Mystery machine: Finish up your summer reading list with a bang during an evening with mystery author Elle Cosimano. She’s got a stack of young-adult thrillers to her name, and the recently published Finlay Donovan Is Killing It is the debut novel in her mystery series for adults. The reading is hosted by Bluebird Books, a sky-blue bookmobile converted from a 1966 Banner camper van.
Saturday 8/28. Free, 5pm. Mudhouse Coffee Crozet, 5793 The Square, Crozet. bluebirdbookstop.com
Winging it: Kenn Kaufman is an extreme birder who’s been at it since the ‘60s, when he dropped out of high school and hit the road in pursuit of feathered creatures. The author, artist, naturalist, and conservationist’s career really took flight when he won 1973’s Big Year birding competition and set the record for most North American bird species spotted in a year. He will virtually discuss his latest book, A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration, with birding photographer and author Pete Myers as part of the Virginia Festival of the Book’s Shelf Life series.
Thursday 2/25, Free, noon. Zoom required. vabook.org.
Serendipity has been a good friend to Brian Noyes, owner of the acclaimed Red Truck Bakery. With locations in Marshall and Warrenton, Virginia, 45 employees, and orders pouring in online, Noyes’ business is better than ever and his homespun image endures, in spite of his enormous success.
He tells the story of that success, and describes his impossible good luck, in the Red Truck Bakery Cookbook: Gold-Standard Recipes from America’s Favorite Rural Bakery, first published in October 2018 and already in its second printing. Noyes is so fortunate, and he drops so many names—including Tommy Hilfiger, who sold him the signature red truck, and John Wayne, who once made him a tuna sandwich—that you kind of want to hate the guy.
But save your hate for someone who deserves it, because Noyes is a sweetheart, a California boy who became a Virginia country gentleman with a taste for the local moonshine that he also uses in some of his recipes. That part of his personality comes through in his storytelling, which is endearing and full of meaning. He frames his recipes with stories of the people, places, and flavors that influenced him, so the book is both autobiographical and instructional.
About that tuna sandwich: Noyes was 19 and working as the art director of a weekly newspaper in California when he stopped by Wayne’s house to return photos that the paper had borrowed for a story. The door opened, and there stood The Duke, who invited Noyes in for lunch. He watched as the actor methodically made the tuna salad—mayo, a pinch of salt, chopped pickles and celery, more mayo—and began building the sandwiches. “Before adding the top slice of toast,” Noyes writes, “he looked right at me, and smashed a fistful of potato chips into the tuna filling, commanding in his drawl, ‘This is why you’ll like this.’”
Noyes still makes tuna sandwiches the same way. More importantly, he writes, “John Wayne’s lesson sticks with me 40 years later: there are no rules.”
Serendipitous? Yes. But the lesson also underpins Noyes’ cooking philosophy: putting a twist on classics and making them his own. For example, instead of the tried-and-true Virginia ham biscuit, he creates ham scones, and his version of skillet cornbread is slathered with pimento cheese frosting.
Before Noyes launched Red Truck Bakery, in 2007, he worked for 30 years as an art director at various magazines, landing finally at The Washington Post. He used his vacation time to attend cooking schools, and to take food-focused road trips all over the South—with his architect husband Dwight McNeill by his side and a beat-up copy of Jan and Michael Stern’s Roadfood in the glovebox. On weekends at home, Noyes cooked and baked. One day in 1997, while he was preparing peach jam for his first-ever entry in the Arlington County Fair, a friend stopped by with some crystallized ginger. A spur-of-the-moment decision to chop some up and throw it into the pot—along with cinnamon, nutmeg, and sugar—resulted in a spicy-sweet jam that won Noyes four awards, including first prize, and the title of grand champion.
Noyes went on to start a small-batch bakery out of the kitchen of his country home, in Orlean, Virginia. He delivered breads, pies, and granola to three small, rural stores in the now-famous red truck (which he bought online, later learning that Hilfiger was the seller), and launched a website to sell his goods.
Some of those goods—fruit pies, quiche, and granola—were served at a 2007 picnic in Rappahannock County attended by The New York Times food writer Marian Burros. Red Truck Bakery ended up leading Burros’ Christmas roundup of her 15 favorite national food purveyors. The day after the story appeared, Noyes’ website traffic skyrocketed from two dozen hits to 57,000 in a single day.
