- On this episode of American Stories: A Reading Road Trip we're heading to the Hoosier state.

- Come along as we celebrate the stories and bookish culture of Indiana, from dark and reflective classics like Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" to children's literary legends like "Clifford the Big Red Dog".

- We'll also hear from inspiring writers who were born in the state, like bestselling author Karen Joy Fowler Newbery Award winner, Kimberley Brubaker Bradley, and YA author and independent bookstore owner Leah Johnson.

- Join PBS Books, the Library of Congress, and the Indiana Center for the Book on a literary adventure through Indiana.

This is American Stories: A Reading Road Trip.

(bright orchestral music) - Well, hello and welcome.

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

- Come along as we take a look into the storied past of the United States and explore today's writers that continue to shape and build our literary landscape.

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 make our stop at the crossroads of America, Indiana, a state whose landscape varies from the towering dunes off the coast of Lake Michigan to expansive farmland and even Columbus, the architectural mecca of America.

- But outside of its landscape and beyond its borders is a broader influence of what it means to be from Indiana.

But we'll let the Hoosiers explain it for themselves.

- Indiana is so unique and special because of the passion that Hoosiers have for practically everything.

- You know, Vonnegut has that iconic quote, which is like, "Wherever you go "there is a Hoosier doing something important there."

And I have absolutely found that to be true.

Like, even after I left, I went away for school, there was always somebody like that I was tangentially connected to that was either from Indiana or had grown up in Indianapolis or had worked here or had been inspired by somebody who had worked here or lived here, whatever.

- There's something very good about the soul of Indiana.

It sounds strange, but I also think there's kind of everywhere quality about it.

You could write a very nice middle grade book that's sort of set anywhere.

When you're from Indiana, you just are writing about Indiana, but it doesn't read about Indiana.

It reads as everywhere, you know, just a place in the United States, and there's something really useful about that.

- How varied it is both culturally and environmentally.

So you have that kind of dunes and beach culture in the north part of the state, but the kind of overflow from Chicago too.

So you have an urban industrial center in the northern part that abuts the Indiana Dunes.

Then you have cornfields and all of that manufacturing and production work that happens in the center of our state.

- Limestone quarries in Lawrence County, Indiana that have helped to furnish and help build some of the great structures in America, including the Pentagon, the Empire State Building, and most state capitals across the country have been built with Indiana limestone.

- I think there is a richer history in terms of authors and books than a lot of people realize.

(light upbeat music) Great bookstores, great libraries.

- You might not know this, but Indiana produces more popcorn than any other state, so you're welcome.

(popcorn popping) (bright upbeat music) - While nobody really knows what a Hoosier is or where the nickname came from, what we do know is that Indiana has a very rich literary history from the post-Civil War golden age of writers, to powerful poets from the Black arts movement, and even some of the biggest names in children's literature.

Let's explore these literary legends.

- So the golden age of Indiana literature happened between the 1880s and the 1920s.

- These writers were incredibly popular, both nationally and internationally.

I would envision it as if you kind of like closed your eyes and pointed at the bestseller list, chances are you'd be pointing at a Hoosier.

- And it all launched when "Ben-Hur" was published by Lew Wallace in 1880.

That book went on to become the bestselling American book of the 19th century.

- Lew Wallace is one of my favorite Hoosiers.

He's an Indiana renaissance man.

He did just about everything in his lifetime and did it very well.

He was a lawyer, was a state legislator, was a general in the Civil War.

Published a novel at a time when men, real men did not read novels, did not read fiction.

It was something that women did.

- He just had all of these different varied interests, so really kind of typified a renaissance man of the time.

- And then Indiana just stayed there, and we dominated the bestseller lists for, like, decades with authors like Booth Tarkington.

So Booth Tarkington came on the scene.

He won the Pulitzer Prize twice.

- [Ray] For both the "Magnificent Ambersons" and "Alice Adams."

He had quite the varied life in Indiana.

He was not only a writer, he decided to do what a lot of young Hoosiers do, and that is run for public office.

- [Megan] And he portrayed, as did a lot of the golden age writers, the kind of changes happening in society.

(light upbeat music) - James Whitcomb Riley came on the scene.

He was a powerhouse.

