- On this episode of "American Stories: A Reading Road Trip," we are headed to the Buckeye State.

- Join us for our superstop in Ohio.

In the heart of America, this state has given us seven US presidents, countless authors and writers, and of course the Superman comics, all of which have shaped our nation's literary landscape.

- [Fred] Ohio also heralds some of today's most notable writers, like former US Poet Laureate Rita Dove, and renowned sci-fi author John Scalzi.

- [Lauren] Join PBS books, the Library of Congress, and the Ohio Center for the Book on a literary adventure through Ohio.

This is "American Stories: A Reading Road Trip."

- Well hello and welcome.

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

- Come along as we discover the books that left their mark on American culture and celebrate the stories that continue to build our shared literary tradition.

- Today we take flight in Ohio, the birthplace of aviation.

- With a history as rich as its rolling farmlands, Ohio is a state shaped by stories told in small towns, bustling cities, and along river bends that once carried the nation forward.

From heartland grit to Midwestern warmth, it's no wonder Ohio has inspired voices that echo far beyond its borders.

- So Ohio is a snapshot of America with diverse populations, bustling urban culture, rolling farmlands, picturesque small towns, dramatic natural beauty, vibrant arts culture, and a deep, rich literary history.

- There are so many writers who came from here, and as a poet, that was for me, it's a home for writers, from Toni Morrison and Nikki Giovanni or Sherwood Anderson.

The numbers are really staggering.

- Ohio has one of the best library systems in the country, and a result of that is there's just so much engagement in books, in writing, in the writing life.

- Columbus specifically has the most indie bookstores anywhere.

I mean, there's a new one popping up almost every week, and they serve their communities, and I think that reflects throughout the whole state.

This is a state that is interested in serving communities, vast communities of readers.

- There's no real one definition, it's a quilt.

There are pockets of very interesting, funky society all over the state that I've always found very inspirational.

- I think that Ohio is really the heart of the country in a lot of ways.

We have a lot of rural spaces, we have a lot of urban spaces.

- [Fred] Ohio has been home to comics creators, sci-fi authors, romance novels, humorists and standup comics, historians, and poets.

Ohio has something to offer every reader.

- [Lauren] As the United States approaches its 250th birthday, PBS Books and the Library of Congress invite you on a journey like no other.

In each episode of this series, we'll highlight a different region of the US and its literary impact on our nation, and explore how each state's history, books, and authors tell its unique story.

- You might know that the Library of Congress is the largest library in the world with millions of books, films, and video, audio recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps, and manuscripts in its collections.

- 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.

- Through each Center for the Book, you'll find support for local literary events, reading programs, and community engagement that fosters a love of books and reading nationwide.

- 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.

You will 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 US 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 Ohio Center for the Book.

Located in downtown Cleveland, this historic building boasts beautiful architecture that stuns visitors just as much as its literary collections.

- The diversity of Ohio's literary culture carries through generations, shaped by writers whose words still resonate today.

Here's a look back at some of the authors who left their mark.

One can read the novels of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison as the story of America, starting with "A Mercy" set in the colonial era right up through the Civil War, the jazz age, and into the modern era.

- [Lauren] She's won all of the awards that you can win as a writer.

- I could say a thousand things about Toni.

I just cannot emphasize how important she has been to several generations of writers.

- You know, I read "Beloved" when it came out as a masterpiece, but my favorite work of hers is actually "Jazz."

I'm a bit of a jazz fan.

It's something I listen to when I work.

It's great to draw to, you know, just kind of float along with the music, and she wrote about it so evocatively.

I mean, it's a wonderful book that I really enjoyed.

- Toni Morrison's probably my biggest influence.

You know, I read jazz when I was 11 years old in the Livingston branch of the Columbus Library and got swept away in it.

It's still my favorite book to this day.

The way that she captures place and people in the interior lives of Black people specifically was a massive influence on me when I was younger.

- Toni Morrison had always been a beacon for me.

And then we did get to know one another and we used to tease each other, give each other Buckeyes and say, "Here, have a Buckeye for luck."

- She's just a gift to the world.

She's a gift.

- [Fred] Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were two Jewish teenagers at Glenville High School in Cleveland when they created Superman, a character that would come to literally define the word superhero.

- We just featured Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in an exhibit that we just did at the Ohio Honor Library because we hold a lot of collection of their Superman works.

- Oh my gosh, I grew up with Superman comics.

I was given a dime and then I would go out and buy that comic book.

