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The Haystack Book Festival is a program of the Norfolk Hub.

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2026 Featured Authors

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Nicholas Boggs

Nicholas Boggs was an undergraduate when he discovered James Baldwin’s out-of-print children’s book, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. After he tracked down its illustrator, the French artist Yoran Cazac, he went on to coedit an acclaimed new edition of the book in 2018. His writing has also been anthologized in The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin, James Baldwin Now, and Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin. He is the recipient of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Beinecke Library and Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, the Schomburg Center Scholars-in-Residence Program, and the National Humanities Center, as well as residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. He received his BA in English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from American University, and his PhD in English from Columbia. Born and raised in Washington, DC, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Belle Burden

Belle Burden holds a BA from Harvard College and a law degree from the New York University School of Law. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times. She lives with her children in New York City.

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Roxanne Coady

Roxanne J. Coady is the founder of R.J. Julia Booksellers Ltd. and serves as its chief executive officer and president. The bookstore was created by Coady to be “a place of inspiration, information, and excitement.” She also founded an online retailer, JustTheRightBook.com, which is a personalized book of the month club. Lastly, she is the founder and chair of Read to Grow, an organization that works to improve early literacy for all Connecticut children.

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Craig Fehrman

Craig Fehrman, a journalist and historian, spent five years writing and researching This Vast Enterprise. His first book, Author in Chief, was described by Thomas Mallon in The Wall Street Journal as “one of the best books on the American presidency to appear in recent years.” Fehrman lives in Indiana with his wife and children.

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David Mayers

David Mayers holds a joint appointment in the History and Political Science Departments at Boston University. His primary area of teaching/research interest is the history of US foreign relations/international politics. His principal books are George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, The Ambassadors and America’s Soviet Policy, (Douglas Dillon prize from the American Academy of Diplomacy), Wars and Peace: The Future Americans Envisioned, 1861-1991, Dissenting Voices in America’s Rise to Power, FDR‘s Ambassadors and the Diplomacy of Crisis, America and the Postwar World: Remaking International Society, 1945-1956, and Seekers and Partisans: Americans Abroad in the Crisis Years, 1935-1941.

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Mayers served on the board of trustees of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Relations from 1999 to 2005. He serves now as a member of the Management Committee, Transatlantic Studies Association. He chaired the Political Science Department from 2001 to 2007 and again in 2015-2018. Since 2013 he has been a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University.

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Robert Moor

Hailed by The Wall Street Journal as a “philosopher on foot,” Robert Moor is the bestselling author of On Trails and In Trees. Translated into more than a dozen languages, On Trails garnered the National Outdoor Book Award, the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and the William Saroyan International Prize. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, New York magazine, Outside, Emergence, and n+1, among other publications. He lives in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia.

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David Nashaw

David Nasaw is a historian, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and bestselling author of The Last Million, named a best book of the year by NPR, Kirkus Reviews, and History Today, and, according to The Economist, one of the "six must-read books on the Second World War"; The Patriarch, a New York Times Five Best Non-Fiction Books of the Year; Andrew Carnegie, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and the winner of the New-York Historical Society's American History Book Prize; and The Chief, winner of the Bancroft Prize. He is the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History Emeritus at the CUNY Graduate Center and a past president of the Society of American Historians. In 2023, Nasaw was honored by the New York Public Library as a “Library Lion.” His father served in the Army. Corps in Eritrea during World War II.

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Megan Kate Nelson

Born and raised in Colorado, Megan Kate Nelson is a writer and historian now based in Boston, Massachusetts. She has written about US western history, the Civil War, and American culture for The New York TimesThe Washington PostThe Atlantic, Slate, Time, and Smithsonian Magazine. Nelson earned her BA in history and literature from Harvard University and her PhD in American studies from the University of Iowa. She is the author of Saving Yellowstone; The Three-Cornered War, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Ruin Nation; and Trembling Earth.

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Sophia Pinkham

Sophie Pinkham is a professor at Cornell University and a former NEH Public Scholar. Her writing on Russia and Ukraine has appeared in the New York Review of Books, New York Times, Guardian, New Yorker, and Harper’s. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

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Elizabeth Samet

Elizabeth D. Samet is the author of No Man's Land: Preparing for War and Peace in Post-9/11 America; Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest and was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2007 by The New York Times; and Willing Obedience: Citizens, Soldiers, and the Progress of Consent in America, 1776–1898. Samet is the editor of Leadership: Essential Writings by Our Greatest Thinkers, The Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, and World War II Memoirs: Pacific Theater. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Grant and the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, she was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to support the research and writing of Looking for the Good War. She is a professor of English at West Point.

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