– On this episode of “American Stories: A Reading Road Trip,” we’re heading to the Silver State.
– Nevada, a state known for the glow of neon lights, also boasts many literary lights, including Mark Twain, powerful voices like Sarah Winnemucca’s “Life Among the Paiute,” and a family whose literary legacy has spanned generations, starting with “Sweet Promised Land.”
– [Fred] Hear from Nevada writers of today, capturing the spirit of the landscape in their stories, including its poet laureate, who penned “Anthem for a Burnished Land,” and the humorous nonfiction writer of “On the Trail of the Jackalope.”
– Join PBS Books, the Library of Congress, and Nevada Humanities on a literary adventure through Nevada.
This is “American Stories: A Reading Road Trip.”
(lively orchestral music) – Well, hello, and welcome.
I’m Fred Nahhat here with Lauren Smith from PBS Books.
– We are exploring America’s storied past and spotlighting the voices shaping the literary culture of today.
Be sure to like, share, and go subscribe on YouTube to PBS Books to catch up on previous episodes of “American Stories: A Reading Road Trip.”
– Today, we’re visiting Nevada, a state shaped by the moonscape expanse of the Great Basin, the green rise of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the unmistakable neon glow of Las Vegas.
But behind that bright curtain, there’s a whole other story to explore.
– I think one of the keys to understanding Nevada is to know that Nevada has three primary, I guess, social, political, and geographic ecosystems.
– We are one of the most diverse states in the nation, particularly when you’re looking at Reno and looking at Las Vegas.
We have just a rich, rich, rich coming together of different strands of identity.
– What makes Nevada unique and special, I think, is the combination of urban and rural.
We’re an incredibly urban state.
More than 90% of the population lives in two major metropolitan areas, Las Vegas and Reno.
Yet there’s this huge expanse in between.
– I think people didn’t realize that it was an eight-hour drive from Reno to Las Vegas.
I mean, it is an expanse of desert.
– We have all of these mountain ranges that run north-south that are separated by these vast valleys.
So that idea of the basin and the range gives this incredible sort of sense of dynamism that is the most characteristic aspect of our home landscape here.
– We have 45 north-south mountain ranges with peaks all over 10,000 feet, and we have wonderful alpine environments in northeastern Nevada that look like Switzerland.
And we have, you know, beautiful deserts, the Mojave down south, and our desert up north, the high desert.
– 85% of Nevada is public lands, which means that you can drive out into the middle of the desert, pull off on the side of the road, pitch a tent, and hang out around a campfire and read a book.
You can also climb up into the mountains near Lake Tahoe, and you can be at the beach and reading a book.
So I think from a book-reading standpoint, it’s hard to beat.
– I believe that there’s something really special about Nevada in that there’s a story around every corner and underneath every hill and rock that’s just waiting to be discovered.
So whether you find yourself in an old ghost town, in a forest surrounding Lake Tahoe, or walking through the streets of the Strip in Las Vegas, you just never know what might await you.
(light acoustic folk music) – Many stories of Nevada are intertwined with the greater tales of the frontier West.
Voices rooted in the land, along with those passing through it, have made an enduring mark on American literature and beyond.
– One of the things about Nevada is that it’s a bigger-than-life state with a long and storied history that’s exciting to tell, and that history reflects so many aspects of the larger story of the American West.
– When we talk about pioneers and pioneering women, Sarah Winnemucca, who is Tocmetone in her tribal language, she served as a translator between federal soldiers and the Indigenous people of the Paiute upon whose ancestral lands I now stand.
– But she wrote the first book by an Indigenous woman in the United States, “Life Among the Piutes,” and was part of a Native American rights movement.
– It’s apocryphal in that it begins to articulate in a very real way what we as people did to an entire culture.
We wiped them out.
And so, you know, it helps us to remember how important her voice was.
The voice of the Paiute, the voice of the Shoshone, and all the other tribes that have lived here.
