(light music) - On this episode of "American Stories: A Reading Road Trip."

We're heading to the last frontier.

- Come discover what makes Alaska's literary world so unique.

From storytelling traditions passed down generations by Native tribes to the written words of adventures like Jack London's "Call of the Wild" and early environmentalists like Margaret Murie.

- We'll also hear from writers who call Alaska home today.

From Velma Wallis Preserving tribal stories to Michaela Goade celebrating Indigenous traditions and Dana Stabenow's Alaskan mysteries to Seth Kantner and Nancy Lord's explorations of life in the far north, today's writers honor Alaska's past while shaping its future.

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

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

- Well, hello and welcome.

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

- Join us as we dive into America's storied history and spotlight the voices shaping its literary future.

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.

- [Fred] Today, we head to the far north of the American continent.

From the untamed beauty of Denali to the shimmering dance of the Northern Lights, the last frontier offers readers and writers a sense of awe, adventure, and the kind of quiet that sparks storytelling.

- Alaska's late entry into statehood and its vast distance from the Lower 48 have shaped a way of life unlike anywhere else where wildlife thrives and roads are few.

But we'll let Alaskans show you just how extraordinary it is.

- For me, the overall beauty of the location is amazing.

I step out onto my back deck and I'm looking at mountains and we watch the Northern Lights sparkling across the sky and I really do love the people up here.

- Well, Alaska is both very big and very small.

It's two and a half times the size of Texas and yet we have the third smallest population in the nation.

So we only have 750,000 people and 20% of those are Native American.

- There's over 200 federally recognized tribes in this state and it's really like a constellation of remote rural communities, with the exception of a few larger city centers.

And a lot of these communities still live close to the land.

- We're not very well connected by road.

We fly, we take a boat.

- I think it'd be like if you came to North America and said, "You know, I went to Miami or I went to Point Barrow."

There's quite a vast difference and Alaska kind of has that span.

It's just so geographically and culturally so huge.

- [Velma] I like to think of us Alaskans as fun.

I like to think of us as we're living here in Alaska.

We make the best of it and we put our best foot forward as Alaskans.

So that's I think what makes Alaska really special.

- We're fishing in the summertime or we're getting ready to go fishing in the summertime.

Then after fishing is over, we're picking berries and we're canning, you know, food and then it's time to go hunting.

And then along about October things start to get dark and we spend much of our time inside and there's nothing better than putting your feet up in front of a roaring fire with a cup of cocoa and a good book in your lap.

(laughs) It's a perfect, it's a book lover's paradise.

(airy music) - Western literary traditions arrived in Alaska only in recent history, but long before that, Indigenous peoples preserved knowledge and culture through rich oral storytelling.

As Alaska has evolved, so too has its narrative transforming from spoken word to written form while keeping its deep roots alive.

- The literary history of Alaska is shorter than in other states.

For example, we had the Alaska Native period, which lasted until about 1790.

After that, we had the Russian-American period where we were a colony of Russia.

- Alaska only became a state in 1959, so we are still very new.

Alaska's Native people have been storytellers forever, for thousands of years.

- [Velma] Well, we grew up with storytelling.

My mother was the big person that pushed it and that's how I became a storyteller was because of the oral storytelling she would tell at nighttime.

My brothers and sisters always joke about, "You became a writer because you listened to Mom and you were able to remember all her stories."

I think that storytelling is important to promote us as human beings in a universal way.

- It's fascinating the different prompts that Alaska Natives use to tell their stories.

For example, Yupik pick girls had a storyknife, which they would use to carve stories in the dirt.

- It's just so interconnected.

Totem poles tell stories or they often tell the history of a particular clan house.

They were front facing on the shore.

And so when canoes would come up, you could see the crest designs within the totem pole and you could tell the history there as well.

Dances are also a forms of storytelling as well.

So yes, storytelling is in every part of the culture.

- Our literary history really seems to begin in about 1900.

That's when we have people who came up here long enough to write about their experiences and start sketching out our literary history - In the early days, as it still is, Alaska was a place for adventurers, a place that a lot of people didn't know about.

So there was a certain amount of sensationalism and exaggeration.

