Clockwise from top left: Annette Gordon-Reed, Parul Sehgal, Colm Tóibín, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Namwali Serpell, Joshua Cohen, Nell Painter, Joanne B. Freeman
Starting this June, Library of America presents an eight-part series of online classes featuring leading contemporary authors on the LOA writers that resonate deeply with them and have something vital to tell us at this moment.
Each session pairs an eminent novelist, historian, or critic with works and writers they find especially resonant: Annette Gordon-Reed on the Declaration of Independence and the response by Black clergyman Lemuel Haynes, Joshua Cohen on Isaac Bashevis Singer, Colm Tóibín on Elizabeth Bishop, Viet Thanh Nguyen on Maxine Hong Kingston, and more. (Click here to learn more about the instructors.)
You can purchase access to the entire season and save on the per-session cost, or pick and choose individual sessions to attend. See below for more information on registration.
Sessions will take place on Zoom and last 75 minutes. Attendees are encouraged to share questions in advance and during the class. The class will be recorded and shared with registrants to watch anytime. Space is limited and registration will be on a first-come, first-served basis.
Registering for Reading America: Acclaimed Authors on Great Writing that Resonates Today
Eight sessions (Click here for a description of each session)
- June 1: Annette Gordon-Reed on the Declaration of Independence and Lemuel Haynes’s “Liberty Further Extended”
- July 9: Joanne B. Freeman on Alexander Hamilton and Alexis de Tocqueville
- July 28: Nell Painter on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Sojourner Truth
- Aug. 18: Joshua Cohen on Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Sept. 24: Parul Sehgal on Arthur Miller
- Oct. 29: Colm Tóibín on Elizabeth Bishop
- Nov. 17: Viet Thanh Nguyen on Maxine Hong Kingston
- Dec. 3: Namwali Serpell on William Faulkner and Toni Morrison
Or go to: rebrand.ly/Reading2026
PRICING
- Series pass: $350 (includes access to all sessions and 25% off all titles on the LOA Web Store)
- LOA Members get the special members’ rate of $300 ($50 off). Learn more about the perks of becoming an LOA Member.
- Individual sessions: $50 ($40 for LOA Members)
SCHOLARSHIPS
LOA is committed to making our programming accessible to as many people as possible.
If the cost to attend this series presents a hardship, or you are a teacher interested in attending for professional development, we are pleased to offer a number of scholarship places at a reduced rate. For more information and to request a tuition waiver, please e-mail support@loa.org.
If you would like to support Library of America’s online programming and help sponsor a reduced-rate scholarship for a deserving student or teacher, please consider making a $50 donation at checkout on Eventbrite or reach out to support@loa.org.
All sessions meet at 2 pm ET.
Annette Gordon-Reed on the Declaration of Independence and Lemuel Haynes’s “Liberty Further Extended”
Monday, June 1
“The American story, from the very beginning, has been multifaceted, multicultured, and multiracial,” writes Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed. “People of color, even in the most dire situations, have always found ways to make their thoughts and feelings known.” Lemuel Haynes (1753–1833) was a Revolutionary War veteran, the first ordained Black minister in the United States, and the first African American to receive an advanced degree. In the opening session of Reading America, we will discuss the Declaration of Independence and Haynes’s response to it, a 1776 essay entitled “Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slave-Keeping.”
Joanne B. Freeman on Alexander Hamilton and Alexis de Tocqueville
Thursday, July 9
Throughout our nation’s history, its citizens, residents, and foreign observers have wrestled with the meaning of American democracy. In this session, we look at two writers with much to say on the topic: Alexander Hamilton and Alexis de Tocqueville. Hamilton had lifelong doubts about democracy, even as he worked to create and uphold America’s new democratic republic. Tocqueville, a French visitor to the United States in 1831–32, was a witness par excellence, describing and judging American democracy as only an outsider could. Putting these men in conversation reveals democracy in all its complexity, and exposes the beating heart of America.
Nell Painter on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Sojourner Truth
Tuesday, July 28
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), giant of American letters, and Sojourner Truth (ca. 1797-1883), feminist abolitionist stalwart, were near contemporaries, living ninety-five miles apart in Massachusetts in the 1840s. Emerson’s classic books, Essays and Self-Reliance, were published in the 1840s, while Truth’s self-published Narrative of Sojourner Truth appeared in 1850. Both promoted and sold their books in person on the lecture circuit, but they never met. In this session, we stage a meeting of Emerson and Truth’s minds through a closer look at their lives and works.
Joshua Cohen on Isaac Bashevis Singer
Tuesday, August 18
What makes a writer an American writer? Is it the accident of his birth, or perhaps the circumstances of his exile? His language? His themes? His audience? The works of Isaac Bashevis Singer, the seventh American citizen to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, raise these questions in fascinating ways. This session discusses three short classics by America’s great Yiddish writer: “Gimpel the Fool,” “The Destruction of Kreshev,” and “The Cafeteria.” Together, they bring the reader from Galician Poland to Manhattan’s East Side, and illuminate starkly different jewels—sweet, bitter, humorous, sexual—in the crown of this impish giant.