– And to me, what’s amazing about it is here you have this Indigenous woman who is living in a really politically embattled time, but she’s so politically savvy, and she tours the East Coast, meets with politicians, makes her case.
– And the Winnemucca family contributed what they could in curtailing violence and perhaps even standing in the gap.
– Sarah was controversial among her own people because of the work she did with the federal government and her advocacy.
Might not always have been exactly what other Native Americans wanted, but considering she is alive in a period where women were expected to be seen and not heard, and especially Native American women, she’s a marvel, and it says something that each state gets two statues in Statuary Hall on Capitol Hill.
And the second one, finally, in the early 2000s, people realized it’s got to be Sarah Winnemucca.
– In many ways, Nevada’s literary history follows the story of the history of the West.
Our foundational storytellers are, of course, the native people and their descendants who’ve lived in Nevada for millennia.
And when colonial settlement began, explorers, trappers, soldiers, settlers, cowboys, miners, all kinds of people from all walks of life wrote in their journals and diaries about what they experienced and what they saw around them.
And these people and their stories help shape our understanding of both Nevada and the broader Western experience.
– And so we have pioneer writers such as Idah Meacham Strobridge and Virginia Reed Murphy, Helen Stewart, Sarah Royce, who talk about their experiences when the land was new and all that they had to wrest from the soil and the wind.
– And there is also a federal report by a captain with the U.S.
Army Topographical Corps, John Charles Fremont.
Now, his wife had a lot to do with the literary quality of his report, and his report was important in terms of the concept at the time of Manifest Destiny.
It was important in terms of attracting people to the West and to the sense of adventure.
But you also get people who’ve gone to the gold rush, who’ve come to Nevada, who tell their stories, and sometimes their stories aren’t quite, shall we say, the truth.
– Many of those frontier writers are documenting, of course, real conditions, for example, on the mining frontier in the 1870s, let’s say.
But also, those writers are really engaged in tall tales, and the sort of storytelling that they do is really hyperbolic, really exaggerated, often sort of calculated to try to fool a rube, an Eastern reader who doesn’t really know what life in the frontier West is like.
And so I think part of the literary legacy in our state is people who are able to use humor to make their experience of the landscape and culture larger than life.
– I feel like it’s virtually impossible to talk about American literature without mentioning the name Mark Twain.
He was one of our most influential and pioneering authors.
He was also a really great humorist and writer, and his words and legacy can still be felt today.
– Now, Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain in Nevada.
He started using the name as a reporter in his late 20s at a magnificent newspaper, the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.
– But it really was Twain’s time in Nevada on the mining frontier where he got exposed to all of these incredible characters, in particular exposed to vernacular language, to the way working people spoke, to the tall tales and hyperbolic stories that were told in saloons and barrooms.
Not only influenced his humor writing, but also influenced his ability to delineate characters in his work.
– Certainly, my favorite work of Twain’s from that time is the collection “Roughing It,” which sort of chronicles his time traveling in the West and in Nevada.
– And I think his stories are still cherished.
I think he’s admired for his gruff and uncompromising humor.
But, you know, there’s some less-than-savory qualities to much of the work, I would probably say, particularly for a contemporary reader.
– There’s so many contradictions in the figure that you love and yet could be also… So you just wanna shake for the blind spots.
– I think he’s probably still one of the finest fiction writers that we’ve ever produced, period.
His ability to mix humor, seriousness, and the reality of what we live with was just unbelievable.
– And since there are people who would say that Mark Twain is the father of American literature, then Nevada is apparently the birthplace.
– Walter Van Tilburg Clark was one of the first authors to be inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.
He grew up in Reno, which formed a background for a second novel, “The City of Trembling Leaves.”
But he is probably best known for transforming what was then pulp Western and stereotypical Western literature into modern Western literature with his first novel, “The Ox-Bow Incident.”
– And is a parable, if you will, on so many issues in the West, from law and order, vigilantism, to psychological profiles and so on.
– [Kathleen] He also published many short stories that gained national recognition and earned the O. Henry Prize five times between 1941 and 1945.