- [Nancy] I think that Alaska lends itself maybe to two kinds of writing in particular: one is mysteries, and then adventure writing I think is the other category that's very big.

- [Dana] So Jack London is known for his novels "Call of the Wild" and "White Fang" and the short story we all seem to read in high school, "To Build a Fire."

- He was here for less than a year.

He came up in 1897 on a steamer during the gold rush and went up the southeast coast and crossed the Chilkoot Pass into Canada and floated down the Yukon River on a handmade cross between a raft and a boat and battled scurvy and mosquitoes and people who had literally gone crazy from just the cold and the solitude and whatnot.

- They came out to the coast of Alaska in St.

Michael.

There, he bordered another steamer back to San Francisco, but was enriched with a trove of stories about his time in the Klondike.

- The two iconic writers are gonna come straight out of the gold rush, which by the way happened in Canada, not in Alaska.

(laughs) And that of course is Jack London and then Robert Service.

Those are almost invariably the first people that leap to mind.

But here's one that will be fun, I think for you.

There was an anthropologist, her name was Frederica de Laguna, and she was an extraordinary individual.

She went all over Southcentral Alaska.

She wrote two mysteries (laughs) that, along with a lot of scientific tracks and anthropological studies and things like that, she wrote a couple of mysteries that were published back in the '30s.

It's just that nobody's ever heard of her today except for the Native peoples because the people of Yakutat gave her a potlatch when she died, which is a signal of honor, I mean even for a tribal member.

And she's truly an extraordinary individual.

A great scientist too, by the way.

- [Velma] Margaret Murie came to Alaska as a 9-year-old in 1911 with her mother on the last boat before the freeze up, which is an issue, you have to get into Alaska before the rivers freeze.

She lived in Fairbanks and became the first woman to graduate from what is now the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1924.

- Margaret Murie, who was known as Mardy Murie, wrote "Two in the Far North," it was published in 1962, and it's a memoir and adventure story, really, of her life.

But also her time with her husband, Olause, in the Arctic.

He was a biologist.

They spent a lot of time in what's now the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and they were very instrumental in the campaign to create the refuge.

She has always been an inspiration to Alaskan conservationists and she's very, very good writer.

She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998 by President Clinton.

- In addition to writing her memoir "Two in the Far North," she wrote a novel "Island Between," which is set on St.

Lawrence Island, and a number of other books.

She wrote articles.

She was the face and the respected voice of that early conservation movement.

- John Haines grew up in a Navy family moving frequently, and in 1947 he arrived in Fairbanks and bought 160-acre homestead.

There, he carved out a life and became one of Alaska's most notable and honored writers.

He wrote dozens of books of poetry, essays, and an autobiography.

John Haines was named Alaska's Poet Laureate in 1969.

He was truly acclaimed as a writer in the state and he received a lifetime achievement award from the Library of Congress Center for the Book in 1994.

- John Haines was a very important writer for me.

When I was new in Alaska, I was sort of searching for Alaskan writers whose, you know, work I could relate to and wasn't really finding much.

This was in the early '70s.

Until I came across some of John's essays from "Living Off the Country" and it just clicked with me.

It was like, "Oh, this is the Alaska that I know and that I want to know and that I relate to."

He's better known for his poetry "Winter News," his first poetry book.

It's just outstanding work.

Shortly after I met John and we had a, really, a lifelong friendship.

He was a mentor to me, very encouraging to me, but also a very tough critic.

So he always sort of kept me on my toes as a writer.

(airy music) - Among Alaska's most prolific voices is Dana Stabenow whose Kate Shugak mystery series has spent over three decades proving that Alaska itself could be the most compelling character on the page.

- Dana Stabenow has written an award-winning series of mysteries.

She's a longtime supporter of writers.

Dana founded the Storyknife Writers Retreat in Homer in 2014.

She built a bunch of cabins up on a ridge for women writers to use so that they could have the time and space to explore their craft without distraction.

- My favorite book that I've ever written is "Though Not Dead," which is the 16th or the 18th Kate Shugak novel.

And essentially what I do is I'm able to tell the history of the last hundred years of Alaska through the life of a character who died at the end of the previous book.

I also hand sell this book all the time.

