- On this episode of "American Stories, A Reading Road Trip," we're heading to the beehive state.

- Utah is a state of breathtaking contrasts where shimmering salt flats, Aspen forests, and towering red rock canyons have stirred the imaginations of writers for generations giving us works like the "Big Rock Candy Mountain" and the "Monkey Wrench Gang."

- [Fred] And that one of a kind terrain continues to shape powerful voices today, including Terry Tempest Williams call for environmental awareness in "Refuge" and the imaginative wild west reinvention of "Rapunzel's Revenge."

- [Lauren] Join PBS books, the Library of Congress, and the Utah Center for the Book on a literary adventure through Utah.

This is American Stories, a reading road trip.

- Well, hello and welcome.

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

- Come along as we explore our nation's storied past and spotlight the landscapes, books, and voices that continue to shape America's literary story today.

- Every stop reveals something new.

You can explore the full series on the PBS Book's, YouTube channel, where more stories from across the country are waiting to be discovered.

Make sure to subscribe now and journey with us for every stop ahead.

- For book lovers and nature enthusiasts, Utah is a place of striking contrasts, deep histories, and powerful inspiration.

From the Bonneville Salt Flats to mountain communities, every landscape seems to invite a story.

- There's a lot of really unique things about Utah.

I mean, historically it's different than any other state in the nation.

Any scholar who jumps into Utah's history will be there for a very, very long time.

- [Paisley Rekdal] We have high alpine forests, we have Red Rock country, we have wonderful and amazing rivers.

We of course have the Great Salt Lake, so there's kind of something for everyone.

And if I was to say one thing about the diversity of Utah's environment, I would sort of say that it's a place in which people really have a very deep relationship to the outdoors because it's one of the states with the most national parks.

- You have the Colorado Plateau, a high desert, a cold desert with the very well known national parks of Zion, Bryce, Canyonlands, Arches, and the monuments, Bears Ears, Grand Staircase, Escalante.

So it's a beautiful place to live and it's a place of stunning contrast and contradictions.

- [Anne Holman] When you're down in southern Utah, there's nothing quite like the color of the sky and the color of the red rocks and the sagebrush.

It's really, it's almost like it envelops you in a warm feeling.

I haven't seen that anywhere else I've been in the United States.

So I think the landscape of Utah is multitudinous.

It has a little bit of everything.

- So when I travel around, a stereotype I hear of Utah is that it's really a monolith, that it's really homogenous.

But for people who live here, we know there's so much diversity of thought, of people, of opinions.

It's a really beautiful place where so many different kinds of people come together.

Utah has the highest rate of volunteerism, and we really are communities that come together in a pinch to help people out.

- [Rebekah Cummings] You can't talk about Utah literary culture without acknowledging the LDS Church and what a big role that it's played here.

The LDS Church really does encourage like reading and writing and education and capturing family histories.

and I think that that is sort of inextricably woven into our fabric here in Utah.

- I also think one of the things that I love is our independent bookstores.

We have so many, we're really lucky and and blessed in that, and we also have so many authors.

So it's a fun place to be a reader.

It's a fun place to be a writer.

I think it's a fun place to be a kid.

I loved growing up in Utah.

I loved running around the national parks.

The landscape definitely piques imagination.

(upbeat music) - Utah's landscapes don't just set the scene.

They shape the story.

Across deserts, canyons, mountains and frontier towns.

Writers have explored freedom, identity, history, and what it means to belong.

- [Kase Johnston] You can't talk about Utah without talking about Edward Abbey.

As someone who grew up here, an English major, as a writer, Edward Abbey was kind of a focal point for my education.

He's famous for the "Monkey Wrench Gang," "Fire on the Mountain," "Desert Solitaire," those books, both fiction and nonfiction.

- [Anne Holman] If you live in Salt Lake and you're gonna drive down to Moab, it's almost de rigueur that you listen to "Desert Solitaire" as you drive down there.

- [Rebekah] He was a seasonal ranger at Arches National Park where he wrote the "Monkey Wrench Gang," which is probably what he's most well known for, and he has had a tremendous impact on the way that we think about eco-activism.

