Tag: Virginia Festival of the Book

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 Hill Edwards’ dissertation evolved over the next 12 years into her first book, Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina. 

“As I transitioned out of grad school into being a professor, the question of capitalism kept coming up, especially among historians of slavery, and I saw that there was a way for me to speak to this literature on the rise of American capitalism perhaps in a different way, focusing on the experiences of the enslaved,” says Hill Edwards, a UVA assistant professor and scholar of African American history. 

Records of enslaved men and women participating in the market appeared in legal and legislative documents, account books of slaveholders, and first-person narratives from runaway slaves. Based on this archival research, Unfree Markets examines the ways in which enslaved people engaged with the economy—and how slaveholders were able to capitalize on these ventures by allowing them to happen. 

Hill Edwards’ book focuses on South Carolina, but she says there is evidence that Virginia’s enslaved men and women also took part in the same kinds of economic enterprises. Between 1820 and 1860, enslaved laborers traded with students at UVA and made money doing “odd jobs” for students and faculty, Hill Edwards says. 

Hill Edwards hopes to challenge readers’ understanding of the relationship between freedom and capitalism, and make them think about how capitalism affects their own lives and society. 

“Especially in the American context, we often think that democracy and capitalism and freedom kind of go together necessarily, but if we look at those topics through the lens, through the experiences of the enslaved, I think that we get a different understanding of what that relationship was,” she says. 

Justene Hill Edwards discusses her work at Lives of the Unfree: Activism and Survival, along with Vanessa M. Holden (Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community) at UVA Bookstore on March 16 at 4pm.

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 brew her own beer.

Whether Martha was correct is lost to history. But the presumption itself is all too common. While women have been at the forefront of beer brewing for centuries, they have never received the credit they deserve.

Tara Nurin, a journalist and writer (who reported for Charlottes­ville’s WVIR years ago), is out to change that. The note about TJ’s granddaughter shows up in her book, A Woman’s Place is in the Brewhouse: A Forgotten History of Alewives, Brewsters, Witches and CEOs. In it, Turin tracks the history of beer through the glasses of women going back to the beginnings of the beverage.

“As divisions of labor formed along gender lines, perhaps with the gradual development of tools for hunting large game and weapons for fighting foreign clans…beer making fell to the women,” Nurin writes in the book, which will be featured in a virtual discussion and tasting on March 18.

Libby Roether, innovation brewmaster at Devils Backbone Brewing Co., will host a virtual tasting of four beers brewed with women in mind: All Dolled Up, an aperitivo-style spritz ale, Suffragette Sour, Bomba Ass Queen pale ale, and Equal Pay IPA. Folks who want to sip along can pick up a Bounce Box of brews at the DB brewery off 151 in Roseland.

Roether, who’s read A Woman’s Place is in the Brewhouse twice, will also participate in the discussion.

“There are so many women that are mentioned in the book that I know, and for a lot of these women, I didn’t even know all of their amazing accomplishments,” she says. “Every chapter, I was surprised by the history and the way everything evolved.”

At its heart, Nurin’s book is about inequality. Women have invariably been replaced in the modern beer consciousness, not to mention the history books, by men. From Suzanne Stern, who co-founded famed craft brew trailblazer New Albion Brewing Company but was shoved from the spotlight by the surly Jack McAuliffe, to women like Roether, who all too often cede recognition to the burly bearded brewers of today, circumstances have conspired to keep women out of craft beer’s halo. 

And while that’s not right, Nurin thinks things may be changing.

“With craft brewing, we are finally seeing a reversal and women reentering the industry,” she says. “The more women who do reenter the industry, the more accepted and mainstream women being in beer will be. And I think that will encourage other women to get into beer and break down some of these stereotypes that Libby hears all the time, like ‘do you know anything about beer?’ That is just the beginning of misogyny.”

Tara Nurin will discuss her book, A Woman’s Place is in the Brewhouse: A Forgotten History of Alewives, Brewsters, Witches and CEOs, with Devils Backbone Brewing Co. brewmaster Libby Roether at Reading Under the Influence, a virtual discussion held on March 18 at 8pm.

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 choice with extra servings of potatoes, pasta, and, of course, cabbage when I came for dinner.” 

Rust Belt Vegan Kitchen takes culinary favorites and staples of the Rust Belt and makes them accessible for vegans. A true community effort, the cookbook features recipes and stories from home chefs and professionals, including Dave Huffman of “Bitchy Vegan Homo” and Dustin Vanderburg of Vegan in the Hood. Inside, you’ll find recipes for desserts, hearty casseroles, party food favorites, and renowned regional dishes, including Cleveland-style Polish boys, Chicago deep dish pizza, Detroit-style coney dogs, Cincinnati chili, and more. 