His book "Rhymes of Childhood" came out in 1890 and sold millions of copies.

- [Ray] James Whitcomb Riley, of course, is known as the Hoosier Poet and is well known for his dialect poetry.

- [Megan] If you went to school in Indiana, you probably memorized at least one of his poems.

- I was maybe three years old, my grandma taught me, "Little Orphan Annie's come to our house to stay, "to wash the cups and saucers up, "and brush the crumbs away."

But he definitely represents a certain kind of time period and a certain way of writing for kids before writing for kids was really a thing.

(quirky upbeat music) - And then we also had Gene Stratton-Porter in this group of golden age authors.

- [Ray] Gene Stratton-Porter was an early naturalist and photographer who became famous for her fictional accounts, which had strong morals.

- Gene Stratton-Porter was actually someone whose books I loved as a child, especially "A Girl of the Limberlost," which I read and read and read.

Many of her books they were bestsellers at the time, and I think many of them still read very well today.

- I think she does a great job of bringing the landscape onto the page, but also of loving the landscape and worrying about the landscape.

- So we really can't talk about Indiana, specifically Indianapolis, without talking about Kurt Vonnegut.

Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922.

And, you know, he lived and grew up here, and he went to public schools here in Indianapolis.

- [Megan] His family's name is on a lot of buildings if you come downtown because they were architects that didn't weather the Great Depression terribly well.

So a lot of the critique and satire that emerges in Vonnegut's work kind of responds to the hardships he saw in society, obviously most notably born of his experience of the war.

- [Ray] Particularly, from his experiences in World War II.

As a prisoner of war being housed in Dresden, he used that as the basis later on when he returned home for his most famous work, "Slaughterhouse-Five".

- Vonnegut is like the godfather of Indiana literature, and as an adult, rereading and re-contextualizing Vonnegut now that I have a greater political understanding, to understand the way things have changed but the way things haven't changed at all in the way that our relationship exist to language, but also the relationship that storytellers have to our government.

You know, Vonnegut was an incredibly political writer.

- [Ray] Kurt Vonnegut is really identified with Indianapolis.

He once said, "All my jokes are Indianapolis.

"All my attitudes are Indianapolis.

"If I ever severed myself from Indianapolis, "I would be out of business, "and what people like about me is Indianapolis."

(bright music) - So Etheridge Knight and Mari Evans were really important figures in the Black arts movement that happened during the 60s and the 70s.

(light jazzy music) And this was a movement that really created new cultural institutions and conveyed a message of Black pride.

- People very rarely associate any radical Black historical movement with the Midwest.

What Mari Evans proves and what so many writers prove, especially writers that have come out of Chicago, Indianapolis, like, we have a rich cultural tradition here of Black arts and Black artists using music, writing to rage against a system that was designed to disenfranchise them.

And Mari Evans is a prime example of that.

- But I actually know her more from her work for children, because I'm a children's librarian.

She wrote a collection called "Singing Black", and it's alternative nursery rhymes for children.

And it's poems that are sort of like Mother Goose but they draw all of their inspiration from Black culture, which is really cool.

It's a really neat collection.

And then we have Etheridge Knight who was born in Mississippi in 1931, but then he lived in Indiana off and on starting in the 1950s until his death in 1991.

So his story is a little bit sad.

He developed an opium addiction after receiving a shrapnel wound in the Korean War.

- And that eventually unfortunately led to a prison sentence, and that's when he found poetry.

So his first collection is called "Poems from Prison," and it's hard to emphasize just how important this book has become.

- And it really captured his experience of being in prison in kind of unique and unprecedented ways.

So that's definitely a part of our history that you really can't talk about Indiana without talking about those important poets from the 60s and 70s.

(light dramatic music) So Indiana is very lucky that we have not only a giant literary dog that's associated with our state, we also have a cat.

So we have "Clifford the Big Red Dog".

The Clifford Books were written by Norman Bridwell, and he lived and grew up in Kokomo, Indiana, which is in Howard County.

- He'd always wanted to have a dog as big as a horse to have as a pet, and came up with this large dog.

Had originally wanted to call him Tiny, but his wife suggested Clifford, because Clifford was her imaginary friend when she was a young girl.

So we have her to thank for the name Clifford, for this gigantic red dog and their many adventures together.

