25 Years of the National Book Festival: Highlights from 2019

This is a guest post by 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 2019 festival, please go here. We hope you enjoy scrolling through the past with us! Check out videos from the first 2001 festival here.

Richard Powers is an American novelist writing at the intersection of science, technology and the human experience. He has written over ten novels, including “Orfeo,” “The Echo Maker” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Overstory.” His other honors include the National Book Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, and he was elected a member of the Academy of American Arts and Letters in 1998.

In this conversation with Ron Charles, Richard Powers discusses the process of writing “The Overstory,” what we can learn from trees and fiction’s power to ignite our curiosity.

Powers is introduced at 00:49, and the conversation proceeds as follows:

1:10 Research and curiosity in the writing process
5:42 What draws him to fiction
8:55 How he got the idea for “The Overstory” and his other novels
14:23 Process of writing “The Overstory”
19:54 Unique structure of “The Overstory”
23:53 True stories that inspired “The Overstory”
30:22 Environmental themes in “The Overstory”
34:01 Audience Q&A begins

With more than 15 million books in print, Raina Telgemeier is one of the most successful graphic novelists of her generation. She is the No. 1 New York Times bestselling creator of the graphic novel memoirs “Smile,” “Sisters” and “Guts,” the graphic novels “Drama” and “Ghosts,” and the illustrator of several “Baby-Sitters Club” graphic novel adaptations. She has received multiple Eisner Awards, a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor, a Stonewall Book Award and other awards.

In this presentation, Telgemeier shares how her life has influenced her creativity, busts common myths about graphic novels and discusses the power of stories to help us understand ourselves and others.

Telgemeier begins speaking at 2:35, and the video proceeds as follows:

4:29 Stories that have influenced her
11:05 “Guts” and the importance of opening up to others
16:48 How she began creating and publishing her work
24:49 All about graphic novels
30:00 The process of crafting a graphic novel
35:15 Live drawing demo
43:48 Audience Q&A begins

Come back next week for highlights from 2020!