know, pictures of Faulkner, letters and things like that.

You know, it's first editions, you know, it's definitely something that any book lover has to pop in and visit, but, you know, don't take more than five people with you.

- [Speaker] A great bookstore in New Orleans is Garden District Bookstore.

- It's again, such a great place where, you know, community comes together.

They have people who knit and crochet.

Every week, there's like a night people can come together and knit and crochet and talk books.

It is such a fabulous place.

There's this one table where there's a puzzle and you can just come in and add to the puzzle and they just leave it out there for people to work with?

It is such a great store.

It truly is one of my favorite places in the entire state.

- I remember meeting the owner of Cavalier House Books when he was just out of high school, and he came to talk to us about the Louisiana Book Festival and he said, "Oh, I work at a used bookstore here in town, and I'm hoping to go into the book business."

Little did I suspect that 20 years later, that young man would be the owner of Cavalier House Books, our official book seller for the Louisiana Book Festival.

He's moved into a larger store in his original town just down the street.

He's now in a landmark historic building.

And just last year, he opened a new store about an hour away in Lafayette.

So it's a wonderful family, wonderful bookstore in Denham Springs in Lafayette.

- We have so many, I could go on and on, but I love a good bookstore.

And a good bookstore loves me because I can never leave an independent bookstore without buying a book.

(screen whooshing) (lively music) - In Louisiana, there is no shortage of literary landmarks to explore.

Whether you're walking down the street or into a museum, there's a unique experience for everyone.

- This is a little unusual but I would tell people that the biggest literary landmark we have in New Orleans is The National WWII Museum because it was the vision of a writer, historian Stephen Ambrose, and it is the repository of all of his great stories and oral histories, and his way of giving back to the people who gave him his stories for the books.

And it's so interesting to me.

I can't prove this, but I think Stephen Ambrose's vision may be the only literary vision to have altered a city's skyline.

- You know, if you come to New Orleans, the city itself is like a gigantic landmark, but specifically if you think about the work of somebody like Tennessee Williams and "A Streetcar Named Desire," and so today we still have streetcar lines you can ride.

And so if you go downtown New Orleans to Canal Street, you can ride the streetcar, get off, walk into the French Quarter and have that same experience from, you know, when the character goes, you know, "Stella," he kind of hollers out.

You know, we have those balconies right there in the French Quarter near Jackson Square that you can have that experience.

I would say anybody that loves history, that loves literature, that loves architecture, if you come to the city and hang around the French Quarter or hang around uptown New Orleans, you're gonna feel that feeling immediately as you're, you know, on the streetcar or taking a walk down Magazine Street.

It's still there to this day and it's gonna be there forever.

- Another literary landmark down in New Orleans is the Hotel Monteleone and their Carousel Bar & Lounge.

The hotel actually opened up in 1886 and then the bar and lounge was built in 1949.

And there have been so many literary lights that have been guests at that bar, at that hotel.

So many works, so many people have been inspired by that location.

It's a beautiful place.

- The Hotel Monteleone is haunted.

I personally believe that everything in the French Quarter is haunted.

That's why I think it... yes, everything.

I've stayed there and it's haunted, the whole place, but the Hotel Monteleone, it's known for being haunted.

There are certain rooms that people, I can't remember which particular rooms, but people definitely see things, but it's also a great literary spot because of there is a Tennessee Williams room there.

- One of my very favorite places in New Orleans is City Park, which is a very old park.

It's bigger than Central Park in New York.

You know, it's got stuff like an old wooden carousel that I think was initially pulled by mules, you know, before there was electricity, that's still running.

There's a magnificent sculpture garden.

It has a Japanese botanical garden that is named for the writer Lafcadio Hearne and oh, Dueling Oaks.

You know, all those scenes in Southern novels of, you know, gentlemen having duels.

The park has magnificent old oak trees, you know, with Spanish moss hanging from them.

And there were two in particular that were kind of famous for the duels that took place under them.

One got destroyed by a hurricane, but one of them is still left with a little plaque on it that you can see.

- Also in New Orleans on Canal Street, there's a statue of Ignatius J. Reilly who is the main character of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole, which is a wonderful book.

He's located on Canal Street because the opening of the scene in "A Confederacy of Dunces" is where Ignatius plans to meet his mother under the clock at the DH Holmes store.

And DH Holmes used to be located right there where the statue's located now.