Parul Sehgal on Arthur Miller
Thursday, September 24
Arthur Miller’s plays of the 1940s and 1950s—All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge—electrified theatergoers and established him as one of the indispensable voices of the postwar era in America. With a particular focus on All My Sons, this session explores some of the characteristic conflicts of Miller’s work—between fathers and sons, desire and obligation, self and community—while paying close attention to the effect his mastery of dramatic devices such as motive, psychology, and resolution has on readers and audience members.
Colm Tóibín on Elizabeth Bishop
Thursday, October 28
The poems of Elizabeth Bishop are “more wryly radiant, more touching, more unaffectedly intelligent than any written in our lifetime,” wrote James Merrill. She is “our greatest national treasure.” Bishop’s work is notable for its use of narrative, its precision and reliance on exact detail, its reticence and power. This session will explore, via poems and letters, her ideas of loss and exile, plus the tone she takes: melancholy, precise, hushed, attentive, and careful to say nothing more than what each occasion demands.
Viet Thanh Nguyen on Maxine Hong Kingston
Tuesday, November 17
Beginning with her stunning 1976 memoir The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston has forged a profound, richly imagined, and genre-defying narrative of the American experience from her vantage as the daughter of Chinese immigrants. In this session, we explore Kingston’s most influential books, The Woman Warrior and China Men, as she intended—back-to-back, as one longer epic about Chinese Americans. These hybrid books move between fiction and nonfiction, imagination and history, realism and fantasy, as they weave Chinese immigrants and their descendants into the fabric of the United States, where they have belonged since the middle of the nineteenth century.
Namwali Serpell on William Faulkner and Toni Morrison
Thursday, December 3
While delivering the keynote address at a 1985 Faulkner conference in Oxford, Mississippi, Toni Morrison remarked that “in a very personal way, as a reader, he had an enormous effect” on her. Morrison’s engagement with Faulkner was a lifelong project, from her examination of The Sound and the Fury in her master’s thesis to ongoing reflections on his work in university lectures. This session delves into novels by Faulkner and Morrison—Absalom, Absalom! and A Mercy, respectively—to explore their treatment of Native Americans, their interest in co-created stories and invented language, Sutpen’s Hundred in relation to Jacob Vaark’s unfinished house, and the overlapping themes of possessive love and stopped time.
Course curator: Bernard Schwartz
Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. She has won sixteen book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009 and the National Book Award in 2008, for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008). In addition to articles and reviews, her other works include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997); Vernon Can Read! A Memoir, a collaboration with Vernon Jordan (2001); Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (2002), a volume of essays that she edited; Andrew Johnson (2010); and, with Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (2016). Her most recent book is On Juneteenth (2021), and she is editor of the forthcoming collection Jefferson on Race: A Reader (2026). A selected list of her honors includes a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the George Washington Book Prize, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
Joanne B. Freeman is the Alan J. Boles, Jr., Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. She is the author of Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (2002), which won the Best Book award from the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic; and The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, which explores physical violence in the US Congress between 1830 and 1860. For Library of America, she has edited Alexander Hamilton: Writings—one of the Atlantic’s “best books” of 2001—and The Essential Hamilton: Letters and Other Writings. A leading expert on Alexander Hamilton, she was the historical consultant for the National Park Service in its reconstruction of Alexander Hamilton’s home, while Lin-Manuel Miranda consulted with her in writing Hamilton: An American Musical. Her ongoing, popular podcasts are History Matters (…and So Does Coffee!) and A Few Thoughts for Those Who Can’t Sleep.
Nell Painter is an artist and historian whose most recent book, I Just Keep Talking—A Life in Essays (2024), explores art, politics, and legacy of racism that shapes American history as we know it. Her many works include The History of White People (2010), Creating Black Americans: African American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present (2005), and Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (1996). In 2025, she received an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Joshua Cohen won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Netanyahus. His other books include the novels Moving Kings, Book of Numbers, Witz, A Heaven of Others, and Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto; the short-fiction collection Four New Messages; and the nonfiction collection Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. He is the editor of I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole: An Elias Canetti Reader (2022).
Parul Sehgal is a critic at large for The New York Times. Formerly a staff writer at The New Yorker, she won a 2025 National Magazine Award for her reviews and columns there. She teaches in NYU’s graduate creative writing program.
Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island; The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster; as well as three story collections and several books of essays and criticism, most recently On James Baldwin. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and has been named as the Laureate for Irish Fiction for 2022–2024 by the Arts Council of Ireland. Three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin, Los Angeles, and New York.
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and it was recently turned into an HBO series. His other books include The Committed, a sequel to The Sympathizer; the short-story collection The Refugees; Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. His most recent book is To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other. He edited the anthology The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, and is a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.
Namwali Serpell is a fiction writer, a literary critic, and a professor of English at Harvard University. Her first novel, The Old Drift (2019), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book prize, and her second novel, The Furrows: An Elegy (2022), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her books of essays are Stranger Faces (2020) and the best-seller On Morrison (2026).