– He called them “quaints,” I guess reference to quaint stories, quaint tales.
And according to contemporary writers, and, you know, hail-fellow-well-mets around town in Virginia City claimed that he was a better storyteller than Mark Twain.
– I love Walter Van Tilburg Clark.
I kind of read him when I was in my late teens and early 20s, and he has a book called “The City of Trembling Leaves,” which is about Nevada.
It’s about a kid growing up in Nevada, and it’s just this beautiful, ethereal book about childhood.
– And the book itself, that coming of age, coming into self as an artist and trying to figure out how you fit into a particular place, I think, is the type of story that resonates with readers no matter where they are, particularly if they have an uncertainty of self, and who doesn’t?
– One of those pioneer writers, though, of course, he is writing in the 19th century by the time we approach his work, is Robert Laxalt.
– The Laxalt family is legendary in Nevada and has influenced Nevada literature and even our sense of place in the state in profound ways.
Robert Laxalt, the son of Basque immigrants to the United States, is considered to be one of Nevada’s finest writers.
His book “Sweet Promised Land” has influenced countless other writers, both in Nevada and across the globe.
It’s not really possible to overstate his influence.
Robert Laxalt founded the University of Nevada Press and wrote 17 books, four of which were candidates for the Pulitzer Prize.
He also wrote for National Geographic and served as a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno’s Reynolds School of Journalism for 18 years, teaching magazine writing and literary journalism.
And Robert’s brother, Paul Laxalt, was an attorney and served as governor of Nevada.
And Robert’s son, Bruce Laxalt, was a poet and an attorney as well.
And Robert’s daughter, Monique Laxalt Urza, is also a writer.
She’s a novelist and also an attorney.
And her son, Gabriel Urza, Robert Laxalt’s grandson, is also a novelist and also an attorney (laughs) and has emerged as one of the strongest voices in Nevada literature today.
– So when I finished law school, I came back to Reno, and I worked as a public defender for about five years.
And the job of being a public defender is the job of being a storyteller in many ways.
And so I felt like in that job I was entrusted with my clients’ stories, and I was limited by the constraints of what I was legally allowed to talk about, what the evidence said, what testimony would allow.
So in some ways, it wasn’t intentional, but I think that it was really my first foray into formal storytelling.
And what happened to me is what happens to many public defenders after five years, which is that I totally burn out.
And luckily, at that time, I took an evening class with a professor who is still one of my closest friends, Christopher Coake, up at the University of Nevada, Reno.
And Chris is an amazing writer, and I wrote my first short story in his class, and he pointed me towards grad school.
And that was something that really changed my life.
So my first book is called “All That Followed,” and I think it really is channeling my experience as a public defender.
My second book just came out this year, this last year.
It’s called “The Silver State,” and it is much more of a Nevada book, and it is about a young public defender who comes back to his hometown in Reno and gets thrown into the deep end of the criminal justice system.
When I’m thinking about “The Silver State,” I hope that readers consider what the role of the criminal justice system is, who it decides to protect and who it decides to discard, essentially, and the way that resources are allocated, and the way that that allocation reflects who and what we value.
(light acoustic folk music) – It is inspiring to see how the Laxalt family’s literary legacy has transcended through generations.
Another well-known Nevada voice is its current poet laureate, Shaun Griffin.
– Shaun Griffin is the current Nevada State Poet Laureate, and he is such a brilliant community figure.
He’s a bridge builder, a thinker, a translator, an artist, really so much more.
His work teaching creative writing and poetry in prisons has changed the lives of our incarcerated population for the better.
And he continues to champion an important social justice work in rural communities in Northern Nevada.
– When I moved up here, as I mentioned, I got lucky and got a job at the community college, and they had a program in the prison, and I said I wanted to do that.
I got tired of teaching for credit and grades and everything else because people were coming to the class for the wrong reasons.
So at that moment, I stopped teaching for credit and started volunteering, and that was in ’89, and I’ve been doing that ever since then.