- I just remember being a young person in the seventies and eighties and all of us just wanted to go monkey wrench everything.

- [Ally] It's an especially relevant conversation now given what's happening with the environment everywhere with climate change and particularly with drought as far as Utah's concerned.

I love Edward Abbey.

I've been reading him for decades, and I think he'll remain relevant and important for centuries.

- [Terry] I think what I take away from Ed is the monkey wrench and not as a tool of destruction, but as a tool of creativity that each of us holds our monkey wrench, whether it's a pen or pencil or paintbrush or the capacity to be a teacher, the capacity to be an American citizen with all of its rights, responsibilities, and obligations.

To me, that's what it means to hold the monkey wrench high.

- I think one of the things that really surprises me still about Utah's literary landscape is that so many of our writers have seen a form of social activism, ecological activism, as inherent to their work.

One is a Native American woman.

She was Yankton Dakota Sioux, Zitkala-Sa.

And she worked for Native women's suffrage in the turn of the century.

She wrote for "The Atlantic," she wrote a book called "American Indian Stories" in fact, but she made activism, native activism, political activism, part and parcel of her writing.

Another writer that I think a lot of people would know about would be Wallace Stegner.

- [Kase] Wallace Stegner was born in 1909 in Iowa and over a 60 year career, he wrote 30 books.

Among the novels were "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," the book that song was named after.

And in 1992, his essays collection of essays earned the nomination for the National Book Critic Circle Award.

- I think part of Wallace Stegner's legacy isn't just that he was an incredible author.

I mean, most of his 30 books are actually still in print, which is incredible.

But he also poured into the lives of so many other authors.

You know, a lot of people talk about the way he taught and mentored them.

- [Terry] Wallace Stegner was family.

He was a deep mentor of mine.

He played tennis with my grandfather.

We also served on the governing council of the Wilderness Society.

We took this idea to Wally of an op-ed piece that we could feature in the New York Times, and he said, why don't you put some teeth in it?

And that was such a lesson.

And that's why I think Edward Abbey, who was viewed as the radical, was actually far more conservative.

It was Wallace Stegner who was the radical on the page and in the world.

- He was an incredible voice, I think for conservation, for, you know, the Western lands.

I mean, some of his most famous works include "Angle of Repose," 'Recapitulation," which I love.

There was a letter he wrote called "The Wilderness Letter," and it was really speaking to how we keep these public lands preserved, not only for hunting and fishing and recreation and skiing and all the things that we always talk about, but because it's good for our spiritual life.

And so that letter had a lot to do with passing the Wilderness Act.

- [Terry] And Stegner was a great master of one-liners.

I remember there was one sentence that he wrote that was one word that said everything.

"Why?"

- [Kase] Wallace Thurman's really, really interesting.

And I read quite a bit of his work when I was younger in an African American lit course when I was at Kansas State.

I didn't know he was from Utah.

I thought it was really kind of cool that oh, oh my gosh, - Wallace Thurman is a fascinating figure.

He was born, I think in 1902 in Salt Lake City.

He found himself very much at odds with the local culture, not just because of racial difference, but also sexual difference.

He was LGBTQ, queer writer.

So he fled to New York and he joined the Harlem Renaissance, but he was also very critical of the Harlem Renaissance, which makes him an interesting figure.

He was sort of an outlier no matter where he went.

He was very interested in the colorism issue in the Harlem Renaissance.

He criticized a lot of the bigger names in the Harlem Renaissance of sort of, you know, not necessarily being as open to darker skinned African Americans.

- [Rebekah' His work, "The Blacker the Berry," is based on themes that seemed ahead of their time.

And now that I know about Wallace Thurman, I feel like I wanna teach all of my students about him too, because even though he might not be part of like who we often think of with, you know, Utah writers, - I think he sort of embodies a lot of the spirit of Utah in the sense that he's always sort of speaking from the margins, thinking from outside, and critiquing from a position of real difference.

So he's a really exciting voice.

- [Rebekah] He speaks to different themes.

