The Nantucket Book Festival Presents
At Home With Authors™
At a time like this, we need voices like these. The Nantucket Book Foundation & Festival presents memorable conversations and time-sensitive takeaways with our 2020 authors, and a growing roster of great writers.
Gabriella Burnham's Debut Novel
"It Is Wood, It Is Stone" is about "a woman's reckoning with what it is that she desires from her life." Gabriella Burnham's own desire, to be a writer, was fueled by Nantucket High School lit teacher Anne Phaneuf. Here they are, together, in joy.
Skip Finley on Whaling Captains of Color: America's First Meritocracy
Oak Bluffs’ Skip Finley has the kind of obsessiveness you read about in whaling stories. He needed it to uncover this chapter in American history, which sheds new light on the meaning of merit.
Alice Hoffman: Remaining Humane in a Dark World
In 1992, a NY Times book reviewer wrote that Alice Hoffman makes us aware of the darkness, and helps us seek the light. That was 20 novels ago. We have a lot to talk about.
Mitchell Jackson on Portland
In this Sunday's NY Times, Mitchell Jackson points his lens at the city he knows best, and we get to know him better in this in-depth conversation with the author.
Tiny Takes
Too busy for a deep conversation with a great author? Sample them here, a minute at a time.
Muskeget's Man
A new book release during a pandemic is a colorful affair when the author is Crocker Snow Jr. We caught up with Crocker at Mitchell's Book Corner to talk about Muskeget: Raw, Restless, Relentless Island.
Historians on Speed Dial
Nathaniel Philbrick explores terrifying moments in American history to shed light on 2020.
Channeling Frederick Douglass on July 4th
"What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" is acclaimed as the greatest speech by one of the greatest orators in America's history. Listen to this 10 minute tour de force to understand why.
Tear it Down?
What's a better monument to freedom: that statue of Lincoln in Washington, DC, or the Frederick Douglass speech about Lincoln at the statue's unveiling? Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Blight offers us a third way in this 18 minute journey to 1876.
Introducing Michael O'Donnell
Daniel Weiss, CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, finds the poetry in one soldier's life and captures a portrait of the Vietnam era with his new book, In That Time.