Six books I didn’t read in 2024

Earlier this fall, I had COVID and, among its other health impacts, one bears mentioning here: For a time, I lost the ability to read. That is, I couldn’t read anything longer than a sentence without losing the rest of the day to a blinding headache. As a fervid reader, this was crushing. I spent […]

A conversation around Black loss with author Jennifer C. Nash

As a writer and theorist, Jennifer C. Nash’s work is deeply connected to political and emotional realities of Black feminism, inviting readers to probe the space between theory and embodiment. She is the Jean Fox O’Barr Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University and the author of four books. Nash spoke to […]

Exploring communal ways of healing 

“Outside of biomedicine, relationships lie at the core of healing—between people and their ancestors, between microcosm and macrocosm, between qualities and elements,” writes Eleni Stecopoulos in her new book, Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing. A poet, essayist, editor, critic, and UVA MFA alumna, Stecopoulos’ previous books include Visceral Poetics, a work […]

Poet CAConrad falls in love with a new world

As a poet, CAConrad is cosmic, their work unrestrained by the page, poems existing as art objects, ecological elegies, ancient technologies. In 2022, they received the PEN Josephine Miles Award for Poetry as well as the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. We recently interviewed them about their new collection of poems, Listen to the Golden Boomerang […]

Jane Alison’s new novel explores modernist feud

Jane Alison’s new book, Villa E, is an ecstatic examination of artistic obsession and self-embodiment, inspiration and legacy, memory and aging. The story revolves around Villa E-1027—the real-life modernist villa on the French Riviera created by architect-designer Eileen Gray—and the irreconcilably problematic relationship it created between Gray and the notorious architect, Le Corbusier. We recently […]

Discovering place, family, and memory in Annie Woodford’s poetry

“Poetry allows you to preserve a certain moment, a certain place. It’s giving voice to something that otherwise I would just carry around mutely,” says poet Annie Woodford, author of Where You Come From Is Gone and winner of the Weatherford Award for Best Books about Appalachia. “Then, when you think about economic systems or […]

Essaying our world

Nell Greenfieldboyce’s debut book, Transient and Strange: Notes on the Science of Life, delivers on the promise of its title. A carefully woven and emotionally resonant collection of creative nonfiction essays, the book is as much a cabinet of curiosities as it is a glimpse behind the curtain of motherhood in contemporary America.  “For nearly […]

Worthy journey

Though Emma Copley Eisenberg is known for her acclaimed true crime memoir, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, she received her MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns/Poe Faulkner fellow. Her new novel, Housemates, is a queering of the classic road […]

Life among the ruins

“The loveliness of deer might go without saying, but still, there it is: The more you look, the more they seduce,” writes Erika Howsare in her debut nonfiction book, The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with our Wild Neighbors. Published earlier this month, the book showcases Howsare’s keen journalistic skills as well as her […]

Local author Emma Rathbone stays focused with Losing It

Writing a novel isn’t easy by most measures, but it’s said that your second novel is where the anxiety really kicks in. Pressure builds to craft a book that’s readable and critically embraced, without being too similar to its predecessor. Of course, this is even more true if your first was met with popular success. […]