I think that in Utah are equally important.

- [Kase] If I were to say it as a writer, and as a historian, Juanita Brooks is a fire starter.

There's a lot of things in every culture that that culture wants to bury.

And "The Mountain Meadows Massacre" is part of that for the state.

And Juanita Brooks was the first historian to really bring that to light.

- [Paisley] This was a terrible massacre that occurred in the 19th century.

And part of the argument that the Mormons made at the time was that it was led by Paiutes.

The Paiutes had nothing to do with this, that in fact it looks like it was Mormon pioneers dressed as Paiutes that led this massacre on settler colonists moving through the Utah Territory.

- Juanita Brooks, I love because she did historical research and she wrote about the Mountain Meadow Massacre famously and other things, and kind of wrought different stories to the forefront.

She turned all of that on its head in this amazing, methodical, beautifully written way that nobody could ignore.

- [Terry] The LDS Church, as you can imagine, was not pleased, but she said, isn't the first tenant of Mormonism truth telling?

Isn't it about holding the truth?

And as a historian, I will hold that truth and I will also hold my faith.

- But she went on to live a long life and she wrote other books.

We still sell "Mountain Meadows Massacre" a couple of times a year.

There are a lot of other Mountain Meadows Massacre books out there, and we do sell those too.

But she's kind of the first one who really took it on and wrote honestly about it.

- And I think that means a lot to so many of us that we can't be afraid of true things and stories that are authentic, even if it makes us look bad.

Humans are complicated, our histories are complicated, and it doesn't say everything about us just because some of those parts, again, are something that we need to learn from and do better in the future.

(upbeat music) - In Utah, inspiration is never far away.

Sometimes it's found in a Red Rock Canyon, sometimes in a mountain town, and sometimes in the pages of a great book.

For Shannon Hale, it's helped launch a career filled with unforgettable stories.

- [Kase] Shannon Hale is the New York Times bestselling author of 50 books for preschoolers, kids, teens, and adults, including multiple award winners, "The Goose Girl," "The Book of a Thousand Days," and Newberry Honor recipient.

"Princess Academy."

- I had a teacher in fourth grade who started me writing stories and poems and I thought (gasps) all this stuff in my head, if I learn how to write it down, then I can share it.

And I was captivated immediately.

My first book was published 19 years after the first time I declared I wanted to be a writer.

So it felt like a long road, but it was always what I wanted to be.

I have published over 50 books for all ages, from board books to babies, up through chapter books, middle grade, young adult, and books for adults.

And I've written in dozens of genres.

So I do a little bit of everything.

I don't like to have to choose, the age of the protagonist determines the age of the book generally.

So if I'm writing about a teen, it's gonna be a young adult book.

If I'm writing about a 6-year-old, that's going to be a chapter book.

And then inside of that, some books are like, make me a graphic novel or make me a novel or make me a screenplay.

There's... I try to just follow the story wherever it leads me.

When I'm writing, I am trying to be true as I can to the characters and the story I'm telling.

And then I have the hope.

It's a faith exercise that if I do the best I can with the words on the page, that a reader will pick up that book and they will tell themselves the story that they need to hear from it.

And I'm doing 50% of the work, but the reader is doing the other 50%.

The reader is coming in with all their life experiences, all their visuals, all their sounds and smells and their feelings and emotions and everything they need in that exact moment in their life.

And they tell themselves the story.

So whatever message they come away from, it's gonna be personal to them.

That's how we come to meaning in ourselves.

We use that story to come to the meaning we need.

And they're the only one that's gonna get that exact message from that book.

- Few writers are as closely tied to Utah's landscape as Terry Tempest Williams, whose work explores the connections between people, place, and memory in a powerful way.

- [Kase] Terry Tempest Williams, like Edward Abbey, I would say she is kind of, she is the matriarch of environmental lit in Utah and the West.

She's still writing amazing books.

She's an advocate for the land, is always fighting for the land, for the lake, for the birds, for everything that we hold valuable in our local state and western environment.

- It was a bit before dawn, we were driving toward Las Vegas.