After tasting success, Noyes wanted to establish a bricks-and-mortar location, which he did after a long search with McNeill. The couple redesigned and renovated a 1921 former Esso service station, in Warrenton, opening the bakery on July 31, 2009.
With the nation in the throes of the Great Recession, the timing sucked. But Noyes and his husband and team persevered. After the economy picked up, Noyes sent a thank-you note to then-president Barack Obama in 2016. Obama dispatched a staffer to hand-deliver a note to Noyes, who handed Obama’s man a sweet-potato pecan pie—Noyes’ mash-up of two classics.
On Pi Day, March 14, 2016, Obama posted a lengthy shout-out on Facebook and the White House website, commending Noyes on both his perseverance and his pie. “I like pie. That’s not a state secret…I can confirm that the Red Truck Bakery makes some darn good pie,” Obama wrote.
So, you see, it’s not just about luck. It’s also about perseverance, relentlessly pursuing a dream, and baking goodness into everything you do.
Meet the author
As part of the Virginia Festival of the Book, Brian Noyes will appear at Williams Sonoma at The Shops at Stonefield, from 11am-12:30pm on March 21, for a baking demonstration, discussion, food samples, and a book signing.
From the Red Truck Bakery Cookbook, by Brian Noyes
“My dad was a dessert purist who loved straight-up rhubarb pie, but it was always too one-note and tart for my liking,” Noyes writes. “To sweeten it and incorporate a lightly floral component, I added strawberries brightened with lemon zest, cinnamon, and ginger. They’re the perfect counterpoint. Dad would probably frown upon my version of the pie, but our customers like it this way. Everyone loves seeing it appear on our shelves, if only because each year it marks the first fresh-fruit (or fresh-vegetable, in the case of rhubarb) pie after a long winter.”
Makes one 10-inch pie
Ingredients
3 or 4 stalks fresh rhubarb, sliced on an angle into ¼-inch-wide pieces (2½ cups)
4 cups fresh strawberries (about 2 pints), hulled, halved if large
1¼ cups sugar
½ cup cornstarch
¼ tsp. ground cinnamon
¹⁄8 tsp. ground or freshly grated nutmeg
¹⁄8 tsp. ground ginger
1 tsp. lemon zest
2 tsp. fresh lemon juice
1 recipe Classic Piecrust dough, or
2 store-bought crusts
2 tbsp. unsalted butter, chilled and cubed
1 large egg, whisked with 1 tablespoon water
Vanilla ice cream, for serving (optional)
Method
1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Place a raised wire rack inside a rimmed baking sheet.
2. In a large bowl, combine the rhubarb and the strawberries.
3. In a medium bowl, mix together the sugar, cornstarch, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and lemon zest. Add the sugar mixture to the rhubarb and strawberries and toss to combine. Stir in the lemon juice. Let sit for a few minutes to allow the fruit to release juices.
4. Roll out one disc of pie dough into a 13-inch round and fit it into a 10-inch pie pan, leaving the crust overhanging. Pour the strawberry-rhubarb mixture into the crust and dot the top of the fruit with butter.
5. Roll out the second disc of dough into a roughly 18-by-13-inch rectangle. Cut it crosswise into six 3-by-13-inch strips.
6. Create a lattice crust by laying three strips of dough across the pie horizontally, then laying three strips of dough perpendicularly across them. Weave the top strips of dough over and under those on the bottom. Trim the dough about 2 inches from the pan, and roll and crimp the edges, combining the lattice crust with the dough in the pan. Brush the dough with egg wash.
7. Carefully place the pie on the prepared baking sheet. Bake for 90 minutes, turning after each 30 minutes or until the center is bubbling. Let cool on a raised wire rack.
8. Serve with vanilla ice cream, if desired.
Around the same time Aja Gabel began learning the alphabet, she began playing the violin. As she became more adept at writing, filling “notebooks with stories as kind of a way to play,” she became more skilled at reading and playing music. When she was 10 years old she traded the violin for the cello and continued her studies through graduate school, stopping short of pursuing music as a career.
“I just never had the professional chops,” Gabel says. “I was good but I couldn’t get to that next level. It was always this thing I really loved and wanted to be a part of.” A 2009 graduate of UVA’s creative writing program who now lives in Los Angeles, Gabel says, “The way I became part of it was by writing a novel about it.”
