Join WhatsApp Channel
Teamwork Arts, producer of the Jaipur Literature Festival and its international editions, has announced that the third edition of JLF North Carolina will take place from September 11 to 13, 2026, in Raleigh.
The three-day festival will bring together writers, poets, journalists, historians, artists, chefs, academics and other cultural voices for discussions exploring literature, democracy, history, science, food and cultural identity.
Presented in partnership with Artsplosure, the festival will hold events at Meredith College, the North Carolina State University Institute for Emerging Issues and Raleigh Union Station, according to a statement from JLF USA Outreach.
The lineup includes author, politician and former diplomat Shashi Tharoor; Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Vijay Seshadri; North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green; former North Carolina Poet Laureate Joseph Bathanti; James Beard Award-winning chef Vishwesh “Vish” Bhatt; chef and restaurateur Cheetie Kumar; and neurologist and author Pria Anand, winner of the 2026 PEN America E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.
Other participants include authors Karan Mahajan, Manil Suri, Belle Boggs, M. Randal O’Wain and Melissa Faliveno; musician and historian Bob Crawford; journalist Jeff Tiberii; Teamwork Arts Managing Director Sanjoy K. Roy; journalist and digital media executive Sree Sreenivasan; and journalist Zachery Eanes.
Among the scheduled programs is a session featuring Tharoor on the promises and challenges facing democracy. The discussion will examine the evolving paths of India and the United States, as well as the institutions, identities and principles that sustain the two democracies.
The session will also consider challenges arising from division, public distrust and changing perceptions of power, according to the statement.
In a session titled “The Poetic Imagination,” Seshadri, Green and Bathanti will discuss the creative process, sources of poetic inspiration and poetry’s ability to illuminate human experience.
Anand will discuss her book, The Mind Electric, which received the 2026 PEN America E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Drawing on neurological cases and personal stories, the conversation will examine questions involving consciousness, memory, illness and identity.
Bhatt and Kumar will join longtime Triangle journalist and WUNC “Due South” host Tiberii for a conversation titled “Food, Memory and Culture.” The session will explore how flavors, traditions and personal experiences shape relationships with food and connect the past with the present and homelands with diaspora communities.
Novelist and mathematician Suri will speak with O’Wain about his memoir, A Room in Bombay, which draws on more than 2,700 letters to revisit his childhood. Their discussion will focus on family, memory, identity, sexuality and the relationship between personal histories and the cities that shape them.
The session “Real Worlds of Fiction” will feature Mahajan and Faliveno in conversation with Boggs about the boundaries between fiction and reality. Mahajan, whose novel The Association of Small Bombs was a National Book Award finalist and won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and Faliveno, author of Hemlock and Tomboyland, will discuss how writers draw on family, society and their inner lives to create fictional worlds.
In “The American Experiment,” Crawford will join Eanes for a discussion on American history. Crawford, bassist for The Avett Brothers and creator of Founding Son: John Quincy’s America, will examine the formation of the American republic, its contested history and the voices that have challenged and reshaped its national story.
“JLF has always believed that literature is a starting point for conversation, a way of bringing people, ideas and experiences into the same room, often from places and perspectives that may seem far apart,” Roy said. “North Carolina offers a wonderful setting for that exchange, with its own remarkable literary, cultural and intellectual traditions.”
Roy said this year’s program would bring together participants from India, the United States and other parts of the world to examine questions surrounding democracy, memory, identity, science and culture.
“At the heart of JLF is this simple idea: that conversation can expand the way we see the world,” he said.
“JLF USA is about creating meaningful connections between our global literary community and the distinctive cultural landscapes of the cities we visit,” said Suraj Dhingra, senior vice president of Teamwork Arts and producer of JLF USA.
Dhingra said North Carolina has a vibrant literary and intellectual community and that the festival would connect regional participants with writers, thinkers and changemakers from around the world.
“We hope JLF North Carolina will open up new conversations, connections and discoveries, and offer audiences across the Triangle an opportunity to engage with ideas and perspectives from far beyond their own communities,” Dhingra added.
JLF North Carolina is part of JLF USA, the multicity international extension of the Jaipur Literature Festival. The North Carolina edition seeks to connect the Triangle’s literary and cultural community with writers and thinkers from the United States, India and elsewhere.