- It's so fascinating that Indiana has produced like iconic children's book character, including Raggedy Ann and Andy, Clifford the Big Red Dog, and Garfield.

- So, but Garfield is, of course, the character that was written by Jim Davis, and Jim Davis lived in Indiana forever.

- Garfield, the lasagna-loving cat, has become an institution in the cartooning world.

I was astonished to learn that Jim Davis, who was the creator, at one time had this strip in more than 2700 newspapers across the world.

And it just shows how ubiquitous this small cat, that was created by this small-town guy from Muncie, Indiana, and became a worldwide phenomenon, spawning movies, television specials.

- [Kimberly] It just seemed so astonishing that something as famous as Garfield could, you know, be in Muncie, Indiana.

(bright upbeat music) - The next generation of Indiana authors is already making waves like Leah Johnson, who is redefining YA literature with authentic stories of Black Queer identity, caring for the state's tradition of writers who aren't afraid to break new ground.

- So Leah Johnson came onto the scene with her YA novel, "You Should See Me in a Crown", and it just was a phenomenal hit.

We are so happy to have Leah Johnson in our state.

She does a lot for the literary arts in Indiana.

- So I was born and raised in Indiana.

There's so much diversity as far as the landscape is concerned here.

But also for me, there was a cultural diversity that I felt like was not reflected in any of the media that I consumed.

CCBC, which is a think tank that does analyses of children's literature, put out a study that in the three years prior to 2018 which is when I signed the deal for "You Should See Me in a Crown", out of all the traditionally published YA novels in the country, only 20 of them had a Black girl as a main character.

And of those 20 books, only one of them had a Black Queer girl as a main character.

And so when I started writing "You Should See Me in a Crown", I was writing into a space that was largely unoccupied.

And so I didn't know whether or not there was gonna be a robust market for that story.

I just had to hope that, you know, somebody was gonna read it, somebody was gonna buy it.

And I certainly didn't know that it was going to have the reach that it ultimately did.

As it turns out, people like it when you write stories that are a little, that have that feeling of a teen movie, like a 90s teen movie, but also have some honesty to them about these communities that are often not reflected in popular media.

I want readers to take away the idea that it's possible to bloom exactly where you're planted.

And so the thing that's so beautiful to me about writing for young people is that we're writing blueprints for possible futures.

We're indicating to young readers that even if nobody around you right now can understand who you are, or can see exactly how you feel, or can identify with where you are in your journey, there is somebody who has been there and who sees you and wants you to survive.

And I needed to tell myself that I could survive long enough to have a happy ending.

And "You Should See Me in a Crown" was a vehicle for me to do that for myself.

- From contemporary voices like Leah Johnson to award-winning children's author Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, Indiana writers continue to tackle difficult subjects with honesty and heart.

- I really love Kimberly Brubaker Bradley.

She is an incredible middle grade writer.

She also writes sort of like on the YA end.

She doesn't live in Indiana any longer.

Now she lives in Tennessee, but we still love her.

And we chose her book "Fighting Words" to be our children's representative title for the National Book Festival in 2025.

- I've written 21 published books.

I'm best known for historical fiction for like 8 to 14 year olds, and in particular a book called "The War That Saved My Life", which was a Newbery Honor book in 2016.

And I have a second Newbery Honor book called "Fighting Words".

I'm very, very proud of "Fighting Words".

I think "Fighting Words" it was the first time that a book for 10 year olds tackled the idea of sexual assault head on.

We were very, very careful how we wrote it, so that it's appropriate for 10 year olds.

I have to be able to, like, sit with that situation for all of those drafts, and so yeah, it can be very difficult to write about difficult things.

But when a child reads a difficult situation, when they encounter it in the pages of a book, first of all they can set the book down and walk away at any point if it's too much.

But it is also a very safe place to read about difficult things and read about how people get through difficult things.

And then, you know, a lot of times it's a springboard for kids to talk about difficult things.

One thing that is true is that children's books almost always have to end with hope.

And even when you're telling quite sad, difficult stories, you're ending in a place of hope.

And that's a hallmark of the genre, and I think it's part of what drew me to it in the first place.

- While Kimberly Brubaker Bradley writes for younger audiences, Karen Joy Fowler takes adult readers into entirely different territory while still finding ways to reflect on her childhood in Bloomington.