Aja Gabel
New Dominion Bookshop
May 19
That novel is The Ensemble, published this month by Riverhead Books. It details the lives and relationships of Jana, Henry, Brit and Daniel—the central characters who make up the titular string quartet struggling to establish a career together. Gabel first had the idea for the book as a teenager when she took a chamber music seminar led by members of the St. Lawrence String Quartet. Observing them for 10 days, Gabel came away with a strong sense of the interconnection their art required.
“I’d never been around professional players of that caliber that were also like people I would want to be friends with,” she says. “It sort of humanized that world in a way it often isn’t.” And that’s exactly what she sets out to do in The Ensemble: Bring the reader into rehearsals, hotel rooms and the homes of these four interdependent people, and trace the fascia that binds them, as well as the tender secrets they keep from each other.
Jana and Henry share an emotional intimacy and platonic friendship while Brit and Daniel dabble in physical intimacy but struggle to understand each other emotionally. The novel follows the quartet members as their career and relationships evolve and their intimacies with each other deepen.
“It became clear to me they had to have some kind of personal relationship in order to make this professional relationship work,” Gabel says. “And you have to do that for years. It’s not normally the case for any other profession.” She explains, “In a string quartet, the thing you’re doing is so intimate that you end up having these relationships that aren’t necessarily romantic but are some weird breed of closeness.”
She details beautifully in the book the hyperawareness each musician has of the others’ bodies and movements. “You come to know somebody’s physicality very well,” Gabel says, with a depth of knowledge you might not even have about your closest friends. “You have to be able to anticipate, react and respond to their physicality with your own physicality. It’s essential when you’re playing music together,” she says.
Gabel addresses the messiness of life and human relationships, of ambition and personal and professional fulfillment, often drawing on music as metaphor. In one particularly poignant line, Brit questions the phrase “inner harmony” (“How can you harmonize with yourself?”) and Daniel responds: “I don’t know about you, but I contain many pitches. It’s about moving from polyphony to harmony. People are so much music. People don’t recognize that enough.”
It began at a Live Arts callback a few years ago. That’s where Lynn Thorne, a native Virginian who had just moved to Afton, met Jennifer. “We kind of became instant friends, and she shared with me pretty early on that her husband was transgender,” Thorne says.
At the time, Thorne admits, she didn’t really understand what that meant. “[Jennifer] told me what she went through to make her marriage work. I was flabbergasted by her story,” says Thorne. After numerous conversations with Jennifer and her husband, Marc (whose last name is withheld to protect their privacy), Thorne convinced them their story should be a book.
Published last November, Who Am I If You’re Not You? tells the story of one spouse coming to terms with his authentic self as the other spouse loses her grasp of her own identity. While there are many memoirs by and about transgender people that chronicle their transition, Thorne’s book tells the story from Jennifer’s perspective. “There are very few books told from the partner’s side, which I think is important,” Marc says. “They are transitioning too.”
Jennifer had met and fallen in love with a woman. An obedient daughter who always did what was expected of her, it was difficult for Jennifer to come out to her parents, and difficult for them to accept. But Jennifer and her partner married and were happy. Then, one day, her wife showed her a film about being transgender and opened a discussion about it.
Jennifer was shocked to learn her wife identified as transgender. Soon after, she decided to transition, began using he/him/his pronouns and changed his name to Marc.
Thorne describes in the book how Marc “had always felt different,” as a child. She writes from Marc’s perspective, “Maybe the whole world just pretended to feel normal, and that is what normal was: pretending to be something you weren’t.” Even as Jennifer tried to support and honor Marc’s authentic self, watching her soul mate change before her eyes hit her hard. When hormone therapy caused Marc’s voice to deepen, Thorne writes, “Jen couldn’t help feeling as though her spouse had died.” Jennifer felt completely alone and began to self-harm and deny herself food in an attempt to regain a sense of control over her life.
“A lot of people would say that they adapt to the person they’re with,” Thorne says. “So if the person they’re with suddenly changes, where does that leave them?” She says there’s some irony in the book’s title “because as Marc was finding himself Jen was losing herself.” In sharing her story, Jennifer says, “My hope is that there are people who won’t feel as alone as I once did.”
Jennifer sought treatment and ultimately overcame the sense of loss. In the book, Thorne recounts the moment when Jennifer came to see, “We are us, just like we’ve always been.” Thorne says, “She comes to realize [Marc] is still the person she fell in love with. I think that’s what’s key.”