For five years I worked for "Alaska Magazine" and traveled around the state and wrote about it and I sandwiched as much history into those columns as I humanly could.

(laughs) It's called "Alaska Traveler," which was the name of the column.

That was probably the best job I've ever had in my entire life because I got to, like, fly all over Alaska and meet all kinds of people and incorporate them into the stories.

I spent five, probably very formative, years on a boat, on a fish tender in Southcentral Alaska.

My, literally, my first memory is my mother's forefinger going under the words "Once upon a time in a faraway land, lived a beautiful princess named Snow White."

And I would be willing to bet that a lot of Alaskans of my generation learned to read exactly that same way.

But it was always, you know, reading was always something that I was interested in.

The only ability basically I have is to put words together into a simple declarative sentence and see if maybe I could make a living at writing.

And it took me about five years.

I think I had $1,100 left in the bank when I (laughs) finally published a book and I never looked back.

- While Stabenow weaves Alaska's history into fiction, Nancy Lord documents its present and warns us about its future.

As both a writer and conservationist, Lord's work connects Alaska's literary legacy to its environmental survival.

- I moved to Alaska right out of college.

I'd always had a fascination with Alaska and I grew up in New England.

I wanted to be far away from what I saw as the sort of confines of New England and be in a bigger space and have more possibility.

So I moved to Alaska very intentionally.

I became a writer once I was in Alaska because I was interested in so many things and I found that to learn about my place and what I thought about it was to write about it.

I write both fiction and nonfiction and I sort of pivot back and forth between them.

Pretty much all my writing is informed by Alaska.

I commercial fished for many years so my first nonfiction book was called "Fishcamp" about that experience.

And then from that grew out another book about beluga whales because I fished around beluga whales and was interested in them and wanted to learn more.

And I've written a lot about climate change because that is the big issue.

I wrote a nonfiction book called "Early Warming" and then I did write a novel called "pH," also about ocean science and warming because I thought that was a way to maybe sort of capture some readers who might be more interested in a fiction story rather than the hard science of nonfiction.

So I sort of wrote my way into being an Alaskan.

- Environmental stewardship is woven throughout Alaska stories and so is cultural preservation.

Michaela Goade, the first Native Alaskan to win the Caldecott Medal, introduces young readers to Indigenous traditions through her vibrant, joyful illustration.

- Michaela Goade is an Alaska Native illustrator.

She won the Caldecott Award for "We Are The Water Protectors."

She subsequently wrote and illustrated "Berry Song" which received a Caldecott Honor award and was picked by the Alaska Center for the Book for the Great Reads for Kids in 2023.

- So "Berry Song" and "Moon Song" are part of a continuing series called "Song of the Seasons" and "Berry Song" is summer, "Moon Song" is Winter and I'm working on the Autumn book now and then, later, spring.

And these books are really inspired by Southeast Alaska, you know, about place, placemaking and they're inspired by my childhood in part, but also just wanting to really celebrate this region and the beautiful seasons we have here.

One of the ways I thought I could go about that was through our traditional wild foods.

And so the wild harvest calendar from season to season, there is such an abundance of wild foods here in this region.

So yeah, it's really like a celebration of place and trying to capture this unique spirit through a cultural lens, but also hopefully speaking to a really wide audience.

Not just for Native children and for Native readers, young and old, to have, but also for non-Native audiences as well.

It's really important for everyone to see these stories that had been, you know, excluded from the wider canon for so long.

For Native children it fosters confidence and a strong sense of identity.

And for others, the non-Native folk, it helps with empathy and compassion and just greater cross-cultural understanding.

- While Goade brings Indigenous stories to life for children, Velma Wallis ensures they endure for all generations.

This Athabascan author transformed her tribe's oral traditions into powerful written narratives, preserving ancient wisdom in the modern form.

- [Patience] Velma Wallis is an Athabascan writer.

She was born into a family of 13 children in Fort Yukon.

"Two Old Women" is an amazing short book, has been translated into 17 languages and has won numerous awards.

And her other book "Bird Girl" also taps into stories from Alaska Natives and she also wrote a memoir called "Raising Ourselves."

- My people and almost all Native people here in Alaska are built on stories.

