This is a guest post by Literary Initiatives intern Leilani D’Angla-Rose.
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 2018 festival, please go here. We hope you enjoy scrolling through the past with us! Check out videos from the first 2001 festival here.
Annie Proulx was the 2018 recipient of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. With her debut novel, “Postcards,” she became the first woman to win the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and her novel “The Shipping News” won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Proulx’s other honors include the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature, the National Book Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her O. Henry Prize-winning story “Brokeback Mountain” was made into an Academy Award-winning film.
In the video below, Proulx shares insights into “The Shipping News” and “Brokeback Mountain” and discusses the environmental and historical themes in her novel “Barkskins.”
The Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction is conferred on Proulx at 3:03, and the video proceeds as follows:
7:46: Proulx gives acceptance speech
12:00: The importance of reading
13:50: Growing up artistically
20:10: Capturing the essence of “a place”
22:10: How-to books, nonfiction and creating a newspaper
26:20: Start as a writer
29:00: “The Shipping News”
32:29: Moving to Wyoming
39:00: “Barkskins”
41:15: Q&A begins
National Poetry Slam Winner Elizabeth Acevedo was born and raised in Harlem by Dominican immigrant parents and currently lives in Washington, D.C. In 2022, she was named that year’s Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. Her New York Times-bestselling book “The Poet X” won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, the Pura Belpré Award, the Carnegie medal, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award and the Walter Award.
In the video, Acevedo reads excerpts from her poetry and novel and shares personal insights into her Dominican heritage, her journey as a writer and the experiences that shaped her voice.
Acevedo begins speaking at 1:40, and the video proceeds as follows:
1:40: Reading of “This is for Us”
3:40: Inspiration behind “The Poet X”
4:50: Background as a teacher and attempting to get kids to read
7:25: Getting a master’s in creative writing and being an outsider
9:05: Animal Ode assignment
12:15: Reading of “Rat Ode”
14:57: Why not everyone is Elizabeth Avecedo’s reader
16:38: The main character of “The Poet X”
18:35: Reading from “The Poet X”
23:15: Q&A begins
Come back next week for highlights from 2019!
Comments (5)
Keep up the good work. Thanks for the updates.
Is something going on? Been over three weeks since this was published and there have been no posts since. Also, I believe the schedule was supposed to have been released already and no updates on that?
Thank you for checking in! We’re releasing the schedule this week and will be continuing this series! (look for a post about 2019 in a few minutes!)
Hello, when will the schedule be released? I’m getting concerned, especially since ya’ll haven’t posted in over three weeks atp.
We’re releasing the schedule very soon, and the next blog post is coming shortly!