A&S Talents Featured in 2024 Virginia Festival of the Book

MAR 8, 2024 Lorenzo Perez, Senior Writer
Virginia Festival of the Book

The Virginia Festival of the Book opens next week with a five-day schedule of author readings and panel discussions in one of the largest community-based celebrations of the written word in the mid-Atlantic region. 

Highlights from this year's festival include associate professor Lisa Woolfork (English) moderating a discussion with acclaimed author Percival Everett about his reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and assistant professor Bonnie Hagerman (Women, Gender, and Sexuality) discussing Skimpy Coverage, her book-length study of Sports Illustrated’s treatment of female athletes since the magazine's founding in 1954. Many of this year's readings and festival events are free to the public. For more information on the festival, visit the official website.

As it does every year, the Virginia Festival of the Book serves as a showcase for the talents of Arts & Sciences faculty, students and alumni. The following events feature members of the College community.

March 20

Holocaust Reckonings

3:30–5 p.m., UVA Bookstore

A seasoned journalist finds the story of many lifetimes in the recollections of her cousin in this part-memoir, part family-history and part detective story, Jews in the Garden: A Holocaust Survivor, the Fate of His Family, and the Secret History of Poland in World War II.

For scholar and author Susan Rubin Suleiman, everyday objects from her past hold memories of her childhood as a Holocaust refugee. Her family survived by hiding, forging papers, and going by a Christian name until they fled to America, where Susan experienced a reckoning that would shape her life and scholarship thereafter. Hear her story in Daughter of History: Traces of An Immigrant Girlhood. This program is sponsored by the University of Virginia Jewish Studies Program.

Moderated by Jennifer Geddes (interim director of Jewish Studies Program)

Where the Truth Lies: Racism and Reckonings

3:30 pm, Jefferson School African American Heritage Center

What comes about when an ethnographer and storyteller confronts a painful legacy of racism? And what happens when a scholar of white supremacy researches her own family’s troubled history? B. Brian Foster’s powerful essays in Ghosts of Segregation: American Racism, Hidden in Plain Sight bring to life what is often in the shadows of Black American heritage. Grace Elizabeth Hale (American Studies, History) revisits an old family legend that hides a dark truth in In The Pines: A Lynching, a Lie, and a Reckoning, one of a Black man, murdered while in her white grandfather’s custody at a rural Mississippi jail. Both books shine light on a shadowed American history, one that deserves reconciliation with the truth.

March 21

Skimpy Coverage

11 a.m.–12:30 p.m., Omni Hotel

Why are female athletes so often seen as spectacle? Skimpy Coverage delves into Sports Illustrated’s treatment of female athletes since the iconic magazine’s founding in 1954. 

The first book-length study of its kind, Bonnie Hagerman’s accessible account charts the ways in which Sports Illustrated — arguably the leading sports publication in postwar America — engaged with the social and cultural changes affecting women’s athletics and the conversations about gender and identity they spawned. Bonnie Hagerman is an assistant professor in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Virginia.

Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant

4–5:30 p.m, UVA Bookstore

Join author Curtis Chin as he talks about his memoir about growing up working class, queer, and Chinese American in Detroit in the 1970s and 80s, a tumultuous period that saw the rise of anti-Asian racism, culminating in the murder of Vincent Chin by a white Detroit autoworker in 1982, and homophobia in the shadow of the early AIDS epidemic. 

Chin, a self-described “writer/producer/director/activist,” co-founded the Asian American Writer’s Workshop in NYC in 1992 and worked on the acclaimed documentaries Vincent Who? (2009) and Tested (2015). Chin will be in conversation with Sylvia Chong (American Studies, English).

This event is co-sponsored by the East Asia Center and the Program in Asian and Pacific American Studies at UVA.

March 22

The Texture of Family: Black Fiction

10:30 a.m.–noon, Jefferson School African American Heritage Center

Join as authors Jeffrey Blount, Donna Hemans, and Joanna Skerrett discuss their novels that illustrate the nuance of Black families.

From a man seeking redemption in a forgotten rural community, to a woman leaving Brooklyn to care for her dying Caribbean father, to a father and son spreading their wife and mother’s ashes, these novels — Mr. Jimmy From Around the Way, The House of Plain Truth, and Island Man — explore what it means to come to terms with familial and communal pain and healing. 