- I think one thing that people don't really realize in Louisiana is that we have some really great state parks.

And when I was writing my Bayou Dream series, I remember Fontainebleau State Park.

If you wanna see the Louisiana Bayou, feel the humidity on your skin and smell it, and just, it's gorgeous.

It's also a great way to just sit and read a book, you know?

It's quiet.

You've just got, you know, the frogs going and the little, you know, whatever chirps out there, but it feels like you're in another world.

It's just so peaceful and I love it.

(screen whooshing) (lively music) - You might know that the Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, but what you might not know is that they've established a local Center for the Book in all 50 states and six territories.

Their mission?

To make the Library of Congress and its resources even more accessible to all Americans.

- I'm Lee Ann Potter, the Director of Professional Learning and Outreach Initiatives at the Library of Congress.

The Library of Congress is the Congressional Library and the National Library of the United States and the largest library in the world with more than 181 million items, from photographs to maps, from motion pictures to sound recordings from newspapers to manuscripts and more.

Oh and yes, there are books, millions of them.

In this series, "American Stories: A Reading Road Trip," you'll hear about many books and authors and poems and short stories and more, and how together they make up our nation's literary heritage.

As you do, I hope you will keep in mind that while they are all unique and come from different parts of our vast country, they all have something very important in common: they all live in the collections of the Library of Congress.

You'll also hear about the library's affiliated Centers for the Book.

There is one in each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands.

These Centers promote reading, libraries and literacy, and they celebrate and share their state or territory's literary heritage through a variety of programs that you'll hear about in this very special series.

- Today we're joined by the Louisiana Center for the Book, located in Baton Rouge.

- And in true Louisiana fashion, they found some pretty amazing ways to shine a spotlight on local authors.

- Well, the Louisiana Center for the Book was established in 1994 for the purpose of stimulating public interest in reading, books and libraries.

And we work to accomplish our mission in three ways.

We develop and sponsor and coordinate statewide reading enrichment programs for children.

We identify and nurture the objectives of Louisiana's writers, publishers, and others that are involved in the creation and promotion of books.

And we also encourage or do what we can to encourage Louisianans to read by presenting and sponsoring public presentations by accomplished authors.

We do what we can to enable the public to interact with living authors, particularly through the Louisiana Book Festival and other annual programs that we host for Black History Month, Women's History Month, and the National Poetry Month.

- The Center for the Book yearly presents the Louisiana Writer Award to one person, a contemporary author, recognizing that person's contribution to the literary and historical culture of the state.

And it's an award given for that person's body of work.

And this year, the recipient of the 26th Award is Julie Kane, who is a poet and previous Louisiana Poet Laureate.

- And then we've got our Louisiana Book Festival.

I've been here, I came to the State Library to help get that started.

And the book festival, we started it in 2002.

There were only 75 authors that we featured.

Now, this year, we have 230 authors that will be here at the festival.

Our festival, as so many book festivals, includes author talks, it includes book signings.

We've got an outdoor area for kids, for children with children's author tents.

We've got, of course, balloon animals and costumed characters.

We've got things for teens with young adult authors and middle grade books.

We also have food vendors.

You can't have a festival in Louisiana without food vendors.

And it really is true that there is something for everyone of all ages.

- If you'd like to explore the full list of Louisiana Writer Award winners, check out their programs for young readers or simply want to learn more, check out the Louisiana State library's website, library.la.gov.

- Well, there's no doubt that Louisiana is the perfect stop for a reading road trip.

Thank you again to the Library of Congress and the Louisiana Center for the book for partnering with PBS Books as we journey across the country, exploring books, authors, and places that help tell our American story.

- Have you had a chance to visit any of these places?

Or if you're local, tell us your favorite spots that out-of-town book lovers should visit in the chat or comments.

- And if our reading road trip has sparked your curiosity about the landmarks, the authors, and literary treasures in your own state, the Library of Congress is a great place to start.

Visit in person in Washington, D.C., search its vast digital collections online, or connect with your local Center for the Book.

- For more information about the authors, institutions, and places featured in this episode, visit us at pbsbooks.org/readingroadtrip.

- Don't forget to like and subscribe so you never miss an exciting episode from PBS Books.

And be sure to share this video with all your friends and start planning your next reading road trip.

- Until next time.

- Happy reading.

(lively music) (tranquil music)