Some 15 years ago, Friends of the Library USA (FOLUSA) launched its first book program at the American Library Association's annual conference in Chicago. Since then, it has expanded its programming and changed its imprimatur, integrating with ALA's Association for Library Trustees and Advocates (ALTA) in 2009 to become the Association of Library Trustees, Advocates, Friends and Foundations (ALTAFF). This year, ALTAFF's Washington, DC, book programs were as mobbed as ever, with standing room only for four offerings: "First Author, First Book," "Authors Come in All Colors," "It's All Politics," and "Isn't It Romantic?"

And once more I had the pleasure of introducing the authors-21 altogether and ranging from breakout debut novelist Jean Kwok to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson to romance queen Madeline Hunter. Here's a summary of the highlights.

Most Touching Moment: Discussing The Calligrapher's Daughter, one of last year's most successful debuts (e.g., it was a Washington Post Best Book), First Author Eugenia Kim explained that she had re-created the story of her Korean-born mother-and the story of early 20th-century Korea, entering the modern world under the 35-year occupation initiated by Japan in 1910. When she mentioned finding her book on a library shelf in Korea, Kim had to pause tearfully to collect herself. No dry eyes in the audience either.

Go Ahead, Borrow It: Both Kimberla Lawson Roby (Love, Honor, and Betray, "Authors Come in All Colors") and Elizabeth Hoyt (Wicked Intentions, "Isn't It Romantic?") told the same story: being approached by a fan (in Roby's case, via email) who blushingly confessed that while she always reads the author's books, instead of buying the latest title she was forced by straitened circumstances to borrow it from the library. Both authors responded that they were thrilled; more than anything, authors want to be read, and libraries make that happen. In any case, as Hoyt clarified, books borrowed from the library have been purchased, so everyone wins.

More Library Cheers: Yes, most of the ALTAFF authors raved about what libraries meant to them. For Kwok (Girl in Translation, "First Author, First Book"), who emigrated from Hong Kong to New York as a youngster, libraries were a safe, climate-controlled place to study-an escape from the squalid apartment she shared with her mother. (Her novel features a scene with cockroaches feasting on soy sauce frozen in bowls.) Jay Varner (Nothing Left To Burn, "First Author, First Book"), hilariously deadpan though his memoir is searing, traced his love of reading to the librarian who asked him as a young teenager to tell her one thing he'd learned from the Civil War history he was returning-and indicate where in the book he'd read it. He was shown up, having quoted a TV documentary, but thereafter became an avid borrower. And Dolen Perkins-Valdez (Wench, "Authors Come in All Colors") reported the text message she had just received from a friend: "Librarians are the gatekeepers of civilization."

Political Hot Spot: David Kilcullen ("It's All Politics"), whose Counterinsurgency explains how antiterrorist efforts abroad should be conducted (as "armed social work"), served as an adviser to Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan. This prompted a lively discussion among Kilcullen and fellow panelists Deborah Amos (Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East), a former Nieman Fellow; David Finkel (The Good Soldiers), a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Washington Post; and Robert E. Pierre (coauthor, with Jon Jeter, of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: High Hopes and Deferred Dreams in Obama's "Post Racial" America), also an award-winning Washington Post reporter. The big question: Regarding that Rolling Stone interview, did McChrystal assume he was speaking off the record (though there's really no such thing, said Pierre) or, as Kilcullen suggested, feel the need to commit "suicide by journalism"? The truth, concluded the panelists, is somewhere in between.

Best Quote on Writing: The question whether they planned the resolution of their works prompted various responses from the "Authors Come in All Colors" panelists: Roby, Perkins-Valdez, Arab American author Randa Jarrar (A Map of Home), YA author Artist Arthur (Manifest), and R. Dwayne Betts, an NAACP award winner for his fierce, honest memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in PrisonShahid Reads His Own Palm). Ultimately, they all endorsed the idea of writing as an act of discovery, but Betts said it best: "If you know what you are going to say beforehand, that's not poetry, it's propaganda."

