In one of BookExpo 2018’s final events, five women gathered for a dialogue on diversity and inclusivity - or lack thereof - in the publishing industry. 

What is free speech in America today and does it need saving. Three prominent Americans, including former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson and Pulitzer prize winner Jose Antonio Vargas.

Barnes & Noble chairman and founder Len Riggio delivered the first-ever opening keynote address for BookExpo America to open the 2018 event. And in it, he fought for books and the need for bricks-and-mortar stores that sell them.

Acclaimed author Clifford Thompson writes about jazz, film, literature and American identity, and he received a Whiting Writers' Award for nonfiction in 2013 for his book Love for Sale and Other Essays (Autumn House Press). 

He lives on a pretty, tree-lined street in Brooklyn in a building that went up in the 1920s and while he has books everywhere, the majority of them live in four tall brown wood shelves placed against the wall in his living room.

Bryan Calvert is a chef and the co-founder of James restaurant in Brooklyn, New York. With James, which he opened in 2008, Calvert was an early pioneer of the type of seasonally-focused, locally-sourced produce that has come to define the Brooklyn food scene.

We recently caught up with Calvert to talk about cookbooks, homemade furniture, and the literary classics to which he turns when he’s not ensconced in historical detective work.

We first met English author Alice Adams in real life, at a cocktail party in downtown Manhattan, where she had come to celebrate her forthcoming debut novel, Invincible Summer. We met her for the second time in space, on Skype, in mid-April.

Adams' bookshelves are located in "the snug" of her North London home, beside a large window. What is a "snug?" we query. "Oh, is that too English?" she replies, then sources a dictionary translation: "Snug 2  (snŭg). n. Chiefly British. A very small private room in a pub."

"Though obviously it’s not in a pub," she adds. "It’s a smallish room off the living room."