The Virginia Festival of the Book is back in action March 20-24, with five days of panels, parties, and events to celebrate all things literary. Renowned authors flock to our city for engaging talks, everyone on the Downtown Mall has a book or two in their arms, and our too-long reading lists get even longer. […]
The Virginia Festival of the Book is back in action March 20-24, with five days of panels, parties, and events to celebrate all things literary. Renowned authors flock to our city for engaging talks, everyone on the Downtown Mall has a book or two in their arms, and our too-long reading lists get even longer. […]
Rust Belt Vegan Kitchen cooking demo March 18, 2pm | Virtual event When Meredith Pangrace decided to go vegan as a teenager, her grandmother made sure she was still included at family dinners. “She didn’t judge me, didn’t criticize,” writes Pangrace in her new community cookbook, Rust Belt Vegan Kitchen, “and she lovingly accommodated my […]
Thomas Jefferson’s oldest daughter, Martha, wrote to her own daughter, Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge, on the occasion of Ellen’s marriage. Postmarking her letter to Boston from Virginia, Martha said she would not be sending Ellen the family’s beer recipes. A fine young woman like Ellen wouldn’t need them, as Martha didn’t “presume” Ellen would ever […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Following directions: Mike Nichols’ beginnings as an improv comedian in 1950s Chicago informed his long career as a film and theater director. He shepherded numerous Neil Simon plays to Broadway success, and drew brilliant performances from Robert Redford, Elizabeth Taylor, Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, and Tim Curry, among many others. In 1967 alone, he had […]
It’s been the year of the pandemic, yes—but it’s also been the year of the book. Since the world shut down 12 months ago, we’ve turned to books to escape our stressful surroundings and also to explain the cataclysmic shifts outside and inside our homes. Last year’s Virginia Book Festival was cancelled as the pandemic first […]