"Two Old Women" for example, is a story about two old women who had to survive.

And when I first had heard that story, I was pretty young and my mother was telling us about it.

We were out in the woods, she and I, getting winter wood 'cause my dad had died years ago and we had to forge for ourselves.

She said, "This reminds me of 'Two Old Women.'"

And then she told me the story and it just catapulted me out of my senses.

I looked back at Mom and she was just like, she was just this fragile thin line of she could die tomorrow and the story would go with her.

So I went and I just wrote it down.

I had no dreams of being an author.

I had no dreams of it being an international story, but "Two Old Woman" wasn't by accident universal success because people recognized on a universal level that this is the human spirit fighting for itself and stories were meant to touch on our human spirit and "Two Old Women" did that for a lot of people throughout the world.

I've been going forward since.

You know, as a Native person I got a sense of self, for my stories, and I think that's what stories do for us and Alaskans from all walks of life here in Alaska, I think we put a lot into our books, reading and writing, 'cause there's a lot of authors up here now and we love storytelling.

You know, that's our staple.

- Velma Wallis honors Alaska's Indigenous past, while Seth Kantner explores its complicated present.

Raised in a sod igloo in the Arctic, Kantner writes about the collision between traditional life and contemporary America with unflinching authenticity.

- Seth Kantner grew up in a cabin near Koktzebue on the far northwest coast of Alaska.

His first novel, "Ordinary Wolves" is an amazing story and won numerous awards.

He also then wrote a memoir called "Shopping for Porcupine."

His recent books include "A Thousand Trails Home," "Living with Caribou," and "Swallowed by the Grapevine."

He writes about an Alaska that most of us would never experience.

- When I wrote "Ordinary Wolves," it was, I think I was very idealistic.

I was raised in this, you know, like I said, I was a wolverine.

You just never give up and you just, life is incredibly hard.

So I just thought, "I just have to write this book and people will understand the Arctic is worth protecting and nature's amazing and lynx love their children, and you shouldn't catch every salmon you see," you know, all sorts of idealistic, "Save our amazing world" ideas.

But I was never your standard environmentalist.

Every other page I was, you know, skinning a wolf or something.

I'm noticing that I'm unable to write something that isn't trying to help the world.

I never said I was gonna write more than one.

(laughs) So it came out and, you know, it wasn't a financial success or anything and my agent, Sydelle Kramer was like, "Oh, okay, so you're all set up to write another one."

I was like, "About what?

I just already put everything in that book."

And so that led to "Shopping for Porcupine," which is kind of a memoir, but with a lot of my photographs 'cause I was spending a huge amount of energy for the last 40 years photographing the Arctic and animals.

I'm very adamant that my sentences be clear and nice to read and my stories be interesting and exciting.

(airy music) - Alaska's late entry into statehood and its vast distance from the Lower 48 mean library resources look a little different, but they remain a cornerstone of communities, both large and small.

- The interesting thing about libraries in Alaska is that we have 250 communities, but just 90 public libraries.

The towns of 100 to 500 people simply can't afford to keep a library running.

That has led to some interesting aspects.

20 of our public libraries are staffed entirely by volunteers.

- So much of Alaska is remote.

That means that the materials to build these buildings costs a fortune just in transportation, nevermind paying for them in the first place.

And then you have to get people out there to build these spaces.

In a lot of smaller towns and villages in Alaska, the libraries are attached to the schools, but they're also open to the public.

The only way you can get a library in the town is to in fact attach it to what is essentially the biggest, largest building in the town, in the town or the village, and which is also the building that is used for all the public events.

- For example, many of our public libraries share buildings with museums and archives.

In Douglas, which is a suburb of Juneau, we have a combined fire station-public library.

- Growing up in Juneau, I have so many memories of going to the different branches of the Juneau Public Library, even as a very small child just running around in the children's section.

And then as I started working on books when I was still living in Juneau, getting to like read them to kids there in those libraries was really a special sort of full-circle moment.

- [Nancy] My favorite library is my library in Homer, Alaska.

It's very welcoming.

It's not just books, it's really a community center for the whole community.

There are lots of computers, there's a fireplace, lounge, it's got lots of art in it.