Where Novelists Get Their Ideas: Perkins-Valdez was inspired to write her heart-rending Wench after seeing a reference to Tawana House, an antebellum resort in free-state Ohio where Southern white men brought their slave mistresses. Daphne Kalotay is of Hungarian descent, but a passion for Russian literature (andRussian Winter, "First Author, First Book"). At the Biblioth?ue nationale de France, Mitchell James Kaplan came across a log listing the men who sailed with Columbus and the chores they performed-save for one man, who he pinpointed as a translator and converso (a Jewish convert to Christianity). Thus began the train of thought that led to By Fire, by Water ("First Author, First Book"), featuring real-life converso Luis de Sant?gel, chancellor to Aragon's king as Spain was uniting and the New Inquisition was closing in. the ballet) led her to imagine a mystery surrounding a Soviet-era ballerina's jewels.

Research, Research: In The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, a magisterial work that takes its title from a poem by Richard Wright, Wilkerson chronicles the movement of the six million African Americans who left the Jim Crow South starting in the early 20th century and spread throughout the country. While researching the book, Wilkerson interviewed literally thousands of these migrants (whom she likened to immigrants who happened to speak the language) and finally settled on three whose life stories she uses to relate the whole. Remarkably, she was at it for 15 years-as she noted, when she started there was hardly any Internet, but now she can find brief references to her central characters on Google.

Funniest Authors: Featuring a part-black, part-Cherokee teenager with more than the usual problems-she can see ghosts, and one kinda cute one wants her to identify his killer-Artist Arthur's Manifest launches the YA series "Mystyx." But as A.C. Arthur, the novelist has already written 19 romances. Her account of resisting repeated urgings to try YA before finally giving in was worthy of a stand-up comic. And you bet Varner was funny, especially when he likened his mother's and grandmother's response to his pending publication as straight out of the TV show Intervention. Seems they objected to his spilling the beans on his police chief dad and scapegrace granddad, who had a real interest in fires.

Biggest Audience Shriek: Mention that best-selling author Roby's forthcoming Love, Honor, and Betray continues the Rev. Curtis Black series, and you get an audience in uproar. Roby, who doesn't confine herself to the series, said she never intended to get so involved in writing about a philandering minister, but there's obviously a lot of demand.

And a Few Shockers: Jarrar, of mixed Palestinian-Egyptian-Greek heritage like the heroine of her biting yet hilarious A Map of Home, was distressed by the lack of Arab American writers when she returned to this country (she was born here and then raised in Kuwait and Egypt). Though things are looking up-she herself was chosen to participate in Beirut39, which honored 39 Arab American authors under 40-the fair-skinned Jarrar reported having been told confidentially that she wouldn't like London because "there are so many Arabs there." Louisiana-born Pierre, whose A Day Late and a Dollar Short uses numerous stories to show that we haven't achieved a postracial society yet, drew murmurs from the crowd when he confided that his family finally left the plantation in 1975-and that after Obama's election his hometown paper ran this headline: "McCain Takes Louisiana."

Isn't It Romantic?: When an audience member asked the authors on the romance panel what they wanted readers to take away from their books, two-time RITA Award winner Hunter (Ravishing in Red) started by citing the idea of choice. (And surely each heroine in her new "Rarest Blooms" quartet, set in the Regency era, has a mind of her own.) Beth Harbison, whose forthcoming Thin Rich Pretty is not a traditional romance but still fit the panel nicely, referred to "the business of escape." Kathryn Caskie (The Most Wicked of Sins) stressed recognizing that "you are enough," Mary Blayney (Courtesan's Kiss) wanted readers to acknowledge that there's always something worth fighting for, and Kristan Higgins, whose All I Ever Wanted contained the romance-defining line, "Love made you a better person," opted for acceptance. And Wicked Hoyt's message? "Hot sex is good."

Surprise ending: At the conclusion of the "First Author, First Book" program, several audience members stood up to give the authors a standing ovation. That was a very satisfying ALTAFF first-and one that each and every program deserved.