Virginia Festival of the Book — March 22-26

The Virginia Festival of the Book is next week! This has long been one of my favorite events of the year. Before I had ever published a book, I attended the festival and imagined that one day I would appear on a panel to talk about my own work. Eventually that did happen, and in addition I have had the pleasure of moderating panels for many years now. This year, I’m moderating two.

The first one is on Wednesday, March 22, at 4pm at the James Madison Regional Library: Secrets and Lies: Haunting Historical Fiction. The panel features three exciting novels. Kathleen Grissom’s novel, Glory over Everything, is about a successful businessman in Philadelphia in 1830 who has a secret about his past that he is faced to confront when he travels south to rescue the son of a runaway slave. Brooke Obie’s novel, The Book of Addis: Cradled Embers, is about Addis, a woman enslaved by William Burken, who in this fiction is the first president of the United States. (Comparisons to Toni Morrison’s work are not far off.) And Susan Rivers’s The Second Mrs. Hockaday is an epistolary novel set in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War about the tribulations of a young bride when her husband returns from battle. There is so much to discuss about these books, we’ll wish we had more time!

The second panel is Friday, March 24, at 4pm, also at the Library: Fiction: Exploring Others and Ourselves. The title of the event doesn’t do it justice, although there is vivid self-exploration in all three of the novels being presented. As Close to us as Breathing by Elizabeth Poliner is a moving account of one Jewish family’s tragic summer at the Connecticut shore in 1948. Jonathan Rabb’s Among the Living is about Holocaust survivor who arrives in Savannah 1947 and must learn what his place in that society can be while still coping with his experience in the camps. Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu is about two women in the aftermath of a different conflict, the breakup of Yugoslavia and the resulting horrors in Bosnia. I’m looking forward to hearing all three of these writers talk about these exceptional novels.

And in addition to these two panels, I’ll be enjoying many others throughout the five days of the festival. Check out the schedule, but I hope to see you at the Library on Wednesday and Friday afternoons.

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