I think that sense, that moral uplifting that Superman gave me all through my childhood is absolutely essential equipment for me as a writer today and a human being today.

- Really, all of modern comics springs from them, and they originally conceived Superman to be a comic strip, and they couldn't sell it.

No one wanted it, but they actually had to wait for the business to change and catch up to their thinking, and they had to wait for comic books to develop.

And then Superman came out and changed everything.

- And I think it's real easy for people to discount superheroes or comic books or graphic novels, but the simple fact of the matter is Superman is a mirror that we hold up to ourselves and say, "What are our values?

What do we believe in?

Who are we as a people?

And who would we want to be our best self?"

And that person always ends up being Superman.

- The hero who makes us feel that we should be the better version of ourselves has become recognized around the world.

And he had his start right here in Ohio.

- [Kimberly] Sherwood Anderson is just such an interesting writer, probably best known for his book, "Winesburg, Ohio."

- [Fred] The short story collection examines life in a fictional small town in Ohio, and has been consistently ranked as one of the most important works in American literature.

- You know, he's considered one of the early modernists, and I'm particularly fascinated with that period.

- [Kimberly] When I was 20 years old, I thought "Winesburg, Ohio" was the most profound book I had ever read in my entire life.

- Taking multiple stories and basically creating a work around them.

It was basically, what, 20, 22 short stories.

You thread them all together and you get this overarching narrative.

- I realized much later that Sherwood Anderson's technique was something that I wanted to do.

I wanted to show many different lives and how they touch.

- The tradition that Sherwood Anderson, I wouldn't say started, but made clear that could be a real narrative powerhouse is one that continues with me.

- [Rita] And I think that he's, in a certain way, a big influence.

- Born in the Maple Heights suburb of Cleveland and growing up in Ohio, Mary Oliver became one of the best loved and most popular American poets.

In one of her most famous works she asks, "Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life."

- So much of her work is asking us the question of, now that you have not died, you've woke up another day and you have not died, what will you do with the time you have earned by virtue of not dying?

And that's a really urgent question that I think actually does not fit as well on a Pinterest board.

And so I appreciate Mary Oliver's quotability, but I think what lives beyond the quotes is a real actual question about our living.

- Her most famous books probably are "The Wild and Precious Life," "American Primitive," "Devotions."

She was just an amazing, amazing poet.

- Her favorite topic, you know, those solitary walks through the woods, that is something that I share with her.

I think my first 15, 16 years of my life were spent walking through the woods lost in my own head thinking about things and other worlds and other stories.

So I share that with her.

- Gosh, the work is just amazing.

What she can do to make us stop and look at nature and realize that that also connects to our souls is incredible.

And she's an Ohioan, how nice, how very nice.

- [Fred] The multi-talented Paul Laurence Dunbar from Dayton, Ohio was a poet, novelist, short story writer, and playwright.

His works were even set to music.

- Paul Laurence Dunbar is one of those people who I feel like his life was cut short.

He died when he was 33 from tuberculosis.

So what he could have done had he continued to live is amazing to me sometimes.

He is a poet who wrote in both standard English and in dialect.

- He was someone that I knew as one of the pioneers of African-American poetry and recognized that code switching that was going on because I had to do it in my own life sometimes, you know, and how he managed that was fascinating to me.

- [Fred] When searching for a title for her autobiography, Maya Angelou turned to Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem "Sympathy."

And that is where the title "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings" comes from.

- Ohio is a real home for poets.

There's just so much poetry here, contemporary especially, there's a real patience in their work that there's a real desire to show you something and take the long way to get there.

- Virginia Hamilton was born in Yellow Springs and lived most of her life in southwest Ohio.

Hamilton's books for younger readers received well-deserved acclaim throughout her life.

And to this day, her "MC Higgins, the Great" was the first book to receive the National Book Award and the Horn Book Award and the prestigious Newbery Medal.

- I love Virginia Hamilton.

I wrote about Virginia Hamilton in two of my books now.

When I was a kid, we were learning about folk tales in elementary school, and I remember John Henry specifically because that was the most alarming one to me, this Black man who worked himself to death.

And I remember coming home really distraught about it, and my mother had a copy of the "The People Could Fly."

Virginia Hamilton's book, "The People Could Fly" in the house and pulled it off the shelf.

And it was so illuminating for me to to see Black and African folk tales presented in a different way that really served the people in them and treated the people in them with real dignity and not just vessels for labor and death.

