2003 NATIONAL BOOK FESTIVAL
FEATURES TOP-RANKED AWARD-WINNING AUTHORS

Seven current winners of major national book awards participated in the 2003 National Book Festival on Saturday, October 4, 2003, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. These distinguished writers head a list of more than 80 award-winning and nationally known authors, illustrators, poets and storytellers appearing at the Festival, which is organized and sponsored by the Library of Congress and hosted by Laura Bush. This third annual national celebration of books and the joy of reading attracted a crowd of more than 60,000.

The seven authors are:

RICK ATKINSON - winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for History for An Army at Dawn: The War of North Africa, 1942-1943 (Henry Holt & Co., 2002)

AVI - winner of the 2003 Newbery Medal for Crispin: The Cross of Lead (Hyperion, 2002)

ROBERT A. CARO - winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the 2003 National Book Award for Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate (Knopf, 2002)

NANCY FARMER - winner of the 2002 National Book Award for Young People's Literature for The House of Scorpion (Atheneum, 2002)

JULIA GLASS - winner of the 2002 National Book Award for Fiction for Three Junes (Pantheon, 2002)

NIKKI GRIMES - winner of the 2003 Coretta Scott King Author Award for Bronx Masquerade (Dial Books, 2002)

ERIC ROHMANN - winner of the 2003 Caldecott Medal for My Friend Rabbit (Roaring Brook Press, 2002)