“I feel with all the negativity out in the world right now,” Marc says, “people deserve to hear a story that with hard work, and many ups and downs, a ‘happily ever after’ can happen.” Jennifer agrees. “Each time I tell the story, or read the story of our journey, it becomes less painful, because I know where it leads. I know the ending, and I wouldn’t change that for the world.”
There’s no denying it: Charlottesville is a wordsmith-rich town. Whether you’re looking for a page-turner for the beach, autumnal meditations in the form of poetry, or a fireside companion for a winter’s night, there are enough local writers publishing books each year to keep your shelves well-stocked. Here are some of the titles published by area authors in 2017.
Corban Addison, A Harvest of Thorns
A journalist seeks to expose an American retailer’s culpability in a factory fire in Bangladesh that killed hundreds of workers.
Hannah Barnaby, Garcia & Collette Go Exploring
Two friends go on separate adventures, one into space, one under the sea.
Rita Mae Brown, A Hiss Before Dying
Set in Crozet, two present-day murders point to a mystery dating from the American Revolution.
John Grisham
Camino Island
Diverging from his legal thrillers, Grisham spins a literary mystery, beginning with the disappearance of some F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts.
The Rooster Bar
A return to form, this legal thriller finds three law school friends confronting a moral dilemma as they discover their professional future is in jeopardy.
Jan Karon, To Be Where You Are: A Mitford Novel
Fourteenth in the series, this Mitford novel sees Father Kavanagh into retirement.
BettyJoyce Nash and Deirdra McAfee, Lock & Load: Armed Fiction
This edited anthology centers on the gun in contemporary American short stories.
Anne Marie Pace, Groundhug Day
A groundhog is invited to a Valentine’s Day party but is afraid he’ll see his shadow.
Caroline Preston, The War Bride’s Scrapbook
Through vintage postcards, photographs and historic headlines, Preston weaves a story of love and shifting gender roles during World War II.
Erika Raskin, Best Intentions
This medical thriller, which takes place in Richmond, raises questions about medical practice and social justice.
Sean Rubin, Bolivar
In this beautifully illustrated graphic novel, a dinosaur lives in New York City undetected, mostly.
Shelley Sackier, The Freemason’s Daughter
Told through the eyes of a Scottish lass, this YA historical novel tells the story of the Jacobites.
Kathryn Erskine, Mama Africa!
This book illustrates the life of a South African singer who challenged apartheid.
Khizr Khan, An American Family
Khizr Khan recounts his life as a Muslim American immigrant, Harvard Law School graduate, and husband and father whose son, Humayun, died in the Iraq War in 2004.
Donna M. Lucey, Sargent’s Women
The author reveals the lives of four women who sat for American portraitist John Singer Sargent.
Stefan Bechtel and Laurence Roy Stains, Through a Glass, Darkly
This work explores Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s role in spiritualism and his communications with the dead.
Sharon Harrigan, Playing with Dynamite
A daughter seeks answers to questions surrounding her father’s mysterious death.
Elizabeth Meade Howard, Aging Famously
In this collection of short essays, Howard discusses aging with locals and celebrities.
Lisa Jakub, Not Just Me
Through her own experience and interviews with others, Jakub explores treatment for anxiety.
Joe Junod, INK: A Life in Letters
This memoir recounts the author’s career and experiences in journalism.
Jeff Kamen with Leslie Stone-Kamen, Warrior Pups: True Stories of America’s K9 Heroes
With color photographs, this book tells the stories of the humans and canines in the U.S. Military Working Dog Program.
Beatrix Ost, More Than Everything: My Voyage with the Gods of Love
Beginning in Munich at the end of World War II, this memoir follows the author into a marriage inevitably impacted by war.
Lisa Russ Spaar, Orexia
Spaar explores late-middle age desire in this collection of poetry.
Lynn Thorne, Who Am I, If You’re Not You?
This love story chronicles Jennifer and Marika, and Marika’s decision to transition from female to male.
Brendan Wolfe, Mr. Jefferson’s Telescope
An overdue library book from dropout Edgar Allan Poe and a key in the hands of a freed slave are among the objects that tell the history of the University of Virginia.
Local author and historian Andi Cumbo-Floyd came of age on the Bremo Plantations in Fluvanna County. In central Virginia, “there are plantations everywhere, but we don’t call them that,” says Cumbo-Floyd. “We call them farms or estates.” While she knew “people had been enslaved there,” she says she “didn’t really have an awareness of what that meant.” A college course on Native American cultures opened her eyes. “Suddenly I was aware I had not learned a lot about American history,” she says.
