This is a guest post by Literary Initiatives intern Nia Valcourt.
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 2014 festival, please go here. We hope you enjoy scrolling through the past with us! Check out videos from the first 2001 festival here.
Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist, an acclaimed public speaker and a renowned futurist. He has written several New York Times bestsellers such as “Physics of the Impossible,” “The Future of the Mind” and “The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything.” Kaku has been featured on television shows on Discovery, Science Channel, BBC, ABC and History Channel. Beyond his numerous bestselling books, he has also been a featured columnist on Popular Mechanics, Discover, WIRED and Newsweek. Kaku received the 2008 Klopsteg Memorial Award and the 2021 Sir Arthur Clarke Lifetime Achievement for his contributions. He is currently a professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center.
In this video, Kaku demonstrates his expansive mind and future-forward thinking as he describes advancements made within science that were previously relegated only to fantasy—such as telepathy, telekinesis and recording memories—while exploring what more our future may hold.
Michio Kaku begins speaking at 2:12, and the video proceeds as follows:
8:53: The Mind
11:19: Movies Coming to Life
15:30: Exoskeletons and Robots
17:50: Superman’s Hologram
19:17: Your Two Brains
22:57: Brain Implants and Sensors
24:46: Smart Glasses and Contact Lenses
31:45: Retrieving Memories
32:50: “Photograph a Thought”
35:02: Combating Mental Illness
Jacqueline Woodson has written over 40 books for adults, children and teens. She is best known for her National Book Award-winning memoir “Brown Girl Dreaming,” her Coretta Scott King Award-winning novel “Miracle’s Boys” and her Newbery Honor-winning titles “After Tupac and D Foster,” “Feathers” and “Show Way.” Her picture books “The Day You Begin” and “The Year We Learned to Fly” were New York Times bestsellers. After serving as the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2015-2017, she was named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress and served from 2018-2019. She was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2020 and was named a MacArthur Fellow that same year.
Watch the video below as Woodson reads from her multiple award-winning memoir in verse, “Brown Girl Dreaming” while discussing her childhood growing up during the Civil Rights movement.
Jacqueline Woodson begins speaking at 2:54, and the video proceeds as follows:
3:34: Background on “Brown Girl Dreaming”
6:10: “The Candy Lady”
10:55: “Sterling Highschool: Greenville, South Carolina”
13:29: “My life is an ordinary life”
14:43: “Flag”
19:17: “Music”
21:26: “Fate and Faith and Reasons”
23:17: Q&A begins
Come back next week for highlights from 2015!