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Humanities Tennessee, in partnership with Vanderbilt University, announced the initial lineup of award-winning, bestselling authors who will headline the free 38th Annual Southern Festival of Books, taking place Oct. 17 – 18, 2026, at Bicentennial Mall, the Tennessee State Museum, and the Tennessee State Library and Archives.
One of the oldest and largest literary events in the country, the festival will be open to the public from 9 a.m. – 6 p.m. on Saturday, October 17, and from 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. on Sunday, October 18, welcoming crowds of more than 25,000 attendees for panel sessions, discussions, book signings, and readings. The Southern Festival of Books will feature appearances from approximately 175 authors representing a wide variety of genres, including fiction and nonfiction, young adult literature, poetry, science fiction, romance, and mystery.
Leading the robust lineup for the 2026 festival will be Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ayad Akhtar, bestselling authors Kathryn Stockett, Allegra Goodman, Elizabeth Kostova and Maria Semple, memoirist Belle Burden, poet Claudia Rankine, award-winning Nashville favorites Ann Patchett and Margaret Renkl, and former Tennessee Governor and US Senator Lamar Alexander, with additional authors added throughout the summer.
“We could not be more thrilled with the authors who will be present throughout the Southern Festival of Books weekend,” said Humanities Tennessee Executive Director Tim Henderson. “Our team works tirelessly all year to build out diverse festival programming that appeals to readers of all ages and interests. The festival is a great opportunity to meet your favorite authors, find your next great read, and connect with fellow readers from across the city and state.”
“We are delighted to join Humanities Tennessee in welcoming this remarkable group of authors to Nashville for the Southern Festival of Books,” said C. Cybele Raver, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at Vanderbilt University. “The festival reflects the very best of what universities and cultural institutions can accomplish together—creating opportunities for people to engage with new ideas, encounter different perspectives, and connect through a shared love of reading and storytelling. Vanderbilt is proud to support an event that strengthens our community and celebrates the transformative power of books.”
Major appearances and events for the 2026 Southern Festival of Books will include:
- Ayad Akhtar (The Radiance): Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright whose work has been published and performed in more than two dozen languages. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors. Akhtar is the author of the novels American Dervish, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year, and Homeland Elegies, which was named one of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2020. He has also authored the plays McNeal, Junk, Disgraced, The Who & The What, and The Invisible Hand. In 2021, he was named New York State Author.
- Lamar Alexander (The Education of a Senator: From JFK to Trump): Lamar Alexander has long been known as one of America’s most principled and effective statesmen. As a U.S. Senator, he helped shepherd major laws governing K–12 education, medical innovation, and the maintenance of national parks. He also served as Governor of Tennessee, U.S. Education Secretary, chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, and as a university president. Known for campaigning in a plaid shirt, Alexander has performed on the piano with 27 symphonies and at the Grand Ole Opry. A seventh-generation Tennessean and Vanderbilt University alumnus, he lives near Maryville in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. This is his 10th book, all written by the author himself.
- Max Boot (Reagan: His Life and Legend): Historian and foreign-policy analyst Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a columnist for the Washington Post. His New York Times bestseller, The Road Not Taken, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography.
- Belle Burden (Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage): 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.
- Soman Chainani (Young World): Soman Chainani is the author of the School for Good and Evil series, which has sold over 4.5 million copies, has been translated into 35 languages across six continents, and has been adapted into a major motion picture from Netflix that debuted at #1 in over 80 countries. Together, his books have been on the New York Times Bestseller List for more than 50 weeks. He graduated from Harvard University summa cum laude with a degree in English & American Literature, and an MFA in Film from Columbia University. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri.
- Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made): Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a New York Times bestselling author and Professor of History at Calvin University. She is a Senior Democracy Fellow with the Public Religion Research Institute. Her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Religion News Service, and Christianity Today, and has been interviewed on NPR, CBS, and the BBC, among other outlets. Her most recent book is Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Her next book, Live Laugh Love, is expected in September 2026.
- Allegra Goodman (This Is Not About Us): Allegra Goodman is the author of seven novels, including the national bestseller Isola, which was a Reese’s Book Club pick; two short story collections; and a novel for young readers. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
- Nikki Grimes (Twice Blessed: Yard Sale Stories): New York Times bestselling author Nikki Grimes was inducted into the Black Authors Hall of Fame in 2023. Her honors include the CSK Virginia Hamilton Lifetime Achievement Award, the ALAN Award for significant contributions to young adult literature, the Children’s Literature Legacy Medal, and the NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children. Author of the Coretta Scott King Award-winner Bronx Masquerade, and five Coretta Scott King Author Honors, Grimes won the Printz Honor and Sibert Honor for her memoir Ordinary Hazards. Her latest titles include Garvey’s Choice: The Graphic Novel, a School Library Journal 2023 Best Book; Lullaby for the King, one of Book Riot’s 25 Best Christmas Books of All Time; and A Walk in the Woods, recipient of eight starred reviews and 11 Best Book listings for 2023, including the New York Times, NPR, and Smithsonian Magazine. She lives in Corona, California.
- David George Haskell (How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature's Revolutionaries): David George Haskell is a biologist acclaimed for his lyrical explorations of the living world. His books have twice been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, in 2012 for The Forest Unseen and in 2022 for Sounds Wild and Broken. His 2017 book, The Songs of Trees, won the John Burroughs Medal. Other literary honors include a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a two-time finalist for the PEN / E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and winner of the Acoustical Society of America’s Science Communication Award, the National Academies Best Book Award, the Iris Book Award, the Reed Environmental Writing Award, and the National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature.