Eager to know more, Cumbo-Floyd took a summer job as an assistant for an anthropologist researching the medical conditions of enslaved people, which allowed her access to UVA’s vast collection of the Cocke family papers—the same Cocke family that established Bremo Plantations in 1808. “It started me on the road,” Cumbo-Floyd says.
Andi Cumbo-Floyd book reading
December 16
Jefferson School African American Heritage Center
On this path, her curiosity intertwined with her love of the written word. She went on to study writing and to teach composition, but when her mother’s health declined, Cumbo-Floyd returned to Bremo Plantations to care for her.
After her mother passed away, Cumbo-Floyd’s father made her a generous offer. She could live with him, all expenses paid, for one year and write a book. “I was able to live at a place where people were enslaved, research at UVA and walk the land where they had been,” Cumbo-Floyd says.
Her father had been the manager of the land for more than 20 years by that point, and he was able to point out its history, such as where the slave quarters had been. Cumbo-Floyd spent her year there getting reacquainted with the physical space, learning the history and healing from the loss of her mother.
The result was a work of creative nonfiction, The Slaves Have Names: Ancestors of My Home, published in 2013. But Cumbo-Floyd learned in the process of writing it, “There are real limits to [creative nonfiction] in writing the history of enslaved people. There’s not a lot of data.”
For this reason, she turned next to historical fiction, and also to a young adult readership. The exploration of Bremo Plantations as a teenager manifested as a (thus far) two-part young adult fiction series called The Steele Secrets, which centers on protagonist Mary Steele, who has the supernatural ability to materialize in unexpected places and to see ghosts.
In the first book, which was published in 2015 and shares the series title, Mary finds herself in a cemetery where she uncovers the hidden history of her town. In the second book, Charlotte and the Twelve, published last year, Mary materializes at a Rosenwald School—historically significant schools constructed for African-American children in the South from 1917 to 1932 as part of a collaboration between Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and Company. In the story, Mary meets the ghost of a teacher named Charlotte, as well as her 12 deceased students, and learns they were murdered. “It turns out it was a racially related crime that has present-day ramifications in 2017, when the book is set,” Cumbo-Floyd says.
Her book’s relevance to current discussions about history and racism in Charlottesville isn’t lost on Cumbo-Floyd. She still hasn’t processed the white supremacist rallies and violence of the summer, but, she says, “In relation to my work it just reminds me that…as hard as it is to write these stories, it’s really important.” Further, says Cumbo-Floyd, “I’m privileged to be able to write these stories through my education and my white skin. I want to be sure I honor that and do it justice.”
‘‘My book came out last year a week before the presidential elections,” says Madeline Iva, author of the fantasy romance Wicked Apprentice. “What I came away with, standing in the blasted devastation of our liberal democratic psyche, was that I’d just written a book about a woman who ends up holding all the power—and people are very nervous about it.”
The experience inspired Iva’s upcoming panel, Queens of the Damned: Women Who Write Horror, Fantasy and Paranormal Fiction, and she will lead a discussion October 28 at Barnes & Noble on how women are challenging and changing genre fiction.
“The title of this panel references that post-election moment,” Iva says. “I have to keep writing that kind of book. Young women need to see and hear about women having power, being comfortable with it, and everyone else not freaking out.”
Whether carving a path in a male-dominated industry or beating the odds to actually publish and attract readers, these women prove the power of positive action in publishing.
Elizabeth Massie, Desper Hollow
“Horror is often thought of as a ‘guy’s genre.’ It’s edgy, gritty, scary and sometimes no-holds-barred graphic,” says the two-time Bram Stoker Award winner. “I don’t begrudge my male horror writer counterparts any recognition they have rightly earned—that would be sexist. But I do know woman horror writers have a ways to go.”
Shawnee Small, The Night Kind series
“I was a goth for over 20 years, both here in Charlottesville when I did my English literature degree at UVA in the early ’90s, and also later, when I lived abroad in the U.K. during my 20s and 30s. As a fantasy author, I decided from the onset that I wasn’t going to hide my gender behind a pen name, for better or worse. …Women are still told that we’re being silly, and that our feelings are over-exaggerated, or just plain wrong. I say don’t listen. Stand by your convictions and don’t be afraid to go against what everyone else says. That’s how revolutions are started.”
