The 16th season of the Talking Volumes book club will bring in a veteran of the women's movement, a poet who wrote for a president and a novelist whose comical mysteries take place in Florida, as well as repeat visits from a New York novelist writing about slavery, and a writer who owns a bookstore.

The season — a joint production of the Star Tribune and Minnesota Public Radio at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul — will open Sept. 15 with poet Elizabeth Alexander, whose "Praise Song for the Day" was written for President Obama's first inaugural (and published by Graywolf Press). More recently, Alexander wrote the 2015 memoir "The Light of the World," a Pulitzer Prize finalist. A reflection on her marriage and her life following the death of her husband, it will be released in paperback Sept. 6.

Florida writer Carl Hiaasen is next up, on Sept. 21. Hiaasen is a Miami Herald columnist and author of 13 novels, five books for children and several collections of nonfiction. He is best known for his outrageous comic mysteries set in south Florida, including "Bad Monkey," "Strip Tease" and the forthcoming "Razor Girl" (out Sept. 6), which begins with a car crash and spins out of control from there.

Gloria Steinem, feminist, journalist and activist, will appear Oct. 6 to discuss her 2015 memoir "A Life on the Road," which will be released in paperback Aug. 23. It tells, in a series of essays, about her peripatetic life and the people she met and worked with along the way. Steinem lives in New York.

Novelist Ann Patchett, who won the Orange Prize and a PEN Faulkner Award for her 2001 book "Bel Canto," will be in town Oct. 18 to talk about her seventh novel, "Commonwealth," which Publishers Weekly calls "a funny, sad, and ultimately heart-wrenching" portrait of a fractured family. It will be published Sept. 13. Patchett, a Talking Volumes guest in 2007, lives in Nashville, where she owns the Parnassus Bookstore.

Pulitzer finalist Colson Whitehead rounds out the season Nov. 3. Whitehead, a Talking Volumes guest in 2011, is the author of "Zone One," "Sag Harbor" and several other books. His new novel, "The Underground Railroad," due Sept. 13, tells the story of Cora, a slave on a Georgia plantation who decides to escape the South. It is "at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage, and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share," the publisher says. Whitehead lives in New York.

Colson Whitehead

Hosted by MPR's Kerri Miller, Talking Volumes has brought more than 80 celebrated writers to towm over the years — including Robert Bly, Nikki Giovanni, Stephen King and Barbara Kingsolver.

Laurie Hertzel • @StribBooks • 612-673-7302 facebook.com/startribunebooks

Talking Volumes
Tickets: Season tickets go on sale July 5 to Star Tribune readers and MPR members (code: FITZGERALD) and July 7 to the general public. Individual shows go on sale July 19. Full-season packages are $115-$125, three-show packages $69-$75, single tickets $25-$30.
Where to buy: eTix.com (tinyurl.com/zajhgw3); 1-800-514-3849 or 651-290-1200, or Fitzgerald Theater box office, 10 E. Exchange St., St. Paul.