Library of Congress National Book Festival

Library of Congress National Book Festival

The National Book Festival is the one day a year the convention center fills up with kids who want to meet the person who wrote their favorite book. This is the 26th one, and the family side of it lives in Hall D on the second floor of the North Building, open 9am to 6pm. That hall is where you want to be if your kids are under 12. There is a Story District run by DC literacy nonprofits with story times and illustrators drawing live, a STEM District with hands-on experiments tied to books, and a Roadmap to Reading area with a table for every state, DC, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and the Northern Marianas. Kids collect a stamp at each table, and a full card gets a giveaway at the IMLS booth. That stamp hunt has kept my kids moving for an hour without a single complaint.

One thing changed this year: free tickets are now required to get in the door. They are still free, but you need to reserve them ahead at loc.gov/bookfest, and there is no ticket needed for individual author talks once you are inside. More than 80 authors are on the schedule across fiction, nonfiction, poetry and children's books, and the 2026 edition adds programming on film, music and American folklife for the country's 250th. Politics and Prose sells books on site. The full schedule posts about a month before the festival, so check the website in late July if you want to plan around a specific author.

Parent Tips 💡

• ✓Reserve tickets before you go. This is new for 2026 and people will get turned away at the door without one. It takes two minutes at loc.gov/bookfest.
• ✓Go straight to Hall D. The author stages are mostly for adults and teens. Everything built for younger kids is in one hall on Level 2 of the North Building.
• ✓You can bring your own food. Each person is allowed a water bottle and personal snacks or lunch, which saves you the convention center food prices and a long line.
• ✓There is a Quiet Room. The Accessibility and Information Booth in the Grand Lobby has details, plus tactile maps and ASL interpreters. Worth knowing if the noise gets to be too much.
• ✓Do the stamp hunt early. The Roadmap to Reading tables get slammed after lunch. Hitting them first also gives kids a reason to walk the whole hall.
• ✓Budget for books. Politics and Prose is the official bookseller and the signing lines are real. Decide on a number before you walk in.