WASHINGTON– An astronaut, an award-winning journalist and a Poet Laureate walk into a bar.
No, it’s not the beginning of a bad joke, and they’re actually walking into the Washington Convention Center.
Buzz Aldrin, Tom Brokaw and Juan Felipe Herrera are three of the more than 175 authors participating in the 15th Library of Congress National Book Festival on Saturday, Sept. 5.
The doors of the convention center will open to the public at 9 a.m. and events will begin at 10 a.m.
This year marks the 200th anniversary of the Library’s acquisition of Thomas Jefferson’s personal library. To commemorate it, the festival’s theme is a quote from Jefferson himself: “I cannot live without books.”
The festival will feature presentations from authors on many different subjects. The presentations will be held at themed pavilions on topics such as food, children, history, poetry and prose, and biography and memoir, among others.
The events will continue into the evening, with special programs beginning at 7:15 p.m. These will include a youth poetry slam, a graphic novels “super session,” a multimedia presentation on “great Books to Great Movies” and a “romance fiction”-themed pavilion.
All-day festivalgoers may get hungry. There are a number of dining options inside the convention center, and even more down the street in Chinatown.
To help attendees get the most out of their festival experience, the Library of Congress has created a free app for the event, which you can download here.
The app has a complete list of events and locations, as well as visitors maps and social media content. You can even create your own custom schedule of events.
For those who can’t make it to the festival this year, the festival’s website and app have something called an “activity feed,” which allows people to follow along with the day’s events through a super-sized, photo-heavy twitter feed of posts tagged with the festival’s #NatBookFest15.
If you do make it down to the convention center for the festival, share your photos and ideas with the #NatBookFest15 hashtag to see them appear in the activity feed.