So it's everything to me that a library should be.

- [Patience] The Ketchikan Public Library is the oldest continually operating public library in Alaska.

- [Nancy] Ketchikan is in the middle of a rainforest, Thomas National Forest, huge trees everywhere.

And in the middle of the library, in the children's section, there's a tree.

It goes all the way up to the ceiling.

It's used to display all sorts of artwork and kids' project and something, but it's just timber logging trees The rainforests are such a central part of Ketchikan that they built the library around one.

- In Alaska, bookstores are more than shops.

They're havens for connection in a land where distances are vast.

Let's discover the places that keep stories alive across the last frontier.

- Title Wave Books is one of the largest, if not the largest book store in Alaska and it is possibly one of the biggest used book stories in the country.

It houses a large section of Alaska books.

It hosts writing groups, book groups, author events, and much more.

- I probably go to Title Wave every two weeks because I'm a book person.

They're very community minded.

They do a lot of author signings and they don't have a lot of room, but they will pull chairs aside in the back and carve out little space and bring in an author for a visit.

- Growing up in Juneau, I have to say Hearthside Books just because I remember going there so much, buying so many books.

A newer bookstore there is, Alaska Robotics has a awesome shop there.

It's a bit of a hybrid between, you know, like comics and kids books and other books and lots of art.

Pat Race runs that.

And he runs the mini comic cons, which are his beautiful way of connecting with authors and illustrators from the Lower 48.

- Most people from rural Alaska travel through Anchorage Airport and there's Mosquito Books.

And so I'm kind of consistently surprised when I'll run into some old ivory carver or something and he'll say, "I've got all your books."

- Mosquito Books has a really nice Alaska section.

It's not huge, but it's very comprehensive.

And so if you're stuck in the airport, stop at the bookstore.

(laughs) - Most towns in Alaska have independent bookstores.

Of course, my favorite is The Homer Bookstore here in my town.

It's one of the longest-running bookstores and it's sort of reinvented itself several times to serve the community.

- Well, this is gonna sound like log rolling, but my favorite bookstore really is The Homer Bookstore.

It's in my hometown.

It's a wonderfully curated, beautifully presented library.

They can order anything and they ship anywhere.

They're terrific.

But there are many good bookstores in Alaska.

I have to say, though, in particular, a lot of good bookstores are located in Southeast in the panhandle of Alaska, like in Sitka, in Juneau, in Ketchikan.

- Here in Sitka, Old Harbor Books is the one bookstore, a very sweet, cozy little bookshop and they've been wonderful and helped support me over the last five years since living here in Sitka.

And they have a little cozy cafe attached to the back called Backdoor Cafe.

So always recommend that spot here in Sitka.

- Fireside Books was established in 2001 in Palmer, Alaska.

Fireside Books is a hub for readers in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, north of Alaska.

Author Eowyn Ivey worked at the store for nearly a decade while she worked on her debut novel, "The Snow Child," which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

- [Carol] Eowyn Ivey, who is one of our finest writers, that's quite often where she will debut a new novel.

She has a following there and such a fond relationship with the store.

- [Nancy] They do all kinds of author events in Palmer and they have a pretty good turnout for their events as well.

I think they're very well patronized by the people in the valley.

(airy music) - Alaska may not boast as many traditional literary landmarks as other states, but it is home to countless places steeped in stories and history.

- Alaska doesn't have a lot of literary landmarks, again, because we're such a new state.

But one landmark to mention is the bus, the infamous bus from Chris McCandless who died in Alaska and was immortalized in Jon Krakauer's book "Into the Wild."

That bus, a few years ago, was removed from its wilderness place by helicopter because it had become a pilgrimage site for people who then got into trouble.

So it now resides at the University of the North in Fairbanks where it's going to be put on display and interpreted.

- [Patience] Since 2012, the Alaska Center for the Book has worked with Alaska State Parks to select poems by Alaska authors for posting in the parks.

Poems have been posted at parks in Kodiak, Seward, the Hatcher Pass north of Anchorage, and near the Chena River in Fairbanks.

- Outside of Anchorage there's a spot called Beluga Point, which is right along the highway.