- Virginia Hamilton, "MC Higgins, the Great," I read that when I was a kid, but one of the things that it brings home is I am not the person who is the hero of that story, it's not a story that is written necessarily with me in mind.

And yet as a kid, I was totally caught up in the book and sort of learning about the world that was within that book, which was so alien from the world that I was living in.

And I think that brings up something that's really important, that literature and writing can bring you to headspaces and culture spaces that you would never sort of meet up with in your day-to-day life.

And it creates sympathy and it creates empathy and it creates knowledge.

And so even though "MC Higgins, the Great" wasn't about me, it was something that taught me about the world that otherwise I wouldn't know.

And that's obviously incredibly, incredibly important, and speaks to what literature can do.

- From powerful prose to short stories to the popularity of Superman, Ohio authors have truly inspired writers around the world and influenced their works, and today's authors continue to shape its literary landscape in powerful ways.

- [Fred] So John Backderf, better known as Derf, has been a lifelong resident of northeast Ohio.

Getting his start as a political cartoonist, his background in journalism serves him well in his long form comics.

It is a fabulous example of what the comics medium is as a unique form of storytelling.

- Well again, you write what you know, and that's what I've always done.

I find so much here to write about, so many stories, so many characters that I haven't really needed to look anywhere else.

And it's worked out so far, so I'll keep doing it.

My most famous work is obviously "My Friend Dahmer," which is the true story of my high school friend, a strange boy who grew up to be the most infamous serial killer since Jack the Ripper.

And it documents his spiral down.

There was no question I was gonna do it.

It took me almost 20 years to finish it, and then I just went on to other stories.

I did a book called "Trash," which is based on my career as a garbage man in my hometown, which I did right after high school.

And then "Kent State," which was my most recent book about the 1970 massacre at Kent State University.

What really tickles me is that it resonates with readers who aren't from Ohio.

It's not just local work.

There's some universality there, or maybe just a curiosity.

I'm hitting some chord there that readers seem to enjoy, and that makes me happy.

- From the gritty realities captured in the graphic novels of Derf Backderf, we moved to the lyrical explorations of everyday beauty found in the poetry of Rita Dove.

Born and raised in Akron, Rita Dove served as US Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress and was the youngest person to be named to that position.

She has numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and the Lifetime Achievement Medal from the National Book Award.

- When I began to write "Thomas and Beulah," which is the poetry book that I got the Pulitzer Prize for, my hope, I wanted to enliven again the lives of an ordinary couple growing up in the early part of the 20th century.

I used my grandparents as a model, and to describe their lives, their very everyday lives, and their interior feelings to that life, this was something that was infused by trying to get a sense of that Midwestern dream.

And so that is in my work I think all the time.

"Thomas and Beulah" is perhaps the most obvious of those connections because there are descriptions of Akron landscapes.

And I do have a poem, which is about my favorite branch library in Akron, Ohio.

So a lot of my work is based in Ohio and comes out of Ohio.

- Ohio really does inspire poets.

Look out for a rising star on the scene who has already won major accolades and a place in Ohio's heart, Hanif Abdurraqib.

- [Fred] Poet, cultural and music critic, and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib was born and raised and makes his home in Columbus.

His first essay collection, "They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us," was released in 2017 by Columbus's own 2 Dollar Radio and named a Book of the Year by multiple publications.

He has gone on to receive well deserved acclaim for his work, including being awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2021.

- I mean, I do think that as a writer, I am kind of a mashup of all the Ohio writers I love and all the Ohio writers I read, and you know, I came up in poetry slam, in the poetry slam scene.

So many of those writers are not published in a traditional sense.

Many of those writers are writers I saw on stages reading one poem I loved, and then I only ever wanted to write one book.

I wanted to write a poetry book, which came out in 2016 called "The Crown Ain't Worth Much," and that was gonna be it for me honestly.

I've written now six books and I think they're very wide ranging.

Some of them are, I've written a book about A Tribe called Quest.

I've written an essay collection that centers largely around music.

Ive written another poetry book.

I've written a book about Black performance.

My latest one is about basketball and place in Ohio.

What's real is that all my books are about place and desire and to some extent grief and loss, and I'm just kind of using these topics as a lens to get to that point.

- But not all of Ohio's writers were born there.

In fact, John Scalzi struggled to find his voice as a writer until his family moved to a small Ohio town where the quiet landscape finally allowed him to hear the stories he wanted to tell.