There was a flash of light.

My father thought that it was an explosion.

We pulled over to the side of the road and rising from the desert floor was this golden-stemmed mushroom, an atomic bomb.

That image sat in my body, in every cell in my body until after my mother's death from cancer.

And I kept having this reoccurring dream, this flash of light in the night, in the desert, illuminating buttes and mesas.

And what I can tell you is we are downwinders, hibakusha, explosion-affected people.

And somewhere that experience registered as a protest in my own DNA.

And that was the epilogue of a book I wrote called "Refuge," the rise of Great Salt Lake and the death of my mother from ovarian cancer.

Nine women in my family have all had mastectomies, seven are dead.

That is my story.

And I remember when I crossed the line at the Nevada Test Site committing civil disobedience, when the officer frisked my body, it was a woman.

She got to my boots and there was a lump and she, oh, you know, pulled out my pant leg and from my cowboy boot pulled out a pad of paper and a pan.

And she looked at me and she said, "And these?"

And what came out of my mouth was, "Weapons," I replied.

And it was in that moment I became a writer.

I think that was his most personal, is most universal.

And I write out of my own experiences.

When I think about Simone Weil, the writer, and she says, "Attention is a prayer."

I would hope that my work would be a call to paying attention, which is I think what Utah asks us again and again and again, to pay attention, to pay attention to the Red Rock Desert.

To pay attention to the Colorado River.

To pay attention to Great Salt Lake in times of flood and in drought.

And more importantly, to pay attention to who we live among.

That we pay attention to what does it mean to be human?

And to find that beauty in a broken world and realize that the interior landscape is deeply influenced by our exterior landscape.

And when we bring those two landscapes together, we create a story.

- The state's literary tradition continues to evolve through writers who inspire readers of all ages.

Bestselling author Ally Condie has built a career creating stories that resonate with young adults and adults alike.

- [Kase] Ally is really cool.

(laughs) She's a really great writer.

She's known mostly for her New York Times bestseller "Matched" trilogy.

Her other work nowadays is more adult.

Her book "The Unwedding" was Reese's Book Club pick and she's got another new novel out now and an Edgar Award finalist for "Summerlost."

- I think that everyone is born creative and it can take on different forms, especially when we're children the world is our oyster, right?

But for me, I wanted to tell a story.

I began writing for young adults first, and I think that was a factor of my having taught high school and liking writing and then teaching students about creative writing and kind of that all coming together.

So that was the place where my mind and the story that I had an idea for initially went.

And to date, that's probably my most recognizable work, is a novel called "Matched" or a series called the "Matched" trilogy for young adults.

And that was on the New York Times list for over a year and hit the number one spot.

And that was a delight to write.

I kind of thought, I'll always write this, I'll always write young adult because I enjoy it very much.

And then I started getting other ideas where the characters were different ages.

So I had an idea and it turned out to be a middle grade novel called "Summerlost."

It's a mystery and it was actually a finalist for the best juvenile mystery of the year.

It was nominated for an Edgar Award.

And that made me really happy because I loved reading mysteries growing up as a kid that age.

And then I had an idea for an adult novel and it was a murder mystery set in Big Sur.

And I thought, well, nobody's asking me to write this.

I'm known as a children's author, (laughs) but I just couldn't step away from the story.

I loved the idea.

And so I wrote it kind of for fun on the back burner.

And then the secret to all of this, I think has been having an agent who is willing to not pigeonhole me, who is willing to say, "If it's good enough, I will take it out.

I will try to sell it."

She does not take it out until she thinks I've made it the best I can.

And so I think that's why I've been lucky enough to publish in a few different genres - Through poetry and prose former Utah poet laureate Paisley Rekdal uncovers the stories hidden in the margins and brings forgotten voices back into the light.

- [Kase] Paisley Rekdal is the author four books of nonfiction, seven collections of poetry, including "Animal Eye" winner of the UNT Rilke Prize.

"Imaginary Vessels," finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Prize.

"Nightingale," winner of the 2020 Washington State Book Award for poetry.

