This is a guest blog post by Junior Fellow Riley Rhoder.
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 or YA book event from that year. To see the other videos from the 2020 festival, please go here. Check out this year’s unique animated festival poster here. We hope you enjoy scrolling through the past with us! Watch videos from the first 2001 festival here.
Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area by her Chinese immigrant parents, Amy Tan is the author of New York Times bestselling novel “The Joy Luck Club.” The novel was a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award and the International Orange Prize, and it was also adapted into a film which Tan co-produced and co-wrote the screenplay for. She is the author of several other novels, including “The Kitchen God’s Wife,” “The Hundred Secret Senses” and “The Bonesetter’s Daughter,” as well as two memoirs, “The Opposite of Fate” and “Where the Past Begins.” In 2021 Tan was awarded the National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
In the video below Tan discusses her memoir “Where the Past Begins” and how creativity and writing led her down a path of self discovery.
Tan begins speaking at 0:34, and the video proceeds as follows:
0:58: Ingenuity
3:12: Imagination
7:07: Hope and fear
Jason Reynolds is an award-winning author of many novels and verse novels, including “Long Way Down,” “Look Both Ways,” “Ghost” and “All American Boys.” His honors include a Newbery Medal, a Printz Award, a Kirkus Prize, a Walter Award and multiple Coretta Scott King honors. Reynolds served as the 2020-2022 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Currently, he is a faculty member at Lesley University in the Writing for Young People MFA Program.
In the video below, Reynolds discusses his book “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix,” and the power of history and storytelling.
Reynolds begins speaking at 0:35, and the video proceeds as follows:
0:50: Background on “Stamped”
2:09: Creativity
3:48: History as a conversation
5:05: History lives in a bubble
6:34: Gomes Eanes de Zurara
8:27: Thomas Jefferson
10:23: Hope
13:52: The internet as a tool
17:58: History vs. memory
Want to hear more from Reynolds? Click here to watch a full Q&A with him from the 2020 festival.
Come back later this week for highlights from 2021!