Lincoln Michel’s new novel, Metallic Realms, is a skillful send-up of science fiction fandom and writing group dynamics, set in contemporary Brooklyn. Crafted as a book within a book, readers meet the members of a sci-fi writing group known as Orb 4 who are struggling to get along, pay rent, and work on a series […]
Lincoln Michel’s new novel, Metallic Realms, is a skillful send-up of science fiction fandom and writing group dynamics, set in contemporary Brooklyn. Crafted as a book within a book, readers meet the members of a sci-fi writing group known as Orb 4 who are struggling to get along, pay rent, and work on a series […]
Independent Bookstore Day is on Saturday, April 26, and it offers the perfect excuse to stop by Charlottesville-area bookshops to find a title or two to enjoy amidst these tumultuous times. For inspiration, local booksellers share their reading recommendations below.—Sarah Lawson 2nd Act Books Charlie Newman-Johnson, manager The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell “The plot, […]
In her book, Moonlight Elk: One Woman’s Hunt for Food and Freedom, Christie Green writes: “When the days are distilled into life and death moments and attuned to tiny toenail prints in the soil and subtle wind shifts, my old identities pale.” A sensuous exploration of the animal world and our place within it, Green’s […]
The University of Virginia has many storied traditions. One, that of the Virginia gentleman, contributed to UVA being the last public university—aside from military institutions—to allow women. Spurred by a lawsuit, the school admitted its first class of female students in 1970. Gail Burrell Gerry was a member of that class of 367 women, and […]
When University of Virginia creative writing MFA alumnus H. G. Dierdorff’s debut poetry collection was published in December 2024, the timeliness of its themes of climate collapse and human connection was undeniable. However, these first weeks of 2025 made it all the more relevant, as Richmond, Virginia’s water crisis and the Los Angeles fires reminded […]
In Bad Naturalist: One Woman’s Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop, Paula Whyman recounts her attempts to restore the ecosystem of a mountain that she and her husband bought. “I’ve been working on the mountain restoration for nearly four years now, since we bought the land in early 2021,” says Whyman. “I started work […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]