And "West: A translation" which was long listed for the 2023 National Book Award in poetry and also won the Utah Book Award in poetry and the Kingsley Tufts Prize for 2024.

- "West" is a perfect example of how Utah has influenced me as a writer.

When I was Utah's poet laureate, I was asked to write a poem about the Transcontinental Railroad for its 150th celebration of its completion.

I thought it would be a good idea to celebrate or focus on the voices of Chinese laborers.

And one of the first things I discovered was in fact, there were no letters, no diaries, no written documents that seemed to have been preserved that were created by any of the Chinese workers.

And when I realized that we didn't have those voices because they were lost to history, I had to think about whose voices we did have.

And then I realized I wanted to think about all the different workers and all the different people that the train had impacted and continues to impact.

When I think about the cultural impact of railroads on American culture, it turns out to be huge.

So the question was how do you create presence out of absence and how do you contain all these different voices?

So I took a poem that was written originally in Chinese.

It was carved into the walls of Angel Island Immigration Station and it eulogizes somebody who died while in detention.

And I take this Chinese poem and each Chinese character actually becomes the title for a different person's perspective, a different worker's perspective, or a different take on the railroad.

And it's both a digital project as well as a textual project.

You can get it as a book or you can go online to www.westtrain.org and you can play the poem.

You just click on the characters and video poems open up and you'll see images, you'll hear music, you'll get to read the text or hear somebody reading a poem.

I think it's so important that we know more about American history, know more about each other's places because I think people want more complexity, they want more engagement, they don't want less.

(upbeat music) - Nestled among Red Rock Canyons and bustling downtowns, Utah's libraries serve as gathering places for readers of every age.

- Not only is the driest state Utah, but the median age is the youngest because of very large families across the state.

So libraries serve so much as community spaces from downtown Salt Lake to the small local community libraries in Logan, in Brigham City, in Moab, in Cedar City, all across rural Utah.

- [Anne] If you go down to Library Square in Salt Lake City today there's two giant buildings, the old, basically the old library and the new library.

It was designed by Moshe Safdie, so it's very fancy.

- [Shannon] I love the main branch of the downtown Salt Lake City Library.

It's very modern and so many windows and the places to play in the children's room and little caves for the kids can run into.

- [Rebekah] It has won awards for its architecture.

It has a giant rooftop garden where there's beehives and rooftop yoga and tons of events up there.

- [Anne] You can see 360 degree view of Salt Lake City.

It's a place where you can spend the day and just have fun with all ages.

- My favorite library is the Provo Library.

I'm actually on the board serving my sixth year, I think, as a member of the board at the Provo Library.

It's a place that I've taken my kids to, I've had author events at.

And so I just love it in every aspect.

I love it as a community gathering place.

The architecture is beautiful.

It's kind of this stunning library that they've repurposed from an old BYU academy building that had fallen into absolute disrepair.

(laughs) And so it's this kind of crown jewel of downtown Provo where everybody loves to gather and it's exactly what a library should be and then more, it's beautiful.

- [Kase] The Ground County library in Moab is just a beautiful small library in a city of readers.

- Part of it is because the architecture of the library just beautifully blends in with the red rocks behind it.

It's so gorgeous inside with the big vaulted ceiling and it is an incredibly productive library.

Their circulation stats are like four times what they should be for a county of that size.

And I think one of the most charming things about the Grand County Library is its home to probably the most beloved library employee in the state of Utah, which is Cosmo, the library cat.

- [Terry] When we moved to Moab, we had to downsize and we had thousands of books.

And so we gave away most of our library to the library.

And to this day, you know, we'll be walking down the street and someone will say, oh, I read this book and it had your name in it and can we talk about it?

I just feel like books are a common thread, it's common ground.

- [Paisley] Well, for me, one of the most special libraries is the special collections at the Marriott Library.

And it feels bad saying that because not everyone can have access to it unless you're a University of Utah student or have that access to that card.

But I love archival research and I love going in and getting the box and opening the box up and seeing like all the different folders.

And that's so exciting to me.

And I love seeing people's handwriting from the past.