So I’ve been out there for over 35 years, and the workshop has really become my sort of anchor for how powerful literature can be as a change agent.
I’ve probably had 200 guys in the workshop in those three decades.
Most of them, almost all of them, have stayed out of prison, which is remarkable.
I never say that you have to have this prerequisite or that to become a writer.
I say to them, “You have what you need.
You just need to start.
You need to believe it, and you need to find a way to let the person inside come out or resurface again.”
And frequently, the guys will tell me that they never had that experience in their life or maybe ever had anyone tell them they write anything or said anything worthwhile.
It’s lifesaving, and that’s why it’s so important.
And now, my role as the poet laureate for the state, my major project is to replicate the workshop across the state.
So we’re getting or have gotten a creative writing workshop started in all the state’s prisons.
And we’re down to, like, the second-to-last prison now.
And out of the six prisons, which we hope to be in all of them by, say, spring, but we’re in four now.
– Another remarkable poet who found her voice in Nevada is Gailmarie Pahmeier.
– Gailmarie Pahmeier is an award-winning poet and author.
She’s won multiple fellowships from the Nevada Arts Council.
She’s been awarded the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in Nevada, received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, served the city of Reno as its first poet laureate, and she’s our state poet laureate emeritus, as well as part of the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.
– I’ll talk a little bit of “Of Bone, Of Ash, Of Ordinary Saints.”
And so I was fortunate enough to get a grant from the Nevada Arts Council, and my project was to travel around the state of Nevada and visit as many state parks as I possibly could and take notes that could become poems or stories.
And I actually thought that I would transition away from character-based poetry and concentrate more on landscape because I would be in these just incredible, sublime, and awe-inspiring places.
But I found that I was most drawn to the stories that people at the parks had to tell.
So I found myself still doing character-driven work, and it was an exciting project, and I really just thought it was gonna be a personal project to fulfill my obligations to the Nevada Arts Council.
But I ran into a young publisher, and I told him about the work, and he said, “I wanna see it.”
And within two weeks, he called me up and said, “We’re publishing this book.”
But I’ll tell you what the most rewarding experience for me is when I’m giving a reading, for example, and someone in the audience will come up afterwards and say, “You know, that was my story.
You told my story.”
Or “I know that person you’re writing about.
I have met someone exactly like that.”
Or “My mom used to scrub the kitchen with those squeaky rubber gloves also.”
Some little detail.
And I think that’s the best compliment I can get.
And that to me is really what it’s all about.
– The land is so important to those who live in the state, and Michael Branch is one author who is using the power of the pen to help others understand why it’s worth protecting.
– Mike Branch is a writer, a humorist, and a self-professed desert rat, which is a distinguished species in our corner of the Nevada world.
Mike lives in and writes about what it’s like to live in the open Great Basin that makes up much of Nevada.
And Mike’s writing perfectly distills that tension that we feel when we live in remote places and realize that we are visitors and that the wildlife and natural world holds the upper hand in the places we live.
– I got into writing primarily because I just love the landscape here so much that I wanted to find ways to engage with it more deeply and to help my readers do that too.
So I write creative nonfiction, which is to say I write true stories, but in artful ways, I hope.
And I also am a humor writer, and that’s a little bit unusual among environmental writers.
We tend to be pretty angry and pretty sad most of the time as environmentalists, but I try to think about my readers’ needs.
It isn’t just about what I wanna get off my chest, and I think of readers as being busy, being tired, being often discouraged, and there are people who are willing to listen, but not if you come at them with a sermon.
And one of the beautiful things about humor writing is you can direct humor at yourself, and if a reader sees that you can laugh at yourself, then they relax, they feel like they can trust you a little more.
But also, you know, there’s plenty of absurdity to go around in the world, and instead of always being discouraged by that, the humor writer’s challenge is to transform that into something that can actually bring joy or insight.
At the root of everything I do is the ambition to help readers see how beautiful and valuable this landscape is.
And as far as I’m concerned, places are like people.
