The Nebraska Center for the Book

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National Book Festival

The 2026 National Book Festival will be held in the nation’s capital at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on Saturday, August 22. A selection of programs will be livestreamed online and videos of all programs will be available shortly after the Festival.

Each year, one children’s book and one adult title are chosen to represent Nebraska at the National Book Festival's Great Reads from Great Places exhibit. Representatives from NCB and the Nebraska Library Commission attend the festival and staff Nebraska's booth in the exhibit hall. Bookmarks, maps, coloring pages, and book lists are given out to thousands of visitors each year spreading the word about our state's great literary traditions.

The Festival Near You

Even if you can’t make the trip to DC, you can still join in the fun right here in Nebraska!

Nebraska Festival Near You Graphic

Book Club Kits

Schools and libraries across the state can check out a free book club kit featuring Nebraska’s Youth Great Read title. The Nebraska Library Commission has 50 books available for checkout, each reservation will discussion guides, activity prompts, bookmarks, and ready‑to‑use programming ideas designed for classrooms, youth groups, and library events. These kits make it easy for communities of all sizes to host book discussions, reading celebrations, or creative projects inspired by Larsen’s work.

Author Talks

To further support statewide engagement, Mylisa Larsen will offer eight virtual author visits to Nebraska schools and libraries. These interactive sessions give young readers the chance to ask questions, learn about the writing process, and connect directly with the author whose book represents Nebraska on the national stage. Libraries and educators can register for these visits on a first‑come, first‑served basis.

Stream the Festival

Viewers are able to live stream some author talks and programming, all programming is available to stream after the festival. Search the line up of world class authors and illustrators to find the speakers and programs you're most interested in!

Great Reads from Great PlacesGold seal for Nebraska's Youth Great Reads From Great Places

Youth Book

Nebraska's 2026 Great Reads from Great Places children’s book is Quagmire Tiarello Couldn't Be Better (Clarion Books, 2024) written by Mylisa Larsen.

Quagmire Tiarello prides himself on not needing anything from anybody. Sure, his mom is skipping work again and showing signs of going into one of her full-out spins, but it’s nothing he can’t handle. He’s used to her up-and-down moods, even if this time it feels a little different. Then his mom disappears, and Quag must find shelter with an uncle he didn't know he had. Should he come clean about his mother’s mental health challenges? Or can he use his carefully honed skills to bluff long enough to find his mom and get home? Readers will root for Quag as he finds himself rethinking his world and learning to accept help from the people who love him.



Mylisa Larsen has been telling stories for a long time. This has caused her to get gimlet-eyed looks from her parents, her siblings and, later, her own children when they felt that certain stories had been embellished beyond acceptable limits. She now writes children’s books where her talent for hyperbole is actually rewarded.

She is the author of the novels Quagmire Tiarello Couldn’t Be Better and Playing Through The Turnaround and the picture books All Of Those Babies, If I Were A Kangaroo, Ho Ho Homework and How To Put Your Parents To Bed.

She has lived in nine states and two countries and has loved things about each of them. Right now, she lives in Wisconsin.. https://www.mylisalarsen.com/

 

Adult Book

Nebraska's 2026 Great Reads from Great Places adult book is The Antidote: A Novel (Revell, 2023) by Karen Russell.

The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a “Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Russell’s novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.

Karen Russell Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including the NYT bestsellers Vampires in the Lemon Grove and Swamplandia!, one of the NYT’s ten best books of the year and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has taught literature and creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of California-Irvine, Williams College, Columbia University, and Bryn Mawr College, and was the Endowed Chair of Texas State’s MFA program. She serves on the board of Street Books. Born and raised in Miami, FL, she is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Stanford University and lives in Berkeley, CA with her husband, son, and daughter. For more information, visit karenrussellauthor.com.



For more information contact Tessa Timperley, 402-471-3434 or 800-307-2665, or visit the Facebook pages of the Nebraska Center for the Book, Nebraska Library Commission, and One Book One Nebraska.


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