- Karen Joy Fowler is just a fantastic read.

She's the author of several wonderful books like "The Jane Austen Book Club" and "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves".

I think it's set in Bloomington, Indiana.

I would suggest everyone to run out and read it.

It's got a great twist.

- I often find inspiration in other people's books, other people's stories.

Frequently, I'll read something, particularly something fantastical like a fairytale or historical, and there will just be a character that the story I'm looking at is not about but will catch my eye.

And I will think, "Well, that person's story seems "more interesting than the one I'm reading.

"I wonder what that person's story is."

So, yes, I frequently begin with something like that.

In the case of "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves", there is a particular experiment that my book is based on.

My book is very fictionalized, but it comes from an experiment that takes place in Bloomington, Indiana University.

My father worked there.

He was in the psychology department.

He ran rats through mazes, so I was very familiar with the part of the university where the lab animals were kept.

I was telling my daughter about this experiment, and when I finished, she said, "Well, that should be your next book."

For "The Jane Austen Book Club", I saw a sign on the wall in a bookstore that said "The Jane Austen Book Club".

And because I was in a bookstore, I thought it was the title of a book, and I thought, "Ah, why don't I ever have good ideas like that?

"I could have written that book," and then looked and saw that there were dates and times, and realized that it was a book club and not the title of a book.

And that if I hurried, maybe I could be the one to write it.

(gentle music) - Behind every great writer is a love of reading, and where there's a love of reading, there are libraries.

Indiana is home to some of the most remarkable libraries in the country.

- [Suzanne] So the Indiana State Library came into being in 1825, which makes them one of the oldest agencies in the state of Indiana.

Indiana became a state in 1816.

It's absolutely breathtaking, completely gorgeous.

It was built between 1932 and 1934 in an Art Nouveau style.

It used to be you would walk in the front door, and you would go up these big steps of knowledge to this beautiful desk where the librarian sat like a queen.

You want to take a look at the card catalog, which extends to both sides of that desk.

It's just breathtaking.

The Indiana State Library has stained glass throughout.

We also have giant murals throughout.

So the building is just beautiful.

- And then for a more rural library, I always encourage people to visit the Bartholomew County Library in Columbus, Indiana, which was designed by I.M.

Pei.

Columbus is worth a visit no matter what, but the library is truly gorgeous.

And so many famous architects have designed buildings in Columbus, and it is a treasure trove for anybody who's a fan of designer architecture.

- Well, of course there's always the Central Library here in Indianapolis.

That was built from the 1917s, a grand structure, that some architects at the time called one of the most beautiful buildings in the entire country.

And it remains that way today even though it's been added onto with a modern structure in the 2000s.

- [Suzanne] And the cool thing about that library is that the central atrium of this building kind of frames the original Central Library that was there.

- The Central Library of IndyPL is one of my all-time favorites.

It's so beautiful.

And they also have an incredible African American story archive in Central Library that's incredible.

So 10 out of 10 do recommend.

- Indiana actually has the most Carnegie libraries in the nation.

We have 164, and many of which are still libraries today.

So well over a hundred are still libraries, and those historic buildings are just gorgeous.

So as a note, I would just say visit as many Carnegie libraries as you can, because they're incredible spaces.

- [Kimberly] The Allen County Public Library is really one of the top small-town, it's a big town but small-city, libraries in the country.

It has a terrific genealogy department.

It had a lot of branch libraries.

Sometimes we would go downtown to the big library, and that was just this magic place.

They had this huge globe right when you stepped in the main doors, and I mean it was probably eight feet around, and it spun.

I loved going to that library.

- So I was raised on the west side of Indianapolis, and so always the library that I shout out is the Wayne Branch of IndyPL.

I grew up in that library, truly.

There's such a special feeling that you have when you walk into a library if you're a person like me, if you're a library kid.

And I can walk in there now and feel the exact same way I did when I was seven years old.

I love that library.

I love it.

- Other libraries I recommend in Indiana include the Lilly Library at Indiana University of Bloomington.

Where else can you see a lock of Edgar Allan Poe's hair, or the James Bond type scripts, or the Sylvia Plath collection, or an honest Gutenberg Bible?