If we get in the habit of saying that some are more beautiful or more important than others, then that has real consequences for how we treat them.
As with people, you know?
If we don’t dehumanize them, if we respect them, if we see them for who they are, we’re much more likely to treat them well.
And I’d like to see the landscapes of the Intermountain West treated well, which in many cases they haven’t been.
So the role of art is in part to help us reexamine those cultural assumptions in ways that might help us to become more responsible in our stewardship of the land.
(light thoughtful music) – One of the best parts of any reading road trip is discovering local libraries.
Nevada offers fantastic community-supporting libraries spread far and wide.
– I love working with our librarians in Nevada and visiting new libraries whenever I can.
From our smallest libraries and rural communities to our libraries that serve our big urban cities, there’s always something magical about stepping foot inside a library and seeing what awaits you.
– Like many communities across the country, Nevada’s first public library was a Carnegie Free Public Library that was built in Reno in 1904.
The public library systems across Nevada have, of course, grown quite a bit since then.
And it’s interesting to think about just a few blocks away from where the first library was in Downtown Reno, there is actually the Downtown Reno Library, which is a really amazing place to visit.
It was built in 1966, and it is an incredible architectural gem.
The library’s architect, Hewitt Wells, couldn’t put the library in a park like he wanted to do, so he made the library as park-like as possible, featuring hundreds of plants, several full-grown trees, and a pond with a fountain.
– It looked kind of, like, futuristic in a way.
It had all these reading rooms that were held up.
In my mind, they’re, like, 30 feet off the ground on these little pedestals, and the whole place was like a greenhouse.
– And in addition to lots of helpful folks and interesting architecture, there’s a beautiful little theater in the basement of that library where I’ve done many events.
– One fun fact about the library that a lot of people don’t know is that there’s actually a secret Cold War bomb/fallout shelter that’s located in the basement.
– You have a northeastern Nevada Mybrary, which is partly online, partly in person, but does a great job of connecting these distant places.
It’s a fair piece from Elko to Eureka, but you can be connected through this.
– And our latest jewel here in Las Vegas is the West Las Vegas Library, and it just opened in January to fanfare and community embrace.
We’ve been waiting for this library: state-of-the-art multimedia rooms so that the public can come in, book time for free.
Then we have, of course, an event space with its own screening capability.
– To go to a very different kind of library, if you head down to Southern Nevada, Boulder City is a small community on the shores of Lake Mead, and there’s a small public library there that, you know, punching above its weight.
I mean, these guys are quite small, and they’re in a relatively small community, but the number of events that they sponsor in there is incredible.
– Of course, you can check out books, but you can also check out gardening tools, cake pans and cookie cutters, board games, hiking GPS devices, and more from their Library of Things.
I’m a really big fan of their book club kits and their movie binge boxes, and these have really fantastic themes for all the patrons to check out.
– So, yes, I’m quite proud that we can offer the one-arm bandit on one side and, on the other, this rich expanse of a library experience that edifies, that inspires, that really speaks to the intellectual side of what it is to be a Nevadan.
(lively country folk music) – Nevada’s independent bookstore scene is one you won’t want to miss.
Across the state, from mountain towns to desert cities, you’ll find quirky, creative bookstores that truly stand out.
– Nevada has a very grassroots, independent bookstore scene.
There are a lot of small, specialized bookstores that help charge the state with literary energy.
I’m thinking about Thistle & Nightshade, Grassroots Books, Las Vegas Books, stores that sell used and rare books, Barnes & Noble, and many more smaller bookstores that serve book lovers across the state.
– Book lovers can’t go to Las Vegas without making a pilgrimage to The Writer’s Block near the Arts District.
The Writer’s Block is a really beautiful, whimsical space that was formerly the only independent bookstore in Las Vegas, and it’s also a coffee shop, a literary community hub, and an artificial bird sanctuary.
– They have a close working relationship with the Black Mountain Institute, which is a literary organization associated with UNLV, and they host a ton of readings, and they also, which I think is so cool, they have several distinct book clubs that they host.
