For the record: Having grown up as an openly gay man in the South, musician and activist Joe Troop is familiar with controversy. The bluegrass player has been threatened and chased off the stage, but that’s never stopped him from engaging in social activism through song. While on a year-long break from touring with his […]
For the record: Having grown up as an openly gay man in the South, musician and activist Joe Troop is familiar with controversy. The bluegrass player has been threatened and chased off the stage, but that’s never stopped him from engaging in social activism through song. While on a year-long break from touring with his […]
Gather ‘round: A cowboy, a UVA professor, and an astronaut walk into a bar…or something like that. You never know who you’ll meet at The Moth, a live storytelling showcase that brings people from all walks of life together. The New York-based production’s events, workshops, podcast, and “The Moth Radio Hour” take you on an […]
Return to rock: Americana quintet Railroad Earth has been performing bluegrass with rock ‘n’ roll spirit for over 20 years. The band’s upcoming album, All For The Song, marks both the end of an era and the start of a new chapter—it’s the group’s first full-length studio record since losing founding member Andy Goessling to […]
If Terry Gilliam remade “The Jetsons,” it might go something like Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Bigbug. This French science-fiction comedy takes a generally dark movie sub-genre—robot servants revolting against their human masters—and transforms it into an outwardly sunny, pastel-colored farce. The results are a hilarious, fascinating satire that’s seemingly light, but overflows with pointed observations about unchecked […]
By Matt Dhillon In February, Saul Kaplan marked both his 93rd birthday and the release of a new book of artwork. The self-published Sketches: Faces of Life & Love highlights what is perhaps the artist’s most discreet and most intimate medium, his drawings. Having retired to an apartment in Martha Jefferson House, the ceramics and […]
How do you get people to appreciate, value, and protect creatures and ecosystems they have never seen? Two authors approach this challenge from different but complementary perspectives at a panel called Seeing Trees, Saving the Great Forests. Dr. Meg Lowman’s mission is to have people take another look at trees—specifically, the complex and fascinating ecosystem […]
Southern landscapes can evoke images of magnolias, Spanish moss, or Billie Holiday’s strange fruit. Those perceptions of the South as a beautiful but benighted part of the country bring three Black writers with deep Southern roots to the Virginia Festival of the Book March 19. “…[T]his landscape made me a writer,” says Ralph Eubanks in […]
For a genre that’s supposed to blow past the boundaries of what’s imaginable, fantasy can be predictable. The genre historically suffers from a lack of diversity on all fronts, and features a plethora of common tropes rooted in racist and sexist ideologies. (And some fans like it that way: When the cast of Amazon’s “The […]
In 1968, two doctors at the Medical College of Virginia performed one of the first heart transplants in the United States—unbeknowst to the man whose heart was transplanted. In The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South, journalist Chip Jones peels back the layers of the entire saga, […]
After reading a book in graduate school that discussed how enslaved women sold goods in South Carolina and Barbados, Justene Hill Edwards became fascinated by the economy of the enslaved. In the American South, slaves engaged in their own economic enterprises, buying and selling goods and earning wages for their work. What started off as […]