And you know, the documents that they collected, the photographs that they had, it's every single time you go in there, it's always like a magical mystery tour of what you're gonna find.

So that's my favorite for sure.

(upbeat music) - In Utah, storytelling is woven into its history and identity.

So it's no surprise that the state is home to a thriving community of independent bookstores.

- The first one is the King's English.

And the King's English is, it's an icon.

- [Paisley] The King's English in Salt Lake City, Utah is renowned.

It's just an incredible bookstore with an incredible culture.

They bring in every author you could ever want.

I mean, I feel like it's such an embarrassment of riches to have it just a couple miles away.

- [Shannon] It's adorable.

It's in a house.

So it's like you walk into the loft and there's the mystery room.

You walk into what might have been a former bedroom and it's the children's room and you feel like the whole house is just, it's full of books - We opened in 1977 and you know, it was anybody's guess of whether we were gonna make it or not.

But we've stayed in business and our customers are what have made that possible.

And our authors and you know, just the general love of community.

Salt Lake shops local and that's what's kept us here.

- [Paisley] I also really love a new one called Lovebound Library.

It is one of the only romance-only bookstores in the country.

It's very recently opened up.

And one of the reasons I love it is everyone's really excited to be there, (laughs) you know?

And every person who works in that store has read everything and they're always giving everybody advice.

And so it's one of the most high-energy bookstores I think I've ever been in.

And I enjoy that so much.

- [Terry] You know, I was raised at Sam Weller's bookstore, Zion Bookstore, and it's now run by his son.

I worked there, it was more valuable than my college education.

- [Anne] Weller Book Works used to be downtown, but they've moved over to Trolley Square and Trolley Square is literally where the old trolleys used to go to sleep at night.

And so when you visit, it's not like going to a strip mall or even a shopping center, it's literally an old trolley barn.

- And one of the book buyers there is an antiquarian bookseller and he does a lot of stuff on the American West.

So there's definitely books on the American West, you will just not get elsewhere.

- [Kase] Another independent bookstore is new and it's Poppy's Bookstore in Spanish Fork, Utah, which is in Utah County.

And this bookstore is so unique.

I don't want to be diminutive in the word that it's cute, but it is so cute, - [Ally] Iconic (laughs) that every room is so considered.

It's a mother-daughter owned operation and they are lovely.

They're these tiny, miniature little rooms with intricate details and they put them in surprising places throughout the bookstore, somewhere within the wall, or they're just clever and winsome.

And you kind of wanna just sit there and look at them forever and that's something that makes that store really special.

- [Terry] My hometown book shop is Back of Beyond in Moab, and it is a spectacular bookstore of regional and local writers of the Colorado Plateau and the American Southwest.

And that's where my heart resides now.

- [Kase] The great thing about Back of Beyond Books is you can walk in and because everybody's traveling to Arches in Monument Valley is there are 10 different languages being spoken at back of Beyond Books at any time during the summer.

And it's just, if you're in Moab, stop by the bookstore.

It's really, really, really worth it.

- [Terry] And Folklore Bookshop in Midway is just precious.

Midway is the Switzerland of Utah.

- [Ally] It's beyond charming.

They work so hard with their community engagement.

They like to be a safe place like many bookstores are for maybe youth and people who don't have a place to go or who feel like they might not be accepted everywhere.

The bookshop is a place where they are welcomed and loved and they will help them find books that speak to their experience.

And so I really love Folklore.

(upbeat music) - If you are planning a scenic escape or looking for inspiration for your next story, Utah is full of places worth exploring in person for full effect.

- [Kase] If you wanna know about Utah's literature, go outside.

It's the mountains, it's the water, it's the lake.

And you can see this in fiction, you can see it in nonfiction, you can see it in fantasy from our Utah writers.

It's gorgeous.

- [Terry] Certainly the national parks, I think they are literary landmarks because of the books that have been inspired by those landscapes, whether it's Zion and Juanita Brooks "Mountain Meadow Massacre" that's in the region, whether it's "Desert Solitaire" coming out of Arches.