We have claimed John Scalzi for our state since he moved to rural western Ohio in 2001 to be near his wife's family.

Although he's best known for his science fiction, Scalzi's voluminous work includes fiction, nonfiction, screenwriting, reviews and criticism, and his blog, "Whatever," which has been active since 1998, making it one of the longest running personal websites online.

- Essentially, I became a novelist when I moved to Ohio, and the first novel that I ever published, which was "Old Man's War," which came out in 2005, was written in my office here in Bradford, Ohio, where I could look out the window and I could see corn and soybeans and my Amish neighbors clopping by in their buggies.

The state gave me the space, it gave me the resources, and it gave me the quiet, frankly, because I live in a small rural community, to be able to spend time with my thoughts and actually build those stories.

It's amazing to me that 20 years into a career as a writer, as a science fiction writer, that I still have a career.

One of the things that has set me apart as a writer of science fiction has been how much humor I get to get away with writing into my books.

And so when I started writing, it was not something that was particularly appreciated a lot.

It took me a decade before we were allowed to actually say one of my books was in fact a funny book, and that was my book, "Redshirts," which went on to be a New York Times bestseller and won the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

And after that, not only for me, but for other writers, humor became a lot more palatable to present in science fictions.

Now, whether people always think that what I write is funny is an entirely different thing, humor is idiosyncratic, but certainly I've enjoyed putting it into the books that I have.

- It's no wonder Ohio has been home to so many authors.

The passion for their state's unique literary history runs deep and will continue to inspire generations to come thanks to their fantastic libraries.

- Although some states may differ with me, I would say that Ohio's libraries are second to none.

Ohio's libraries are as diverse as its population, public, academic, and special libraries.

We also have a number of unique institutions in the state as well.

One of those is the Mercantile Library in Cincinnati.

It's unique among literary landmarks in that it has a 10,000 year lease on its property, and since its founding in 1835, the subscription library has hosted literary luminaries like Emerson, Melville, Updike, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Margaret Atwood, and many, many more.

- I got to read at the Mercantile Library, which is a massive honor because it's so beautiful, but the real gift of that library is just wandering through it because there's so much history in it.

- Not only do I know of the Mercantile Library, I am actually a patron of it.

I've had a membership for about 10 years.

I was doing an event in Cincinnati and someone said, "Oh, you should go visit this place," and I went up and I looked around and it was just the coolest library that I had ever been in.

- The Mercantile Library is so fun.

If you get a chance, go see it.

It's like going back in time.

Huge shelves piled with books to the ceiling and the ladders and everything you think about when you think about an old time library.

- My staff wrote me some quick notes, and they say the library won't have to look for a new location until the year 11,845.

They said to put that in perspective, we're nearly as close now to the advent of human agriculture as we are to the end of the lease.

- [Fred] Ohio is lucky to have an institution like the Ohioana Library Association.

- We are the only state that has a library that forever preserves these books, so we have about 90,000 pieces in our collection now.

Libraries regularly get rid of books so that they can make room for new books.

We don't do that.

So we have first editions that are signed by Toni Morrison and we have a first edition of "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

It contains authors' papers.

We have letters written by Langston Hughes, for example.

We have Civil War letters, so we keep those kinds of things as well.

We have a collection of over 150 scrapbooks that have been created by Ohioans.

We have a pretty large music collection.

We used to give a music award.

We keep those things, and that makes us unique as a state in the literary world.

- [Fred] They also host the Ohioana Book Festival and provide the Ohio Book Awards to celebrate Ohio literary awards.

And if you want to engage in a little literary tourism in the state of Ohio, the Ohioana Library Association has put together a wonderful resource called the Ohio Literary Trail.

- We do, yeah, you can get that on our website, Ohioana.org.

You can download the literary trail.

So it's a great thing to stick in your glove compartment as you're driving around Ohio, stop by and see something that's associated with an author.

- It's not only Ohio's libraries that are a rock in their communities, but the independent bookshop scene is also making a huge comeback.

- [Fred] If you're looking to purchase some books while you're in Ohio, we have a number of unique bookstores that are available for you to browse.

- The Ohio bookstore community is amazing.

If you asked me to name my favorite bookstores, we'd be here for two hours because there's some in Akron, there's some in Cleveland, there's some in Toledo, there's some in Cincinnati, there's some in little towns.

Hamilton, Ohio has a great bookstore, but if I think about the ones around us here in Columbus, there's a big store called The Book Loft in German Village.