Mary Behre, Tidewater series
“I had 42 agents turn down the first book in my award-winning series,” Behre says. They feared they wouldn’t be able to sell the book, which she’d written because “I’d always wanted to read books about ghosts that did more than creak the floorboards or move a lamp.” She went on to sell a two-book deal and sign contracts for more.
S.A. Hunter, Scary Mary series
Hunter writes about a high school girl who hears ghosts and wishes they’d shut up. Welcomed into the community by local romance writers, the Charlottesville-based, self-published author says that “being paid and praised for my writing is still amazing to me.”
Jodi Meadows, Before She Ignites
“I think fondly of the authors whose books I read as a teen, whose books showed me that fantastic adventures weren’t just for boys, and I want to carry on that tradition.” Meadows’ latest includes dragons, politics and a girl who did the right thing and was punished for it. “Now, as someone whose books are getting bigger, it’s my job to make sure that path includes space for marginalized authors, whose voices have been silenced throughout history.”
Tina Glasneck, Dragon’s Awakening, part of the Through the Never anthology
“Representation of different colors, beliefs and backgrounds [as a few examples] matter in fiction,” Glasneck says. “I truly believe that books help people grow. Minds are changed through great storytelling. …To me, when we stop reading, we also, as a culture, stop thinking and growing.”
Kathryn Erskine has lived in the Netherlands, Israel, South Africa, Scotland and Newfoundland, but she has called Charlottesville home for the last 14 years. This month marks the release of Erskine’s first picture book, Mama Africa! How Miriam Makeba Spread Hope with Her Song, and her sixth middle-grade novel, The Incredible Magic of Being. Though written in two different genres and originating on two different continents, the books manifest a unifying intention: to empower young people.
Erskine first learned of singer and civil rights activist Miriam Makeba, the subject of Mama Africa!, a picture book biography, while living in South Africa as the daughter of an American diplomat. “That’s the first country I remember as being home,” Erskine says of her 5-year-old self. When she began school, she thought all of the native South African children must be sick because she only saw white children attending her school. “That’s when my mom had to explain apartheid to me,” she recalls. “I knew my mother didn’t like it but that she was powerless. And that was a really scary thought because at that age you expect parents to be able to fix everything.”
One thing her mother could do was play the banned music of Miriam Makeba. Erskine says, “It was just a great sense of empowerment that as a girl or a woman you had a voice even when people said you didn’t.” Erskine purposefully chose a picture book format to chronicle Makeba’s life of combatting injustice because, she says, “I really wanted to make it approachable to kids. I wanted young kids to feel empowered—sort of like I did as a kid—that you do have a voice and that your voice and your song is important and powerful.”
In The Incredible Magic of Being, Erskine strives to connect young readers to own their distinct voice. In the case of 9-year-old protagonist Julian, that voice may be a nerdy one, and that’s just fine. The novel follows Julian and his family as they move from Washington, D.C., to Maine, and Julian thrills at the idea of exploring the universe through his telescope without the interference of light pollution. “I think kids are smart and curious and I want them to know that’s okay,” Erskine says. “It’s a great thing to be curious, even if people make fun of you. Just keep going because there will be people who appreciate that and you will get so much out of life if you live it the way you want and find out as much as you can.”
An inquisitive child herself, Erskine says she often didn’t verbalize her questions “because I thought people would think I was too weird.” But now she says, “It’s okay to just come right out and talk about parallel universes and how you might have a separate family in another universe, or you might have friends that cross over that barrier.”
These are the kinds of questions she allows herself to ask through the voice of Julian. Something he considers in the novel is the possibility that, as he was being born and his grandfather was dying, they passed each other in the cosmos and his grandfather communicated with him. The jacket of the book, which features a marshmallow aflame in a starlit sky, references one of the things his grandfather told him: “Don’t burn your marshmallows!”
But there’s another reason for the marshmallow. “I’ve learned to put in food that I like so that when I go visit some place and they want to put out the food in the book, it’s something I like to eat,” Erskine laughs. “I learned that with Mockingbird,” she says of her 2010 National Book Award winner. “I really don’t like gummy worms.” And that’s okay, too.
An opponent of Apartheid, singer Miriam Makeba was exiled from her native South Africa in 1960 when her passport was revoked. With the help of Harry Belafonte she came to the United States and continued her career. She won a Grammy in 1965, traveled with Paul Simon’s Graceland tour in the ’80s and starred in Sarafina! with Whoopi Goldberg in the ’90s. Through the years she resided in France, Guinea and Belgium, and finally returned to Johannesburg in 1990.