“More than anything, this book is not going to criticize you for whatever choices you make in your diet,” writes Pangrace. “It will encourage you to open your mind and enter the Rust Belt Vegan Kitchen. Trust us, it’s a delicious place to be.” 

Pangrace shares a cooking demo of one of the recipes from this community cookbook of Rust Belt culinary favorites, updated for today’s vegan diet.  

Making Sense of the World, Making Sense of Ourselves: Graphic Memoirs

March 20, noon | Virtual event

Laura Gao was born in Wuhan, China. When she was 3 years old, she and her family immigrated to a small town in Texas. No one had heard of Wuhan. Until 2020, when COVID hit. “What used to be innocent confusion has been replaced with disgust and pity. However, I’m done hiding away this time,” writes Gao in her viral web comic, “The Wuhan I Know,” which addresses anti-Asian racism and gives insight into the culture, people, and history that she knows and loves. 

Messy Roots is Gao’s debut book—a coming-of-age graphic memoir that explores her identity as an Asian American and queer person, and gives readers an intimate, personal look at her hometown after it became famous for all the wrong reasons. Gao illustrates Wuhan with shades of buttery yellow, glowing orange, and earthy green—a stark contrast to the washed out browns of her Texas or the calm blues of San Francisco.  “This is the Wuhan I knew. Infinite rice paddies…peaceful lily pad ponds…and my cousins and me, with no internet and too much energy.”

Gao and author Courtney Cook (The Way She Feels: My Life on the Borderline in Pictures and Pieces) explore how growing up and living life is hard enough, let alone with the added spotlight of a pandemic or the effects of borderline personality disorder.

Secrets, Sisters, and Spies

March 18, 7pm | Jefferson School African American Heritage Center

Kellye Garrett is a pro at brainstorming ways to commit murder. The crime writer worked in Hollywood for eight years, writing for the CBS drama “Cold Case” and observing all the interesting personalities that flock to the movie capital of America. 

Garrett’s writing has a captivating cinematic quality. Her Detective by Day series is humorous and light, filled with fun characters and fast-paced mysteries that make for a perfect weekend read. Her new novel, Like a Sister, is a darker whodunit, set in the modern world of social media influencers and reality TV stars.

Desiree Pierce, a disgraced reality TV star, is found dead on a playground in the Bronx. The police and media call it an overdose and leave it at that, not interested in looking any further into the death of a Black woman. Desiree’s estranged half-sister, Lena Scott, knows something isn’t right, and embarks on a dangerous journey to uncover the truth. Garrett deftly examines race, class, and gender in this authentic story about family, fame, and sisterhood. 

Join mystery authors Garrett, Naomi Hirahara (Clark and Division), and Alma Katsu (Red Widow) in person as they share their latest work. Each novel reveals different facets of American culture, and the heroines work to solve inexplicable deaths and long-hidden secrets.

Bodies in Space & Time: Identity in Sci-Fi & Speculative Fiction

March 19, 2pm | Virtual event

“One of my favorite types of writing is magical realism,” says author Ryka Aoki. “Others may have their definitions, but for me, magical realism is a style that highlights what is sublime about everyday living—then enhances it with a bit of magic or religion or even the stuff of nightmares.” 

In Aoki’s Light from Uncommon Stars, the mundane is made magical and the possibilities are endless. It’s a story about queer love, making deals with the devil, and alien donut makers. Shizuka Satomi is a renowned violin teacher who made a bargain to deliver seven souls to hell. She’s got one more left, and time is running out. Katrina Nguyen is a young trans runaway who finally made it to Los Angeles and escaped her violent father. Lan Tran is an alien refugee who runs a donut shop. These three lives collide in a story that’s both fantastically fun and staggeringly real in its depictions of transphobia, racism, and violence. Aoki’s deeply moving writing invites readers to understand the power of found families, music, and delicious donuts. 

Aoki, Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds), and Lincoln Michel (The Body Scout) discuss the explorations of race, gender, and identity posed in their science fiction and speculative fiction.

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 in their crowns. A career biologist and forest ecologist, Lowman has earned the nickname “Canopy Meg” for her pioneering work using hot air balloons, drones, and rope walkways to study this previously inaccessible world. Much like Dr. Suzanne Simard, whose research in the forests of British Columbia helped uncover the fungal-based ecosystems beneath the trees, Lowman’s work reveals the rich biodiversity in the treetops.

“We only see the part of a tree that’s near us,” she says. “We don’t see what’s in the top of the tree—about half of the species in the world live only in the forest canopy—until we cut it down.” Lowman has written several popular science books about the forest canopy (because “trees don’t have a voice,” she notes). But she hopes her latest book, the autobiographical The Arbornaut: A Life Discovering the Eighth Continent in the Trees Above Us, will also reach and inspire girls to follow careers in science and ecology. For that reason, Lowman says, she deliberately ended the book on a note of hope. We can learn to value and preserve our forests, she believes, “and find ways to translate our knowledge into positive action.”

In Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet, John W. Reid takes a more global approach, bringing in his own background in environmental economics and policy. Reid and his co-author, noted biologist Thomas E. Lovejoy, had been discussing for years how the Earth’s great mega forests—in Siberia, North America, the Amazon, the Congo, and New Guinea—needed to be managed as individual ecosystems. Reid “was frustrated at economics not knowing how to value these big forests—it can only value things as products in a market, by taking them apart.” In 2019, Reid and Lovejoy co-authored a New York Times op-ed that developed into this book.

Reid is careful to say that the mega forests “are not more important than the forests out your back door.” But these large, continuous expanses have an outsize influence on water cycles, carbon cycles, weather and climate, biodiversity, and wildlife migratory patterns. And, as one of the last places for surviving indigenous peoples, they are “a template for us to learn how to live with our environment.”

Moderator Michelle Nijhuis, an environmental and science journalist (as her website says, “writing about humans and other species”), will help these two authors explore their common themes, as well as the threats—biological and human—to our forests. In Reid’s words, “it’s a truism that you love what you know. But it’s a truism because it’s true. There’s different ways of knowing; being there is the most powerful,” but he cites the examples of Jacques Cousteau and popular nature programs in exposing the wider public to the world’s wonders. Lowman mentions Jane Goodall in the same way, as someone who has drawn the natural and human worlds closer.

Perhaps the well-known saying should be re-written: You can’t save the forest unless you see the trees.

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 A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through a Real and Imagined Literary Landscape, which explores the Magnolia State’s rich legacy of literary greats, from William Faulkner and Eudora Welty to Richard Wright and Jesmyn Ward. “It is the beauty of the land mixed with the state’s complex history that inspires and perplexes its writers,” he says.

Eubanks will be joined by Birmingham-born Imani Perry, professor of African American studies at Princeton. Perry journeyed south to consider the region with fresh eyes in her book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation.

And panelist Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, a Charlottesville resident, sets her acclaimed short story collection, My Monticello, in a central Virginia landscape very familiar to local residents.

Panel moderator Justin Reid, Virginia Humanities director of community initiatives, notes the panel’s commonalities: “Our experiences being Black in the South, loving a place that doesn’t always love you back, and being protective of it.”

Another theme: that the racism and poverty attributed to the South are symptoms of the entire nation.

Eubanks was born in the Piney Woods coastal plains of Mississippi, and he’s written two memoirs, including Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi’s Dark Past, which Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley called one of the best nonfiction books of 2003.

His career spans publishing—the Library of Congress’ director of publishing and a stint as editor of Virginia Quarterly Review—academia, and journalism. He’s currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. And yet, there’s always Mississippi. 

“What I realized in returning was how much of my imagination was threaded together in Mississippi, so much so that it affected the way I looked at the entire world,” he writes. The book’s title refers to a quote often attributed to Faulkner: “To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.”

His latest book documents the many, many Mississippi writers—far more than you might have realized—and their regions of the state. National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward describes the Gulf Coast humidity as “a warm embrace,” and says the area “helps me keep a sense of urgency in my work.” She hopes at least one of her children will remain in a place “that I love more than I loathe.”

Perry’s ancestors never left Alabama. She’s a scholar of law, and literary and cultural studies, studied at Yale, Harvard, and Georgetown, grew up in Cambridge and now lives in Philadelphia, but considers Alabama a core part of her identity. 

She says the most virulent racism she experienced was in Boston during school busing.

Perry sees the South as scapegoated. “This country was made with the shame of slavery, poverty, and White supremacy blazoned across it as a badge of dishonor. To sustain a heroic self-concept, it has inevitably been deemed necessary to distance ‘America’ from the embarrassment over this truth. And so the South, the seat of race in the United States, was turned on, out, and into this country’s gully,” she writes.

In “My Monticello,” Johnson’s protagonist is a UVA student and descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings who flees violent white supremacists in a JAUNT bus to Monticello. Johnson was in Charlottesville during August 2017, and the novella “absolutely was influenced by August 12,” she says.

Her story “Control Negro” was a reaction to ABC officers slamming a Black UVA student to the ground on the Corner in 2015, an incident that made her realize, “That could be my kid or someone I knew.” 

“I think for Charlottesville audiences, there’s a lot that will resonate with what we’re grappling with now—outside perceptions of us and the stories we tell ourselves that don’t exactly align,” says Reid.

Charlottesville’s former mayor Nikuyah Walker and vice-mayor Holly Edwards both have referred to the city as a “beautiful ugly” place, which Reid says is something a lot of Black southerners understand. “I see beauty and ugliness,” says Reid. “It’s not one or the other.”