It's a old house, multilevels, packed full of books.

It's a very fun experience.

- When you have this stereotypical idea of a independent bookstore, I think that The Book Loft is what you are thinking of.

It is a literal maze.

You can get lost in this bookstore, and you wouldn't complain about getting lost in this bookstore because it's book heaven.

- [Kimberly] It's in German Village, which is a very cool part of Columbus.

It's got all these pre-Civil War buildings.

It's got like cobblestone streets, it's got cute little shops, so The Book Loft is kind of labyrinth.

You go in there and maybe you come back in three days, maybe you come back in an hour.

I mean, no judgment here, no judgment.

- [Derf] There's still a lot of funky little independent bookstores left around town, and they're treasures.

My favorites are, they're two in my neighborhood, one's called Mac's Back's Books.

- [Speaker] Giant, lots of books, kind of a almost '70s vibe, like there's some used books, there's some new books.

Very cool place to find your next read.

- It's almost like a headquarters for local authors.

They're very, very author friendly.

They love poetry and they love comics, and in fact, I just did a signing there that was great.

And the other one is right around the corner from me called Loganberry Books, which is one of the most beautiful bookstores I've ever seen.

It's one of those stores you walk in and it's just like, oh my God, floor to ceiling books, just these beautiful shelves, and I can spend hours and hours and hours and bookstores.

I always have, and I probably always will, at least I hope I always will.

- The first thing I did when I got to Ohio was to find what my local bookstore was.

- In every corner of Columbus that I go to, there are bookstores I find that I love, and not just the big cities, not just Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus.

You know, there are bookstores popping up in little towns.

Those places also require books, those places also have readers, and so Ohio has really become a hotbed for new bookstores.

I can just say my large admiration for the bookstores here are that they're all so different.

There are really so many bookstores in the city, and the reason that they can all thrive independent from each other is that they're also different.

It's hard work to curate that kind of experience, and it comes with knowing the people in your community well, and I think that is the first step, perhaps, to creating a bookstore space is not getting books on the shelves as it's understanding the hearts and minds of the people who will be coming in.

- Well a road trip through Ohio wouldn't be complete without a few stops to explore its literary landmarks.

If you've ever wanted to step into the pages of a book or find the inspiration to write your own, Ohio is full of places that awaken creativity.

- From authors' homes along the Ohio Literary Trail to quiet reading rooms and vast collections, these places have a way of stirring the imagination and letting a spark in the soul.

- [Fred] For anyone passing through Ohio that has any interest at all in comics, and you really should, there is one stop you have to make.

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library Museum on the campus of the Ohio State University is the foremost center for the study and preservation of comics and cartoons in the world.

To give you an idea of the size of their collection, they have over 300,000 original cartoons, over 60,000 books and graphic novels, over 6,000 boxes of archival materials, and 2.5 million newspaper comic strip pages and clippings.

- I was at the Billy at the beginning, it was originally called the Milton Caniff Library because it started with his papers.

He was an Ohio State grad.

I was closely connected to that place.

I still am.

There is a Derf collection at the Billy Ireland, believe it or not, shoved under the sink in the background.

They love it when I make that joke.

When I walk in the Billy, I just, immediately, I have a big smile on my face.

It is literally the center of the comics world, the heart of the comics world.

- The thing I would say about the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library Museum is it really, again, brings up the point that cartoons are literature, cartoons are art, cartoons are work that can move and excite and inspire us.

And certainly there is no history of literature in the 20th century and beyond without including cartoons and comics and graphic novels.

So the fact that there is the preeminent museum of cartoon art and knowledge I think is fabulous that we have it here in Ohio.

- [Fred] So one of the special locations in Ohio is the Toni Morrison Reading Room with the Lorain Public Library.

When Toni Morrison was asked how her hometown could memorialize her, a statue or naming a school after her, the thing that she suggested was a reading room in the library.

- What I really appreciate about Toni Morrison is I went to the Lorain County Public Library a couple months ago where she worked in like 1948 as a shelver.

She shelved the books at the library.

They have this Toni Morrison Reading Room, and it really showed to me like that Toni Morrison was a real person.

You know, they have pictures of her when she was young, and she looked like a girl in the '40s at that time when she was shelving books in Lorain, she didn't see herself reflected in those books.

It was 1948.

It was a very different time.

So, you know, that inspired her to really become the person that she became.

- If someone were to visit Ohio, I would first say you do not skip Cleveland.

