NORA SMITH
Staff writer
Saturday afternoon, the toll of the Bryant Bell echoed across Chautauqua Lake and Chautauqua Institution’s grounds, ringing in the new reading season of curiosity and three newly announced 2027 Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle selections.
“Bryant Day was the first of the memorial days that CLSC members would honor throughout the year,” Mary Lee Talbot, grand marshal of the Banner Parade for the 2026 CLSC graduating class and historian of the CLSC Alumni Association, said.
Originally, Talbot explained, Bryant Day — named after William Cullen Bryant — was held in October, but in about the last 10 years, it has taken place during the Summer Season, with the early announcement of some of the book selections giving members more time to start reading.
At 11:30 a.m. Saturday, Chautauquans gathered below Miller Bell Tower, waiting in anticipation for what the 2027 reading season would bring. Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Jordan Steves presented the audience with a history of Bryant Day before welcoming President of the Alumni Association of the CLSC Pat McDonald to recite a poem by Grace Livingston-Hill-Lutz.
Harmonies filled the air as the Motet Choir led Chautauquans in “From Age to Age they Gather,” sung to the tune of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Following the performance, Steves welcomed Michael I. Rudell Director of Literary Arts Stephine Hunt to announce the 2027 reading season’s theme: curiosity.
“Curiosity is thinking about the many ways that each book inspires us to ask questions, to pursue a responsibility for and the joy of revelation, to think about the many ways that curiosity has inspired and created innovation and elevation and evolution for us here at Chautauqua and beyond and the world around us,” Hunt said.
Hunt then announced the three 2027 CLSC selections that selectively fit into each week’s theme and follow the season’s overall theme of curiosity.
Hunt unwrapped the first selection, Bone Valley: A True Story of Injustice and Redemption in the Heart of Florida, by author as well as host and producer of the podcast “Bone Valley,” Gilbert King, who has previously been to Chautauqua for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America. Hunt said Bone Valley will be celebrated during Week Three in honor of the theme of “Trust.”
“I think it’s a really good one for ‘Trust’ Week, thinking about the trust we put into our justice systems, sometimes blindly so, and how it sometimes fails us and the trust that we put into strangers or into our neighbors, sometimes in uncomfortable ways or ways that we don’t expect arising,” Hunt said.
Next, Hunt revealed that Week Eight, “On Living Well: A Week Curated with Dr. Sanjay Gupta,” will celebrate two books by American poet and essayist Diane Ackerman that complement one another — one of which is not yet published.
Hunt said Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses was originally published in 1991 but has been reprinted because Ackerman’s A Feast in Every Sense, a companion book, will come out in 2027.
“[A Natural History of the Senses] is a very lyrical, incredible history of what scientific research we’ve done to understand the human senses,” Hunt said. “It also pulls in some really beautiful depictions of those senses from literature.”
Hunt said Ackerman expands this theme in A Feast in Every Sense.
“While [A Natural History of the Senses] leans more into the science and the history of our study of the human senses, [A Feast in Every Sense] takes that thread that has a little bit of the lyrical and study of literature and leans into that,” Hunt said. “So, this one’s a beautiful expansion of the hard science that she’s looking at in the first book.”
Hunt said Bone Valley and A Natural History of the Senses are available for purchase, but because A Feast in Every Sense will be published in 2027, it can only be pre-ordered. She said the other selections are currently in discussion and will be announced through the fall, winter and spring on Chautauqua Literary Arts’ social media and clscchq.org.
After revealing the first 2027 selections, Steves led Chautauquans in the call and response before the Motet Choir joined the crowd in singing the tune of “America, My Country ‘Tis of Thee” before the bells rang in the new season of reading.
Talbot reflected on the legacy of Bryant Day and the tradition of the ringing of the Bryant Bell.
“I can sort of imagine a woman out on the prairie somewhere, going, ‘Oh, it’s October 2 at Chautauqua, and they’re ringing the bell, and I can start reading, and my magazine just came and the books are coming,’” Talbot said.