At this event, that description is not just applicable to the South. “Beautiful ugly” is an American story.

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 Rings of Power” was announced, the showrunners weathered a barrage of complaints that racial diversity was inauthentic to Tolkien’s made-up world.) 

Traci Chee is part of a new generation of writers changing the landscape of the genre. Her latest young adult novel, A Thousand Steps Into Night, takes place in the Japanese-influenced world of Awara, and follows an ordinary girl, Miuko, as she embarks on a quest to reverse a curse that transforms her into a demon. It’s a fun story full of magic, demons, and adventure that also invites reflection on real-world problems. 

“One of my favorite parts about writing fantasy is that you can pull together a lot of different inspirations and creative impulses,” says Chee. “[It’s] both a fun folk-tale road trip through a Japanese-influenced fantasy world populated by all manner of demons and spirits, and also an interrogation of American patriarchy and the many insidious ways that sexism manifests in our everyday lives, from microaggressions to social ostracization to violence.”

Dreaming up a whole new world wasn’t enough for Chee—she took things a step further by creating her own original folklore and language. She developed a syllabary, glossary, and basic grammar for the language of Awara, which includes gender-neutral pronouns (hei/heisu). As for the folklore, Chee was inspired by the Japanese children’s stories of her childhood. “I had so much fun daydreaming up bits of humble magic—like tree goblins that live in wood beams and shapeshifting magpie spirits obsessed with shiny things,” says Chee. “My favorite creature is actually one that almost got cut!” The tskemyorona, or heebie-jeebie spirit, is a centipede-like creature with fireflies for eyes. If you just got a chill up your spine—sorry! 

A Thousand Steps Into Night is fantasy for the young adults of today—and everyone else who reads YA (it’s never too late to start). It’s dark yet playful, creative, and takes readers along on Miuko’s journey of self-discovery, transformation, and growth. “I think there’s something so compelling about being a teenager—it’s such a fascinating time, when you’re figuring out so much about yourself and about the world and about who you want to be and what kind of a world you want to make,” says Chee. “What a privilege to be able to write about that.”

Chee will discuss A Thousand Steps Into Night on March 16 at 7pm, and her acclaimed novel, We Are Not Free, on March 17 at 7pm. Both events take place at the Irving Theater in the CODE building. More information at vabook.org.

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, documenting the uncontested power of the “gods in white coats” and the decades of ignoring—and exploiting—Black Virginians. Jones will discuss his work, along with two other panelists, at the book fest’s Fighting for Justice: When Our Institutions Do Not Serve event.

The Organ Thieves opens with Richmond attorney L. Douglas Wilder (who later became Virginia’s first Black governor) being hired by William Tucker to find out why the body of his brother Bruce, who had gone to the MCV emergency room with a head injury that proved fatal, was missing his heart. From there, Jones unravels how white privilege, human hubris, and Virginia’s long history of using Black bodies for “scientific advancement” ignored one man’s rights and his family’s heartbreak. The story sheds light on why many in the Black community today still distrust the white medical establishment. “This is a book about ethics,” says Jones, “and about how there has to be someone who says, ‘No, this is wrong.’”

The session’s moderator, Kristen Green, has examined injustice with both a reporter’s clarity and a personal perspective: Her book, Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County, recounts how the Virginia community where Green grew up closed its public schools to avoid desegregating them.

Dr. Benjamin Gilmer took on injustice himself, and the story of that battle enthralled more than 15 million listeners on a recent episode of NPR’s “This American Life.” In his book The Other Dr. Gilmer: Two Men, A Murder, and an Unlikely Fight for Justice, two coincidences—Gilmer’s last name and his training in neurobiology—lead him into a 12-year fight to right the wrongs done to one man by the justice system, the prison system, and our society’s misunderstanding of mental illness.

When a small North Carolina family practice hired Gilmer to replace Dr. Vince Gilmer (imprisoned after confessing to a gruesome patricide), he found a community still confused by the inexplicable actions of a man they had respected. Ben suspected Vince might have been misdiagnosed and sent to prison rather than to psychiatric care, and once experts confirmed Ben’s suspicions, he found our institutions—and the people who run them—were reluctant to correct their mistakes.

“I didn’t understand these institutions [when I first got involved],” Ben says. “Law enforcement and the incarceration system are designed to punish, not to treat.” He says once Vince was correctly diagnosed, “I was naively hopeful to have the [prison] sentence reversed—and the exact opposite happened.” It took 10 years, with the help of NPR journalist Sarah Koenig, and this book to get Vince transferred to a psychiatric facility for treatment.

Why would Ben Gilmer take up the fight for a man he didn’t know and had never met? He cites his upbringing, his stint as a Schweitzer fellow in West Africa, and his commitment as a physician. More simply, once he was drawn in, he says, “I couldn’t just walk away.”