(bright upbeat music) The collection at the Lilly Library in Bloomington is just incredible.

They do amazing exhibitions and great curatorial work there.

(air whooshing) (funky upbeat music) - While Indiana might have the most Carnegie libraries in the United States, there's also no shortage of independent bookstores, from well-established shops that have been around for generations to new ones that are making a splash.

- I would recommend visiting all of the bookstores in Indiana, because they're all incredible in their own ways.

Just in the last five years we've seen this flourishing of independent bookstores that are supporting Hoosiers' book habits.

- One of these bookstores is Loudmouth Books, which is actually owned by Leah Johnson.

It's a really great bookstore just right in the heart of downtown Indianapolis.

- Loudmouth Books was opened two years ago as a way to combat book banning around the country.

We had seen more books banned in the United States than ever before in our history.

And I happened to have the resources and the social capital and the real time at that point to invest myself in opening a bookstore that had a mission of uplifting banned books and marginalized authors.

And so Loudmouth exists as a home for authors who maybe are not always welcome elsewhere, because of race, because of gender, because of sexuality.

And we make those stories and those people the center of the work that we do.

So, you know, in the words of James Baldwin, "The place in which I'll fit will not exist "until I make it."

And so I created the space and have found that it is truly a home for so many people who needed that sense of community here in Indiana.

- Indiana is pretty good when it comes to independent bookstores, and there seem to be new ones cropping up all the time.

But one that springs to mind is Viewpoint in Columbus, Indiana, because it's been around since 1973.

So that shows you some real spirit when you think about the up and downs of the bookstore business, that this little store in this architecturally significant town in Indiana is still there, still helping out local readers, and finding books for old and young alike.

So it's one of my favorite spots to stop at whenever I'm down in Columbus.

- My absolute favorite in Indiana is Kids Ink in Indianapolis, which is only children's books and has been there for a very long time.

- [Suzanne] Kids Ink has hosted really fantastic children's authors, nationally known authors for decades.

- Visiting authors sign the bathroom wall with a sharpie.

And so it was such an honor for me.

The first time I got to sign the wall at Kids Ink, I felt like I had really arrived as an author.

- Wild Geese Bookstore in Franklin, Indiana is a newer one, but it's one that's really taken off since it first opened, so much so that in 2025 it became the Great Lakes Bookstore of the Year from the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association.

So that's great that this one store in a small town south of Indianapolis has done so well to get this great award from a Midwestern association of book club.

- Tomorrow Bookstore is a bookstore in downtown Indianapolis that really emphasizes a wide variety of works, but they focus on works in translation too, which is really neat.

Every time you go in there you see a book by an international writer that you might not have come across before.

So they've really tried to support connecting people with non-American writers in addition to American writers.

So, yeah, I mean they're all just wonderful, and like I said, doing incredible community work.

(bright cheerful music) - With a state so steeped in literary history, there's no shortage of places to check out that hold ties that inspired writers while they honed their works.

Here are just some of the highlights Hoosiers recommend you check out.

- One of the highlights for me, for anyone who's interested in Indiana literature, is the Lew Wallace Study in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

(bright cheerful music) We're not talking about his home.

This is just the place where he went to write.

- [Megan] It's a beautiful single-room standalone study.

And the way that the artifacts are displayed you know, shows what a renaissance man he was.

- A lot of what he had still remains in the study, and you can go there and see what inspired him to do his writing.

- When I was maybe 12 years old, my grandmother took me to Gene Stratton-Porter's house where she lived at the edge of the Limberlost Swamp that she wrote about in "The Girl of the Limberlost" and "Freckles" and some of her other books.

And I was so excited, and I ran through this cabin to look out the back to see the swamp.

And what I saw was cornfields, because it had been drained at the turn of the century, which was just crushing.

But the happy news is starting in 1997, they started to put it back, and it's now several hundred acres behind her house.

So when you go there now, you can walk through the swamp on boardwalks and start to see what it was like.

- My father was a great fisherman and outdoorsman, and we spent a lot of time in the Yellowwood State Forest, which is just beautiful.

And if you're inspired by nature, it's an excellent place.

(bright cheerful music) Just the tulip trees, and the dogwood trees, and the cardinals, things that I missed very much when I moved.

