This is a guest post by Junior Fellow Eleanor Ball.
The Library of Congress National Book Festival will celebrate its 25th year this week 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 2023 festival, please go here. We hope you enjoy scrolling through the past with us! Check out videos from the first 2001 festival here.
Tananarive Due is an award-winning author who teaches Black horror and Afrofuturism at University of California, Los Angeles. A leading voice in Black speculative fiction, Due has received an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award and a British Fantasy Award. Her previous horror novels include “The Between,” “The Good House” and “My Soul to Keep,” and her collection “The Wishing Pool and Other Stories” was featured at the 2023 National Book Festival.
Grady Hendrix is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter living in New York City. He is the author of “Horrorstör” and “We Sold Our Souls.” His novel “My Best Friend’s Exorcism” is currently being adapted into film, and the New York Times bestseller “The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires” is being adapted into a television show. His novel “How to Sell a Haunted House” was featured at the 2023 National Book Festival.
In this conversation with moderator B.A. Parker, Due and Hendrix discuss writing historical horror, how horror holds a mirror up to society and what makes a house truly haunted. The conversation proceeds as follows:
1:10 Influences on their writing
6:08 All about haunted houses (including spoilers for “How to Sell a Haunted House” at 16:03)
17:30 Balancing fun thrills and serious topics in horror stories
24:17 Crafting characters
30:33 Horror topics they won’t write about
32:55 Writing historical horror
40:13 Behind the scenes of “The Wishing Pool”
42:09 Their recent reads
46:25 Audience Q&A
Joy Harjo, the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States, is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Mvskoke Nation. Harjo is the author of 10 books of poetry, several plays, children’s books and two memoirs; she has also produced seven award-winning music albums and edited several anthologies. Her many honors include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and a Tulsa Artist fellowship. Her picture book “Remember,” illustrated by Michaela Goade, was featured at the 2023 National Book Festival.
Michaela Goade is a bestselling illustrator and enrolled member of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. Her book “We Are Water Protectors,” written by Carole Lindstrom, won the 2021 Caldecott Medal and was a 2020 Kirkus Prize finalist. Goade’s debut as an author, “Berry Song,” received a Caldecott Honor in 2023. Goade illustrated “Remember,” written by former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, which was featured at the 2023 National Book Festival.
In this conversation with Shelly C. Lowe, former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harjo and Goade discuss collaborating on “Remember,” what inspires them and the power of poetry to hold our dreams.
Harjo and Goade are introduced at 0:59, and the video proceeds as follows:
2:20 Harjo reads from “Remember”
5:30 Books they grew up with
8:08 Poetry as a “pocket”
9:33 Collaborating on “Remember”
12:13 The importance of memory and community
21:50 What inspires them—and how to inspire the next generation
33:18 Harjo reflects on being Poet Laureate during COVID-19
37:29 The power of picture books
44:55 Audience Q&A
Come back later this week for highlights from 2024!