This is a guest post by Literary Initiatives intern Kevin Lopez Cruz with additional support from Junior Fellow Eleanor Ball.
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 2015 festival, please go here. We hope you enjoy scrolling through the past with us! Check out videos from the first 2001 festival here.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, was born in Vietnam and raised in the U.S. as a refugee. Nguyen gained acclaim for his debut novel, “The Sympathizer,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted into an HBO series. His works—including novels such as “The Committed”, short story collection “The Refugees,” and nonfiction like “Nothing Ever Dies”—explore themes of war, memory, identity and diaspora. A MacArthur and Guggenheim fellow, Nguyen advocates for refugee and Vietnamese diasporic voices through the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network and serves on the Pulitzer Prize Board.
He offers both literary and political critique in this thought-provoking presentation, using “The Sympathizer” as a lens to reflect on the necessity for memory and the existence of identity and conflict.
Nguyen begins speaking at 2:09, and the video proceeds as follows:
5:21: Paris by Night
6:33: First reading
11:17: Reflection and memory
14:06: Q&A begins
36:20: GQ article
42:27: “The Sympathizer” audiobook
Jenny Han, a bestselling author, screenwriter, and producer, is known for her popular young adult novels. Her work has been published in more than 30 languages, and her acclaimed series “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” and “The Summer I Turned Pretty” were adapted into shows on streaming services. Han also created the Netflix original series “XO, Kitty” and founded the production company Jenny Kissed Me. In 2023, she received the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Distinguished Alumna Award.
In this presentation, Han reflects on the personal and emotional roots of her storytelling, particularly through the “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” series. She discusses the inspiration behind her characters, her creative process and how writing helped her navigate change in her own life. Han also emphasizes the importance of authentic representation, sharing how meaningful it is for readers—especially young Asian Americans—to see themselves reflected in mainstream literature. Through anecdotes and in the audience Q&A, Han offers a thoughtful look at how vulnerability, empathy and family relationships shape her work and resonate with a wide readership.
Han begins speaking at 2:33, and the video proceeds as follows:
3:00: Summary of “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before”
4:01: What inspired “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before”
9:04: Seeing oneself reflected in fiction
11:16: Q&A begins
15:30: Her writing process
16:53: On developing characters
23:38: Advice for young writers
Come back next week for highlights from 2016!
A previous version of this blog post contained incomplete information and has since been updated.
Comments (5)
You never forget your first. And for me, my first National Book Festival was unforgettable. It wasn’t just a bucket list item; it was the first anniversary of the rest of my life. Just a year before, I’d faced a severe anaphylactic reaction, my life passing before my eyes.
I chose to commemorate that first year’s journey with books and my mom. I made the hotel reservations, she cleared her calendar, and we were off. I vividly recall meeting so many authors, particularly Jane Smiley (her A Thousand Acres is simply brilliant) and the wonderfully approachable David Baldacci.
Nine years later, my mom and I found ourselves back amidst the buzz of the festival. A new hotel, yes, but the heart of our celebration remained: books and, this time, my mom’s triumph. She’d bravely navigated cancer during the pandemic and was eager to celebrate her resilience.
When will the authors be released? Us enthusiasts are counting the days! Thank you.
The author lineup announcement is coming very soon, by mid-July!
When will this year’s author list be released? It’s just over 2 months away!
When will this year’s author list be shared