25 Years of the National Book Festival: Highlights from 2013

This is a guest post by Literary Initiatives intern Amanda Brown.

The Library of Congress National Book Festival will celebrate its 25th year on September 6, 2025. For this year’s festival information, visit the 2025 National Book Festival website.

To honor the occasion, we are taking the 24 weeks leading up to this year’s festival at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center to highlight two videos each week from past National Book Festivals, from the festival’s first year in 2001 to 2024. Each week we’ll highlight a past festival year, with one adult book event and one children’s book event from that year. To see the other videos from the 2013 festival, please go here. We hope you enjoy scrolling through the past with us! Check out videos from the first 2001 festival here.

One of America’s most celebrated writers, Don DeLillo is the author of 18 novels, numerous short stories and plays, and a screenplay. He received the National Book Award for “White Noise” and the PEN/Faulkner Award for “Mao II,” as well as the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction. A Guggenheim fellow in 1979, DeLillo was awarded the inaugural Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, to honor “an American literary writer whose body of work is distinguished not only for its mastery of the art but also for its originality of thought and imagination.”

In the video below, Don DeLillo speaks candidly about his writing process, emphasizing the importance of story inspiration, visualization and structure.

DeLillo accepts the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction award at 5:05, and the video proceeds as follows:

6:28: Marie Arana introduces Don DeLillo
10:36: First question of the interview
12:50: DeLillo’s job before he became a novelist
14:05: “Writing is convenient and requires the simplest of tools…”
17:38: Finding and constructing a story
31:36: Taking the simple and making it complex

Lynda Barry is a cartoonist and author as well as a spirited advocate for the idea that imagination never truly disappears but is always ready for us to rediscover throughout our lives. Barry’s career spans decades. Her comic strip “Ernie Pook’s Comeek” launched in the 1970s and developed a strong following. She later gained critical acclaim with graphic memoirs like “One! Hundred! Demons!” and “What It Is,” the latter winning the 2009 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work. In recognition of her contributions to the comic art form, ComicsAlliance listed Barry as one of twelve women cartoonists deserving of lifetime achievement recognition. In 2013, she received the Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Award, and was inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame in 2016. In 2019, she received a prestigious MacArthur Foundation fellowship for her work at the intersection of visual art, literature and education. In 2020, her work was included in the exhibit “Women in Comics: Looking Forward, Looking Back” at the Society of Illustrators in New York City.

In the video below, Lynda Barry emphasizes that creativity does not belong only to the gifted, but to everyone. 

Lynda Barry begins speaking at 2:05, and the video proceeds as follows:

4:31: Familial influences in her writing
7:54: “What do we call the arts?”
14:48: “An image is specific”
26:40: Reason for loving books
29:54: Favorite comic strip of all time
32:48: Meeting favorite cartoonist
37:14: What “making work using images” means to Barry
37:43: Reading one of her cartoons

Come back next week for highlights from 2014!