This right here, "Beyond the Glittering World," which is an anthology of indigenous feminisms and future.

And it's by one of Utah's terrific writers, Stacie Shannon Dentesosie.

And so this is tied to all of our national parts of sacred lands, public lands, lands that are being protected by Native voices like Bears Ears National Monument.

So I think every square inch of Utah is a literary landscape because it's people who have passed through.

- [Kase] Another one to look at is the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah.

There's been a lot written about the Japanese internment camps during World War II.

Topaz was one of them.

- Not only did Topaz have so many influential artists and writers working at the time, but many descendants of these incarcerees also went on to write and to produce more art.

So Julie Otsuka's bestselling 2002 novel, "When the Emperor was Divine" and Ruth Sasaki's 1991 collection of short stories were very much about their family's specific experiences in Topaz.

- The Utah Shakespeare Festival is always worth a visit.

Shakespeare did not live here or know of its existence, (laughs) but you really can't beat a Shakespeare play with a beautiful cast under the open air in a theater that was built after the manner of the Globe.

It's just a magical night.

So that's a literary landmark that I love, as well as the Utah Shakespeare Festival.

- We're opening a new giant museum.

It's called the Utah History Museum, and it's gonna be up by the capitol.

I'm sure there'll be a lot of literary aspects to it.

- I'm so excited to finally have a state museum where people can come and see our culture and and our history.

And they've been very thoughtful, I think with the design and implementation and the stories that they plan on telling through it.

- I also had the great honor of being Utah's poet laureate for five years.

One of the things that I really, really enjoyed was working on a project called Mapping Literary Utah, which is a web archive of Utah writers past and present.

And there's everyone from performance poets to Cowboy poets, romance writers, YA novelists, graphic novelists, playwrights, you know, you name the literary genre.

We have them on the site.

And so I hope people go and look at that because we have over about 250 writers so far, archived and more are coming.

(upbeat music) - Today's look at Utah's bookish culture is part of a nationwide celebration.

2026 marks the United States 250th birthday.

So we've partnered with the Library of Congress to celebrate the stories, authors, and books that define each corner of this nation.

- [Fred] 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 affiliated centers for the book across the US with the mission to make the Library of Congress and its resources 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'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 Utah Center for the Book, located in Salt Lake City.

- The Utah Center for the Book is housed at the Utah Humanities Council in Salt Lake City.

Just a couple blocks from West High where Wallace Thurman went to high school.

And you know, we have a lot of great programming when it comes to literature in the state.

We're really, really lucky.

We host the Utah Humanities Book Festival that will be in its 29th year.

This year, it's a month-long festival that goes from October 1st to October 31st.

And I curate the festival.

And last year we had 147 different events with nearly a hundred different authors across the state.

And so one week it will be a cluster of events in northern Utah.

The next week will be a cluster of events in southern Utah.

The next week will be in the Wasatch Back Park City and such.

And we bring in authors from across the country as headliners and we bring in our own local authors 'cause we have headliners.

We have authors like Ally Condie and Brandon Sanderson and Shannon Hale.

Utah has a really rich literary culture and the Utah Humanities Book Festival does its best to highlight all of it across the state.

We also are home to the Utah Book Awards and we are home to the Utah original writing competition in partnership with the Utah Division of Arts and Museums.

Beyond that, we support local libraries, we support local bookstores, and we try to reach every county in the state, especially rural counties with book programming, especially during our Utah Humanities Book Festival in the fall.

- If you'd like to learn more about the Utah Book Festival or their regional writing competition, visit them online at utahhumanities.org/programs/cen.

- Today's stop in Utah has been awe-inspiring.

Thank you again to the Library of Congress and Utah Center for the book for partnering with PBS books as we journey across the country exploring the books, authors and destinations that showcase America's story.

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

Tell us about your must see stops in Utah, 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, 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.

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

- And this is just one stop along the way, the PBS Book's YouTube channel, you'll find the full journey, stories from across the country all in one place.

Ready whenever you are.

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

- Until next time.

[Both] Happy reading.

(upbeat music)