The Haystack Book Festival is a program of the Norfolk Hub.
when
October 2, 3, & 4, 2026
where
Norfolk Library
Norfolk, CT
Writers In Conversation
2026 Festival Events
Brendan Gill Lecture—A Conversation with Belle Burden
Friday, October 2 - 6:00 PM
Belle Burden, author of Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage talks with Roxanne Coady, RJ Julia Bookseller
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Registration is required.
Across Borders and Belonging—Exile,
Identity, and American Lives Abroad
Saturday, October 3 - 10:30 AM
David Mayers, author of Seekers and Partisans: Americans Abroad in Crisis Years 1936-1941
in conversation with
Nicholas Boggs, author of Baldwin: A Love Story
After the Wounds—War, Memory, and the Search for
What Endures
Saturday, October 3 - 1:00 PM
David Nasaw, author of The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After WWII
in conversation with
Elizabeth Samet, author of Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness
Inventing America—Power and Myth at the Nations Edges
Saturday, October 3 - 3:00 PM
Craig Fehrman, author of The Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis and Clark
in conversation with
Megan Kate Nelson, author of The Westerners: Myth Making and Belonging on the American Frontier
Among the Trees - History, Culture, and Environment
Sunday, October 4 - 11:00 AM
Sophie Pinkham, author of The Oak and the Larch: A Forest Story of Russian and Its Empires
in conversation with
Robert Moor, author of In Trees
Haystack Book Festival brings together in unmoderated conversation writers and thinkers who have something to talk about. Past and upcoming talks are as various as Pulitzer Prize finalist Janice Nimura and Dorothy Wickenden on the women who helped spark the first American civil rights movement, David Chaffetz and Sarah Maslin Nir on Horses as treasured companions and engines of power, NYT Cooking’s Sam Sifton and Melissa Clark on the world of cooking, William Egginton and Samuel Moyn exploring the public circulation of ideas, George Packer and Elizabeth Becker on the coverage of war and how it has changed, Allen Ellenzweig and Jarrett Earnest on the work of photographer George Platt Lynes, Hugh Eakin on Picasso and the movement of modern art to America, and many conversations on our environment and the nature that surrounds us with Noah Charney, Carl Safina, David Allen Sibley, and many others.