The National Book Foundation's Lisa Lucas On Storytelling And Innovations In Reading

The Executive Director of the National Book Foundation will be in Greensboro Thursday evening. Lisa Lucas is the first woman and first African-American to lead the organization. In addition to presenting the National Book Awards each year, the foundation aims to engage readers across the country.

WFDD's Bethany Chafin spoke with Lucas about her ongoing goals for the nonprofit after a year as Executive Director.

Interview Highlights

On her vision for the National Book Foundation and whether it's changed after her first year on the job:

I think it was always about transferring the enthusiasm that I have, and that the foundation has always had, and that the staff here has for literature and making that more widely accessible and making it bigger and brighter and louder. And obviously the nuts and bolts of the job change as you learn what you do and what you need to fix and what's working well. But I think that everything that we do is guided by that desire to amplify. 

Advice on how to make reading a habitual practice:

You know people always have that book that's sitting on their shelf. They've got this 900 page tome about the Civil War that they've been meaning to read. Or maybe they are a hundred pages into it and they feel like they can't read anything else until they've read that 900 page tome. You have to read something fun. When I'm burning out on reading, I always pick a book that's going to just engage me in a certain way...and so, if I'm reading all one thing - all fiction, all nonfiction, and all dense texts, whatever it is, I'll just pop in and read something like Maria Semple's 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette?' which is a delight and a joy and smart and funny and easy to read. Just getting through that really enjoyable book that I don't have to struggle through will pave the way for reading whatever challenge I have in front of me. 

On the 2017 Innovations in Reading Prize:

Barbershop Books - such a great organization that really tries to find readers where they are. [They're] trying to engage young people in the activity of reading...and where are young boys? They're at the barbershop. When we say 'innovations in reading,' the idea is to think of people and celebrate people who are thinking about how to bring others into reading in creative ways. And [there's] that idea of saying 'OK, we want young men of color to be reading books and to be taking part in this activity in this literary tradition that we have. And so we're going to go to them.' 

On getting people excited to read:

Publishers are very clever and they are changing with the times. There's Riverhead which is a publisher out of Penguin Random House. And they do a food club where an author will come and make a meal and it will have some relationship to their work or where they're from or the book that they've written. And people love it.

But I don't think it's about selling it. I don't think we need a trailer necessarily or a book club to make it popular. And I think the more that we change the narrative, the more that we don't talk about it as a dying industry or talk about reading a book like we talk about eating spinach or doing exercise and we talk about it as storytelling, as one of our most profoundly compelling forms of storytelling, the more people will want to join in. People are listening to 12-hour Serial podcasts. People are listening to books on tape or audio books. People are binge watching five seasons of a series on television and you know none of these things are different. It's falling in love with a story and following along till the end. 

An Evening with Lisa Lucas takes place Thursday, June 8th at 7 p.m. at the Greensboro Historical Museum. The event is free and open to the public.