- Silas House (The Tulip Poplars): Silas House was a finalist for a 2024 Grammy Award, is the winner of the 2022 Duggins Prize, and is a two-time winner of the Southern Book Prize. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Time, the New York Times, the Advocate, Garden & Gun, and other publications. He teaches at Berea College and at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Creative Writing.
- Christina Baker Kline (The Foursome): Christina Baker Kline is the author of 10 novels, including the New York Times bestsellers Orphan Train, The Exiles, and A Piece of the World. Her novels have received the New England Society Book Award for Fiction, the Maine Literary Award, and several bookseller awards, among other prizes. Born in England, she was raised in the American South and Maine. She lives in New York City and in Southwest Harbor, Maine.
- Emily Lordi (Holding Lightning: The Life, Loves, and Art of Whitney Houston): Emily Lordi is a writer, professor of English at Vanderbilt University, and cultural critic whose focus is African American literature and Black popular music. She is the author of three books: Black Resonance, Donny Hathaway Live, and The Meaning of Soul. In addition to scholarly articles on topics ranging from literary modernism to Beyoncé, she writes essays for such venues as New Yorker.com and The Atlantic, and appears in documentaries such as the BBC series Soul America and the Netflix series This is Pop. She is also a writer at large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, where her recent work includes profiles of FKA twigs and Dolly Parton, as well as essays on Black recovery from addiction and African American artists who have left the U.S.
- Jay McInerney (See You on the Other Side): Jay McInerney is the author of eight previous novels, a collection of short stories, and three collections of essays on wine. He lives in New York City and Bridgehampton, New York.
- Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Night Owl): Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the New York Times bestselling author of two illustrated collections of essays, Bite by Bite and World of Wonders, the latter of which was chosen as Barnes & Noble’s Book of the Year and as a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. She has published four award-winning poetry collections and spent a decade serving as poetry editor for environmental magazines Orion and Sierra. A professor of English and creative writing for more than 25 years, she gives firefly tours for Mississippi State Parks and lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with her family.
- Ann Patchett (Whistler): Ann Patchett is the author of numerous novels, most recently the No. 1 New York Times bestselling Tom Lake, works of nonfiction, and children's books. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner, the Women's Prize for Fiction in the UK, and the Book Sense Book of the Year. Her novel The Dutch House was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been translated into more than 30 languages, and Time magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. President Biden awarded her the National Humanities Medal in recognition of her contributions to American culture. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is the owner of Parnassus Books.
- Jayne Anne Phillips (Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir): Jayne Anne Phillips is the author of Black Tickets, Machine Dreams, Fast Lanes, Shelter, MotherKind, Lark and Termite, Quiet Dell, and Night Watch, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2024. Her work has been a finalist once for the National Book Award and twice for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The recipient of Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, Howard, Bunting, and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Boston and New York.
- Margaret Renkl (The Weedy Garden: A Happy Habitat for Wild Friends): Margaret Renkl is the author of The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, which won a 2024 Southern Book Prize and was a New York Times bestseller and the 100th selection for Reese’s Book Club. Her earlier titles are Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss (2019), which won the Reed Environmental Writing Award in 2020; and Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South (2021), which won both the Southern Book Prize and the PEN/Diamonstein Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay in 2022. From 2017 until earlier this year, Renkl served as a regular contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. The founding editor of Chapter 16, a daily literary publication of Humanities Tennessee, and a graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Carolina, she lives in Nashville.
- Maria Semple (Go Gentle): Maria Semple is the bestselling author of Today Will Be Different, Where’d You Go, Bernadette, and This One Is Mine. Her novels have been translated into 40 languages. Before writing fiction, Maria wrote for TV. She lives in New York.
- Ruta Sepetys (A Fortune of Sand): Ruta Sepetys is an internationally acclaimed, No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of historical fiction published in more than 60 countries and 40 languages. Winner of the Carnegie Medal and honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Sepetys gives voice to underrepresented history and those who experienced it. She has been invited to present at NATO, European Parliament, the U.S. Capitol, the Library of Congress, and embassies worldwide. She alternates her time between the hills of Tennessee and the flats of Florida.
For a full lineup of festival authors, visit sofestofbooks.org. Additional authors and other special announcements will be added to the list throughout the summer. Featured festival books will be available for purchase at the festival and can be signed by authors throughout the weekend. Parnassus Books is the festival bookseller.
In addition to 100 sessions over two days, the festival features more than 100 vendors, food trucks, and three performance stages. A music stage focuses on the incredible talent of the Nashville music community, and the performing arts stage offers theater, spoken word, and poetry throughout the weekend. The children’s stage and activity center features authors, musicians, performers, crafts, literary character meet-and-greets, and parties celebrating beloved children’s books. During the festival, there will also be a special screening of the PBS American Masters documentary Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World.
The Southern Festival of Books will once again host a Student Reader Day on Friday, Oct. 16, welcoming 500 students from Middle Tennessee public schools for author discussions and a book giveaway, courtesy of Parnassus Books Foundation, Nashville Predators Foundation and Dollar General Foundation. Authors TBD
The always-popular Authors in the Round Dinner, chaired by Libby Page and Alice Campbell Brackenbury, will be held Friday, Oct. 16, at Marathon Music Works. Authors in the Round, which allows guests to dine alongside more than 40 regionally and nationally known authors, is the festival’s signature fundraiser, helping ensure that Humanities Tennessee can present the annual festival free of charge.
For a regularly updated list of all authors, please visit sofestofbooks.org/authors.
To learn more about the Southern Festival of Books and to stay updated on festival announcements, please follow us on Twitter (@SoFestofBooks), Facebook (@SoFestofBooks) and on Instagram (@sofestofbooks).