- So when you're visiting downtown Indianapolis, if you come to the Indiana State Library, you can go up a block and then catty-corner a block, you're gonna find yourself at the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library.

This is a library that you can go to to visit Kurt Vonnegut's papers.

You can also visit the wonderful staff there that will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about Kurt Vonnegut.

It's also an official literary landmark with a stamp of approval from the American Library Association, so definitely worth a visit.

- I do recommend visiting the James Whitcomb Riley Home.

The story goes that when James Whitcomb Riley passed away, his friends kind of shut his house up, and it is today as it was when he was alive.

So it's a true preservation, and his, like, top hat and cane are still kind of out on the bed.

Like it's really, really fascinating.

- If you are a John Green fan, then you know about Funky Bones probably, which he references in "The Fault in Our Stars".

And so a literary landmark that I always recommend is Newfields, which is where that piece of art is located.

And not only that, but there are so many other pieces of art that have been referenced in literary works that I think are just hugely inspirational.

John Green is so local that he has referenced so many different places that I'm like, yeah, you can do just a John Green tour of Indianapolis and like find all these different places that he's put in his books.

- Another fun thing to do if you're in Indianapolis, downtown Indianapolis is to look for our murals of Indiana writers.

There's one of Mari Evans.

We love her pink sweater.

There's also one of James Whitcomb Riley, and you'll know him by his top hat.

And then there's one of Kurt Vonnegut, and he's got his little hand like inside of his sweater.

So definitely go around Indianapolis and find those murals.

And there's other wonderful murals in Indianapolis as well.

So not only literary, but you can also examine your art scene while you're there.

(gentle guitar music) - Today's journey through Indiana'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.

- Now 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 six 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.

We'll 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 Indiana Center for the Book, housed in the State Library in Indianapolis, where reading is encouraged at an early age and celebrated at all life stages.

- The Indiana Center for the Book is located inside the Indiana State Library, and usually you will find the Indiana Center for the Book Director working in the Indiana Young Readers Center.

One of the significant programs run by the Indiana Center for the Book is our Indiana Letters About Literature program.

So Indiana Letters About Literature is a program where we ask students in grades 4 through 12 to write a letter to an author, living or deceased, about how their work has made a difference in how they see themselves or how they see the world.

And this program is just a beautiful program.

We get hundreds of entries every single year, and the judges select about a hundred to go into an anthology.

And you can find those anthologies on the Indiana Center for the Book website, and you can really see the impact of books and authors on these young people in such positive ways.

The Indiana Early Literacy Firefly Award is a very cute initiative from the Indiana Center for the Book.

It is a book award, and it is voted on by Indiana children ages zero to five.

So the books that are highlighted in this award are wonderful picture books that really focus on early literacy skills of talking, singing, reading, writing, and playing.

One of the things that makes this award special is the program guide that goes along with the book award every year.

This comes out of the Indiana Early Literacy Firefly Committee, and it's a program guide that really helps children's librarians incorporate this award into their programs.

The Indiana Young Readers Center is a wonderful place to come and visit.

The collection in that space includes books by Indiana authors, illustrated by Indiana illustrators, set in Indiana, or books that have won an Indiana award.

So I always say to visitors that come to the Indiana Young Readers Center, it's all Indiana all the time.

There's also wonderful exhibits where you can learn a little bit more about the different services that are offered at the Indiana State Library.

So you can learn about genealogy and family trees.

There's toys for all ages.

We also have Legos in the center all the time.

So you can come and play with Legos or play checkers.

You can come and interact with your family amongst a bunch of Indiana books.

- If you'd like to explore the anthologies of the Indiana Letters program, check out winners of the Early Literacy Firefly Award or simply want to learn more visit them online at in.gov/library/icb.

(bright upbeat music) - Well, Indiana has really been a remarkable stop for a reading road trip.

Thank you again to the Library of Congress and the Indiana Center for the Book for partnering with PBS Books as we venture across America shedding light on its many unique stories, writers, and literary landscape.

- Before we go, we want to hear from you.

Have you had a chance to visit any of these places that we've discussed?

Or if you're 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, the authors, and the 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.

- 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 for 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... - Happy reading.

(lively orchestral music) (lively music continues) (bright piano music)