Local poet and pediatrician Irène Mathieu has been a storyteller for as long as she can remember. Before she learned to write, she would observe her mother and narrate everything she did. “She found it super annoying,” Mathieu says with a laugh. Mathieu, who lived in Charlottesville for parts of her childhood, returned last July […]
Leslie Jamison writes in the beginning of The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, “I wanted to know if stories about getting better could ever be as compelling as stories about falling apart. I needed to believe they could.” The author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection The Empathy Exams struggled with alcohol dependence […]
In 2018, over 50 authors living and working in the Charlottesville area published new books. They built fictional worlds populated by talking animals, anti-terrorist teenage space fighters, and ordinary humans trying to find the truth. They documented last year’s violent white supremacist rally in our city and dug into our history of racism. They redefined […]
It might not sound like a comedy: A twice-divorced single mom living with her mother tries to save money from her food service job to move into her own apartment. But Penelope Lemon: Game On!, is just that. “It’s hard to describe why something is funny,” says Inman Majors, an English professor at James Madison […]
By now you might know his name. You’ve seen it before in these very pages. Maybe you’ve started to put a face to the name. You see him on the Downtown Mall, holding a camera, watching. He is freelance photographer Eze Amos, whose first photography exhibition, “Cville People Everyday,” opens this month at New City […]
Around the same time Aja Gabel began learning the alphabet, she began playing the violin. As she became more adept at writing, filling “notebooks with stories as kind of a way to play,” she became more skilled at reading and playing music. When she was 10 years old she traded the violin for the cello […]
Artist Melissa Cooke Benson’s explorations in portraiture, long inspired by her daily life, have aligned with geographical moves, new and different cityscapes and cultures and alterations in her interior life, too. “With each life transition,” she says, “I’ve had to digest what’s going on around me and think of a way of incorporating what I […]
It began at a Live Arts callback a few years ago. That’s where Lynn Thorne, a native Virginian who had just moved to Afton, met Jennifer. “We kind of became instant friends, and she shared with me pretty early on that her husband was transgender,” Thorne says. At the time, Thorne admits, she didn’t really […]
Every day since Donald J. Trump became the Republican presidential nominee on July 21, 2016, local artist Warren Craghead has drawn him, or someone in his administration. Now six months’ worth of Craghead’s daily drawings have been published in a collection titled Trump Trump, Volume 1: Nomination to Inauguration. “I thought when I started it […]
There’s no denying it: Charlottesville is a wordsmith-rich town. Whether you’re looking for a page-turner for the beach, autumnal meditations in the form of poetry, or a fireside companion for a winter’s night, there are enough local writers publishing books each year to keep your shelves well-stocked. Here are some of the titles published by […]