Arlington resident Amina Luqman-Dawson was recently honored with the most prestigious prize in children’s literature for her book “Freewater.”

Shortly after the Civil War, Washington became a place where artistic and literary spirits assembled, including scribes George Alfred Townsend and Mark Twain.

“You can’t take an adult seriously when he’s debating you over why Twilight vampires are O.K. with sunlight. If my parents had read ‘Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing’ at the same time as I did, I would have looked into boarding school,” writes Joel Stein.

The ever popular National Book Festival, sponsored by the Library of Congress and now in its eleventh year, has plans to expand to two days this year. On Saturday and Sunday, September 24-25, the festival will be on the National Mall with author talks, book signings, kids activities, and – given that this year’s theme is “celebrating the joys of reading aloud” – lots and lots of readings.

Photo by katmere. After Carla Cohen, co-owner and founder of quintessential Washington bookstore Politics & Prose, died last month, the DC literary community lost an icon. To celebrate her life and her contribution to DC’s cultural scene, Politics & Prose will hold a memorial for Cohen tomorrow at 1 pm. There will be a number of speeches, giving tribute to Cohen, from icons in the DC writing scene. Speakers will include co-owner and co-founder…

Put “sex” and “drugs” in your title and you’re sure to catch the attention of the young people. Say “gefilte fish” and you’re adding a touch of Jewish kitsch. Sex, Drugs, and Gefilte Fish: The Heeb Storytelling Collection, a reading taking place tonight at Chief Ike’s, sits at the “edgy end” of the DCJCC’s 2009 Jewish Literary Festival. Heeb is a humor magazine targeted to the young and Jewish, and this reading aims to…

Few writers have managed to pin the millennial male ego under glass the way Nick Hornby has. In his comic novels High Fidelity, About a Boy, and the new Juliet, Naked, among others, Hornby picks apart our vanity and insecurity in ways that are as scary as they are entertaining. He’s also written loads of great nonfiction about his love of soccer, literature, and pop music. Like High Fidelity, probably his best-known book, Juliet,…

Hot for Teacher: Erin Weaver and Cody Nickell get excited about math in Aaron Posner’s new production of “Arcadia.” A few years after Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld dominated network television with their “show about nothing,” Tom Stoppard astonished the theater with a play about everything. More specifically, the mathematical conceits that govern the ultimate predictability of everything. Or don’t. Learned opinion varies about the math. Not so vis-à-vis the play: Arcadia was hailed…

To celebrate the release of Electric Grace: Still more Fiction by Washington Area Women tonight, editor Richard Peabody and ten of the book’s forty-two contributors will be reading selections from their work at Politics & Prose tonight at 7 p.m. Faye Moskowitz, a memoirist, poet, short story writer and professor, will read from her story “Completo (A Triptych),” from the journal, Story Quarterly. Professor Moskowitz—or just Faye, as she would have it—grew up in Detroit…

You’d think that, once the Almighty found himself on the business end of God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens’ latest broadside, there’d be hell to pay. Instead, Hitchens’ book became an international bestseller, racking up laudatory reviews and garnering an even larger audience for his witty contrarianism. Which makes one suspect that perhaps The Hitch is on to something. As if it needed more attention, yesterday God Is Not Great was named one of five…