Do not skip the northeast of Ohio thinking, "Oh, it's industrial, it's part of the rust belt."

There are so many interesting and very important historical things that happened in that area.

In my hometown of Akron, Ohio, for instance, you have the John Brown House.

So John Brown was busy getting his rebellion together.

Sojourner Truth gave her fantastic "Am I A Woman" speech in Akron, Ohio.

I would also suggest that they go to Dayton and see the Wright Brothers Museum, so you can also see how someone dreamed of flying.

- What's great about Dayton, where Virginia Hamilton is also from, is that there's so many things, historical things, just in like a few block radius, you know, in Dayton.

And so the Wright Brothers, their old factory is just a few blocks away from, you know, all these legendary art studios, which are just a few blocks away from Paul Laurence Dunbar's house, where you can still go and it's still relatively intact.

And there's a real beauty in going to a place where someone created and seeing it at least relatively close to what it was.

And there's a real spirit of imagination in Paul Laurence Dunbar's work that I think actually does reflect the imagination of a place like Dayton, which created and gave so much, be it flight or funk music or the poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, they all kind of have this soaring imagination.

- We have the Jerry Siegel House here in Cleveland.

It was restored and covered in nice Superman paraphernalia.

And you can actually stand on the street, look up at the top floor window, and see Jerry's desk where he dreamt up Superman right there.

And you know, to be that close to the actual origin of an iconic cultural figure is pretty amazing.

And young Lois Lane lived right across the street, the girl he based Lois Lane on.

So things like that are just, I get a big kick out of those.

- [Fred] One important literary figure who made Ohio Home was Harriet Beecher Stowe.

And you can visit her house in Cincinnati, and although she didn't write "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in Ohio, Harriet was able to gain the knowledge that made the creation of that pivotal work possible right here in Ohio.

- The Harriet Beecher Stowe House, and I really do love the preservation of a home.

There's something about that kind of literary landmark that moves me deeply because I am just a big process person.

I love seeing where people were in process, you know, like Paul Laurence Dunbar's house, like the home of Amina Robinson here in Columbus.

All of these things, you know, you feel a spiritual movement when you're in the space.

- Well at the heart of Ohio's literary treasures is the Ohio Center for the Book, dedicated to keeping the joy of reading alive and thriving.

From honoring the state's proud legacy and comics and graphic novels to producing engaging podcasts and curating collections from around the state, the Center for the Book continues to spark inspiration for readers and writers alike.

- The Ohio Center for the Book is dedicated to promoting and celebrating books, reading, literacy, and libraries to Ohio's residents and the book community at large.

Here at the Ohio Center for the Book, based at the historic main library of Cleveland Public Library, we have an extensive collection of circulating books by Ohio authors, including comics creators.

Taking its cue from Ohio's status as the birthplace of Superman and the state being home to significant historic and current comics creators, the Ohio Center for the Book adopts, as one of its primary charges, the promotion and advocacy of comics as an important and unique medium of expression.

And as part of that, we have a regular comics discussion group and programming devoted to the medium.

We collaborate with other literary organizations around Ohio, including the Ohioana Library Association, and we host a podcast named "Page Count" with an amazing back catalog of episodes for you to learn more about Ohio's literary scene, both past and present.

- If you'd like to explore the Ohio Center for the Book's events, book lists, and podcasts, visit ohiocenterforthebook.org.

And if our reading road trip has stirred your curiosity about the places, authors, and literary treasures in your own state, the Library of Congress is a great place to start.

Visit in-person in Washington DC, search its vast digital collections online, or connect with your local Center for the Book.

Visit pbsbooks.org/readingroadtrip or loc.gov to learn more and keep your literary adventure going.

- What a fantastic journey we have had through Ohio.

Thank you again to the Library of Congress and the Ohio Center for the Book for partnering with PBS books on "American stories: A Reading Road Trip."

- I don't know about you, but I would love to visit that Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum and Library, and I could bring the kiddos, they'd love it.

What about you?

- Oh, I just have to see some of those authors' homes on the Ohio Literary Trail.

- What about you?

Have you had a chance to visit any of these sites?

Or if you're an Ohio local, tell us your favorite spots that out of town book lovers should visit in the chat or comments.

- And if you're looking for more literary inspiration, be sure to visit your local library to get started on your own adventure.

- 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 from PBS Books.

And be sure to share this video with all of your friends to start planning your next trip to Ohio.

- Until next time.

- [Both] Happy reading.

(bright music) (gentle music)