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 […]
After writer and UVA professor Sydney Blair died unexpectedly in December 2016 due to complications from pancreatitis, her children, Tom and Abbie Swanson, found a manuscript-in- progress titled Honorable Men: And Other Stories. When they revealed their discovery to their mother’s longtime friend, Sheila McMillen, she agreed to serve as editor to finish the work. […]
Vanessa German grew up in Los Angeles in a creative household, wearing clothes her artist mother made, writing stories, and crafting creations from the scrap materials her mom laid out on the dining room table for her and her siblings. “We were makers as a way of life,” says German, the 2018 recipient of the […]
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 […]
From 1988 to 1992, two recent UVA graduates, Chris Farina and Reid Oechslin, set out with a camera, 16mm film, little money and no lighting equipment, to interview residents of Charlottesville’s West Main Street. They wanted to learn more about their newly adopted hometown by inquiring into the lives and histories of the people tethered […]
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 […]