You get out of your car and here are sculptures of the whales that look like they're coming up through the gray concrete to look at you just as they would come out of the gray water.

And here's a beautiful poem about belugas so that you can be out, experience the wilderness, and come around a corner and here's a beautiful piece of poetry that links your experience to the written word.

- [Michaela] So Sealaska Heritage Institute, their goal is to make Juneau one of, like, the northwest coast arts capitals of, like, the world.

So they have all these big, beautiful buildings and art installations that they're putting together downtown, but they also run this SHI storefront downtown.

And there you can find all sorts of books and art, of course, too.

But if you're interested in Alaska Native cultures, it's got everything written by Native peoples or by their institution themselves.

Native stories by Native people.

- [Dana] The Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage, thank God, is one place that you can get to easily because you're gonna have to fly in and you're gonna land in Anchorage almost every time.

They have a walking trail out back where you can see the various Alaska Native structures that were built all over Alaska in this one little walk.

So that if you can't afford to fly out to, you know, Utqiagvik, which most people can't 'cause it's very expensive, at least you get to see some facsimile thereof.

- [Velma] The tourist companies have access to whales and glaciers and brown bears and stuff like that, that we Alaskans who grew up there and lived here for some of us, 10,000 years, our people have been here, we haven't seen half of those things, (laughs) you know, and the tour company accesses all those things.

So I sometimes, I think to myself, "One of these days I'm gonna take a tour in Alaska."

- You can take a cruise and see Southeast Alaska, which is, you know, basically a foreign country from the Arctic.

If we're gonna fly north, I think a place like Nome has like gold rush history and maybe more infrastructure as far as hotels and stuff.

I know a lot of people do go to Denali Park and all that and I think that's great if you wanna see bears and moose and stuff, that would be, you know, much harder to see here.

I tend to want the hitchhiker's version of life, which is, you know, rubbing shoulders with the people who live here.

(airy music) - Today's journey through Alaska's literary landscape is part of a bigger celebration.

As America approaches its 250th birthday, we're exploring the stories, authors, and books that define each corner of this nation.

Thanks to the Library of Congress, PBS Books is excited to take you on a literary journey like no other.

- 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 6 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 Alaska Center for the Book.

While they operate a little differently than other centers, their mission remains the same: connecting Alaskans with authors and books.

- Centers for the Book nationwide are frequently programs of the state library in their state.

They are frequently part of the humanities council from the state and some of them are also hosted by universities.

In Alaska, the Center for the Book is a standalone non-profit.

We function entirely with grants, donations, and the membership fees that the board pays.

We don't have a brick-and-mortar location.

All of our work is done from homes.

I'm in my kitchen.

(laughs) So it's a different type of a Center for the Book.

Alaska overcomes its vastness and expensive travel by embracing a primarily online book event.

Founded in 2011 by Alaskan writers, the Center for the Book has coordinated Book Week since 2013.

Online events include author interviews and panels, and there are a number of in-person events held across the state at bookstores and libraries.

The statewide creative writing contest began in 1981 with partners on "Anchorage Daily News" and the University of Alaska Anchorage.

The Alaska Center for the Book took on project management in 2010.

We received roughly 500 entries each year from people ranging in age from 6 to 96.

Authors Nancy Lord and Ernestine Hayes are two writers who won awards early in their careers in the contest and who went on to become state writer laureates.

So finally, Alaska Reads.

Since 2016, this biennial statewide reading program has focused on the selected title by a living Alaskan author to create a shared reading experience with author readings and the free distribution of books statewide.

Titles selected include "Blonde Indian" by Ernestine Hayes, "Find the Good" by Heather Lende, and "Sivulliq" by Lily Tuzroyluke.

- If you'd like to learn more about their writing contest, reading rendezvous, check out some of their online events, or simply want to learn more, visit them online at alaskacenterforthebook.org.

- It's safe to say that Alaska has been a truly one-of-a-kind stop for our reading road trip.

Thank you again to the Library of Congress and the Alaska Center for the Book for partnering with PBS Books as we journey across the country, exploring the books, the authors, and the places that define America's story.

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

Or if you are a 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, 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.

- 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... - [Both] Happy reading.

(warm airy music) (gentle music)