Moderated by Njelle Hamilton (English, African American and African Studies)

March 23

Virginia Festival of the Book at the Paramount Theatre Talks and Discussions

10:30 a.m.–8 p.m., Paramount Theatre

Hear Senator Danica Roem explore Burn the Page: A True Story of Torching Doubts, Blazing Trails, and Igniting Change at 10:30 a.m.; then, hear U.S. Poet Laureate and recent MacArthur “Genius” Awardee Ada Limón at 1:00 p.m. Bestselling author and columnist Roxane Gay, author of Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business at 4:00 p.m. And join Percival Everett at 6:30 p.m. for his book tour of James: A Novel.

Moderated by Kiki Petrosino (Creative Writing) and Lisa Woolfork (English).

Bark and Bite: YA Stories of Inner Strength

11:30 a.m.–1 p.m., Omni Hotel

Kept confined with only her wilding dog for company, a Black girl of the future wonders what’s behind her tiny cell; while a present-day African American girl struggles with fears and nightmares in Gone Wolf, the novel by award winning author and asst. English professor Amber McBride (English), 

In The Night Fox by Ashley Wilda, a girl at a remote retreat for teens with mental health issues yearns to “heal,” so that she can go home. A fox symbolizes hope, even as she ventures into a magical, but dangerous realm. In these poetic novels, canine creatures allow girls to find their own bark and bite: an inner force each never knew she had.

Memory Making and Democracy: A Look Back at August 12, 2017

Noon–1:30 p.m., Omni Hotel

Historians and journalists Aniko Bodroghkozy (Media Studies) and Nora Neus revisit the indelible moments of August 12, 2017, when white supremacists descended upon Charlottesville.

Aniko Bodroghkozy’s Making #Charlottesville: Media from Civil Rights to Unite the Right places this event in context with two other epochal moments, both in 1960s Alabama, that put American racism and the struggle against it on worldwide display. She spotlights the media’s treatment of these events and how activists made use of the new media environment of their day to organize and amplify their respective messages.

Nora Neus’s 24 Hours in Charlottesville: An Oral History of the Stand Against White Supremacy recounts the stories of students, faith leaders, politicians and community members who counter-protested against, confronted, witnessed, and responded to these Neo-Nazis protests.

The Hurting Kind and Other Poems: U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón

1–2:30 p.m., Paramount Theatre

“Poet Ada Limón writes with simple and disarming honesty — for people rather than other poets, declares The Guardian about Limón’s newest book, The Hurting Kind. In all of her works, be it the National Book Award Finalist Bright Dead Things or in National Book Critics Award winner The Carrying, Limón is attuned to the vibrant mysteries of the natural world and the vulnerabilities that lurk and rest within the human condition. The U.S. Poet Laureate and recent MacArthur “Genius” Awardee will explore her poetry and practice during what promises to be a memorable evening. In conversation with Kiki Petrosino (Creative Writing).

Healing Words: Poetry and Health

3–4:30 p.m., JMRL Central Library

Brian Teare (English) and fellow poet Cindy Juyoung Ok examine how the mind and body ail and heal. Ok punctuates her Yale Series of Younger Poets debut Ward Toward with digital renderings of psychiatric wards and therapists’ notes. A Guggenheim Fellow, Teare, in Poem Bitten by a Man, uses ekphrasis in his lyric essay on his pursuit of a diagnosis for a chronic illness.

Book Tour: James by Percival Everett

6:30–8:00 p.m., Paramount Theatre

A “literary icon” (according to Oprah Daily), Pulitzer Prize finalist, and one of the most acclaimed authors of our era is bringing the book tour of his newest novel, James, to the Virginia Festival of the Book.

With its release in mid-March, 2024, you will be among the first readers to be swept away in Percival Everett’s reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one that centers the enduring character “Jim” on an adventurous ride down the Mississippi River. But his is no child’s tale: James needs a plan once he learns he’s to be sold away from his wife and daughter, just as Huck is escaping an abusive household.

From the pen of a literary master, James: A Novel is destined to be one of the most vital retellings of our lifetime.  In conversation with Lisa Woolfork (English).

March 24

UVA MFA Reading at Visible Records

2–3:30 p.m., Visible/Records
 

Celebrate four recent graduates of UVA’s MFA program and Area Program in Poetry Writing as they read from recently published works.

Readers include:

Held at Visible Records, this program will be followed by the Festival Finale a networking event next door at Decipher Brewing. Join us for this free event and receive a drink ticket for our afterparty!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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