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Others include Leonard Pitts, Juan Williams, Jonathan Alter and Jeffrey Toobin, all of whom have new books that are of the moment and politically charged.

In all, the Tucson Festival of Books, March 15-16 at the University of Arizona, will feature more than 330 authors from all genres, listed at .

Maureen Dowd

Dowd’s new book, “Notorious: Hollywood, Fashion, and Culture Revealed Through Profiles of Our Most Infamous Celebrities,” will debut the week of the Tucson festival.

It’s “an intimate, gossipy romp through the culture of celebrity from a legend in American journalism,” says publisher HarperCollins.

“Using her signature wit and incisive commentary as a scalpel, Dowd dissects influential cultural elites,” the publisher says, including what it describes as leading Hollywood women, silver screen foxes, funny people, fashionistas and “hubristic media and tech titans” (Elon Musk is on that list).

This will be Dowd’s second visit to the Tucson Festival of Books, and like the first, in 2019, it will come at a time Donald Trump, a prime target of her zingers, is in the White House. Dowd has covered Trump since 1987.

At the 2019 festival, nearly 600 readers packed in to hear Dowd while another 400 were turned away from the full UA venue. At that appearance, the queen of barbs professed her love for Arizona cacti: “I identify with them.”

Leonard Pitts

“In a career that now spans 48 years, Leonard Pitts Jr. has worked as a college professor, columnist, radio producer, lecturer and author. In short, he says, he’s a writer,” the book festival’s website says.

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize in commentary while with the Miami Herald in 2004, Pitts became a syndicated columnist whose work often appeared in the ����Ӱ��AV.

He comes to the festival with his seventh book, a novel entitled “54 Miles” published by Agate Publishing in January 2024.

54 Miles takes place in “the fateful weeks of March 1965 — from the infamous “Bloody Sunday” march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on the 7th to the triumphant entry into Montgomery on the 25th that climaxed the voting rights campaign,” through characters “who find themselves confronting the past amid another flashpoint in American history,” Amazon says.

Juan Williams

Juan Williams has worked for The Washington Post, NPR, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Ebony. He is currently senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a columnist for The Hill.

Winner of an Emmy for television documentary writing, Williams is the author of the civil rights history “Eyes on the Prize,” which accompanied the PBS series. He wrote a landmark biography of Thurgood Marshall and other New York Times bestsellers.

His new book is “New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement.”

“Williams brilliantly traces the arc of this new civil rights era, from Obama to Charlottesville to January 6th and a Confederate flag in the Capitol,” says Simon & Schuster, which will publish the book in January 2025.

“An essential read for activists, historians, and anyone passionate about America’s future, New Prize for These Eyes is more than a recounting of history. It is a forward-looking call to action, urging Americans to get in touch with the progress made and hurdles yet to be overcome.“

Jonathan Alter

Jonathan Alter is a columnist, historian and documentary filmmaker who says in his book festival profile, “I wrote editorials for the ����Ӱ��AV many years ago.”

He is the author of three New York Times bestsellers about American presidents and covered the Trump felony trial for NYTimes Opinion, The Washington Monthly, and Old Goats, his Substack newsletter.

His new book is “American Reckoning: Inside Trump’s Trial — and My Own,” published by BenBella Books in October 2024.

Here’s how Alter’s website describes it: “For 23 days, Jonathan Alter sat just feet away from the most dangerous threat to democracy in American history, watching the spectacle of the century: the felony trial of Donald Trump. Highly publicized but untelevised and thus largely hidden from public view, this landmark trial offered hope of real justice amid a grueling eight-year national ordeal and foreshadowed the drama of the 2024 presidential election.”

Alter says his book is “a cri de coeur for American democracy” (looked it up — passionate appeal, complaint or protest).

Or, as Stephen Colbert of CBS’ “The Late Show” more accessibly blurbed it, “I’m grateful for this gripping guidebook through a bizarre chapter in the life of our strangest president.”

Jeffrey Toobin

With President Joe Biden’s recent pardon of his son Hunter in the headlines, and President-elect Donald Trump saying he plans to pardon his supporters involved in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol as soon as his first day in office, the longtime CNN legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin has timed his new book well.

“The Pardon,” coming out in February 2025, is described by Simon & Schuster as: “a timely exploration of the most controversial presidential pardon in American history — Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon — and its profound implications for our current political landscape.”

Toobin, a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, is the author of 10 books, including “The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court,” “The Run of His Life: The People vs. O.J. Simpson,” “Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism,” and “Too Close to Call.”