– They have writing workshops for young readers and writers.
They have author talks.
And it’s really a special community that the owners, Drew Cohen and Scott Seeley, have worked hard to create.
– Another bookstore, independent, that we’re so blessed to have in my city of Las Vegas is Analog Dope.
It is a woman-owned, queer-owned, Black-owned bookstore that is also a record shop.
So you’ll have literature on one hand and, as the name of the shop indicates, some dope music on the other.
So it is specializing in amplifying Black and brown voices, queer voices.
So it is a must-stop shopping for anyone coming through Las Vegas.
– The Radical Cat is a bookstore in Reno that’s a cozy home for both cats and people.
It’s a feminist bookstore that focuses on literature from diverse and marginalized voices, but it’s also a community hub and a cat adoption center.
– The Radical Cat’s sort of philosophy is that this is a place where the most vulnerable can come and find something that will resonate with whatever it is they need right now.
But I think everyone in the Northern Nevada communities, and particularly here in Reno, is so, so appreciative that this gem exists, The Radical Cat.
– So I really love the idea that, you know, a bookstore doesn’t have to be a giant warehouse full of a zillion books you’ve never heard of.
It can also be a small selection of books for sale that are curated by somebody who really loves books, which is certainly the case at the Bristlecone General Store in Baker, and at lots of other places in rurals in Nevada where the bookstore gets folded in with other kinds of businesses that serve multiple purposes in a small community.
(lively folk music) – For a state with such a deep pioneering history, Nevada has some uniquely cool landmarks to explore, both natural and manmade.
– We’re really proud to have the Western Folklife Center located in Nevada.
It’s actually housed in the center of our state in the Pioneer Hotel in Elko, which is in the heart of cowboy country.
Their signature event is the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering.
The gathering is a week-long coming together of people around poetry and music, and the arts of real life, particularly Western arts.
– There’s no pretension whatsoever.
These are just honest voices who have decided to hone their craft and tell these rich stories about cowboy culture in Nevada and far beyond.
– I happened to be in Elko during one of them and was able to pop into a few events, and it’s rowdy, and it’s raucous, and it reminds you that literary events don’t have to be very stuffy.
– Head up to Virginia City; historic Virginia City.
That’s where Mark Twain and his buddies did all their drinking.
So you can go to the Bucket of Blood Saloon in Virginia City and order a whiskey and look out over that landscape and really imagine what it would’ve been like for writers and storytellers in the 1870s and ’80s.
– If you’re visiting Virginia City, one place to check out would be Piper’s Opera House.
From the 1860s until the 1920s, it attracted so many famous stars that played in the theater and performed in the theater, and it’s one of the most significant vintage theaters on the West Coast.
– And it’s still operating, and it’s been restored, and it’s a site now of concerts and plays and many, many cultural events, and it’s one of the treasures of this region.
– Reno has the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, and it’s not necessarily, in my mind, Cooperstown for baseball, but you do get a sense there of who these people are.
And you can do this online, but you learn who are the writers about Nevada.
There are some nonfiction authors, but of course, the emphasis is fiction.
And obviously, you’re going to have people like Mark Twain in there, but you’re also going to have these people who are, if not native to Nevada, associated with Nevada, who most people don’t realize are even out there, or they may not even realize there’s a Nevada connection.
– There’s a beautiful crossover again between literature and the arts when you visit the Rita Deanin Abbey Museum.
Rita Deanin was an accomplished painter and sculptor, but where the literature aspect crosses into the arts aspect is Rita Deanin was married to Edward Abbey, who was a renowned poet.
In homage to Edward Abbey, and in celebration of the artwork of Rita Deanin Abbey, one of our literary landmarks is the Abbey Museum.
Please make sure to make it one of your stops.
– I would definitely recommend that you head out to Pyramid Lake.
Pyramid Lake is surrounded by the Northern Paiute Reservation.
It’s almost completely undeveloped.
It is spectacularly beautiful.
It’s one of the most stunning desert terminus lakes in the world.
