Annual Center for the Book Idea Exchange

I got back today from the annual State Center for the Book Idea Exchange meeting. Hosted by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress this meeting provides the directors of all the state Centers for the Book an opportunity to get together and talk about the projects we do and to share ideas and experiences and to help each other with problems our centers may be having. This year there was a lot of discussion about book festivals, state book awards, literary maps, and NEA Big Read projects. We also talk about national projects that centers organize at a state level, like the National Book Festival, Letters About Literature, and River of Words.

This year, for the first time, several of the center directors got together to have a book discussion dinner after the meeting. We read and discussed The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. and were lucky enough to have Chris Higashi of the Washington Center for the Book at the Seattle Public Library join us for the discussion and share with us the excellent Reading Group Toolbox for the Works of Jhumpa Lahiri that they created for their 2007 Seattle Reads project.