But you’re also really prompted to think about the fact that, you know, this is native homelands for Northern Paiute people, and there are lots of writers and artists among the Northern Paiute, and for all of them, Pyramid Lake is a kind of spiritual home.
So that’s a must-see for anybody who cares about landscape or literature.
– So you can go around the state and find these little nuggets.
We tend to think Nevada’s going to be associated with gold nuggets or silver nuggets, though silver doesn’t come in a nugget, but there are a lot of literary nuggets, too.
(bright thoughtful music) – Today’s journey through Nevada’s literary landscape is part of a bigger celebration.
2026 marks the United States’ 250th birthday.
To celebrate, we’re exploring the stories, authors, and books that define each corner of the nation in partnership with the Library of Congress and local Centers for the Book.
– You might know that the Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, but what you might not know is 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 will 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 will 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 U.S.
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 will hear about in this very special series.
– Today, we’re joined by the Nevada Center for the Book, which is cared for by Nevada Humanities.
– Nevada Humanities is our state’s nonprofit 501c3 independent partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
We were founded in April 1971, so we’re actually celebrating our 55th anniversary this year in 2026.
We have two offices in Las Vegas and Reno, and we’re really proud of our small but mighty team of four.
Our mission is to connect communities and share and amplify the stories, ideas, experiences, and traditions of the diverse people of Nevada.
And we do this by supporting and creating a variety of humanities-based programs around the state, both in person and online.
The Nevada Center for the Book is one of those programs, and underneath this umbrella, we work to promote literature and literacy throughout the Silver State with events such as author talks, writing workshops, and a variety of programs and partnerships with all of our local libraries.
– One of the things that’s notable about the Las Vegas Book Festival is that when Nevada Humanities founded the festival in 2002, we made a conscious decision to appeal to all kinds of readers and book lovers and to feature authors from all kinds of genres.
If you read mysteries or romance novels or edgy, modern fiction, there is a place for you at the Las Vegas Book Festival.
– The Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl takes place every fall in Reno, and we like to think of it as not just your standard book festival, but really it’s a humanities festival that celebrates the written word in all of its forms.
Really, it’s our literary take on a pub crawl.
So there are dozens of author talks, workshops, performances, book signings, and other activities that happen throughout the day.
We bring in a keynote speaker to kick off the morning, and then we set book lovers loose across Downtown Reno, where they descend upon bars, museums, libraries, and other community spaces for a day full of literary adventures.
“Sagebrush to Sandstone” emerged out of our statewide reading program, Nevada Reads, during a time when we couldn’t really gather together safely in person, and so we looked to the outdoors and our natural surroundings as a way for people to still interact with and engage with their surroundings and one another, to think about the humanities.
It’s hard to describe exactly what it is, so I like to tell people it’s part nature guide, it’s part poetry anthology, and it’s also part workbook that includes creative prompts and scientific facts to get people inspired.
The book’s also expanded now to be one of our signature program series of Nevada Humanities, where we encourage Nevadans to explore the outdoors, learn about the cultural and natural history of this region, and foster close contemplation, appreciation, and immersion in the places we encounter.
– If you’d like to learn more about their Literary Crawl, the Las Vegas Book Festival, or any of their other programs, visit online at nevadahumanities.org.
– Today’s scenic stop in Nevada is certainly one for the books.
Thank you again to the Library of Congress and Nevada Humanities for partnering with PBS Books as we journey across the country, exploring the books, authors, and places that define America’s story.
– Have you had a chance to visit any of these places?
Tell us your favorite Nevada books or spots that out-of-town book lovers should visit in the chat or comments.
– [Fred] If our reading road trip has sparked your curiosity about the landmarks, 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, or connect with your local Center for the Book.
– For more information on the authors, institutions, and places featured in this episode, visit us at pbsbooks.org/readingroadtrip.
– And 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 of your friends to start planning your next reading road trip.
– Until next time, happy reading!
– Happy reading!
(lively orchestral music) (bright piano music)
