The Virginia Center for the Book is hosting the 2026 Virginia Festival of the Book. Programming begins this Thursday with preview events, and will continue from this Friday, March 20th, through this Sunday, March 22nd. For Arts This Week, we spoke with the director of the Center, Kalela Williams.
The book is part personal narrative, part critique of power structures in America. A.D. Carson is an associate professor of hip-hop and the global South in the University of Virginia’s McIntire Department of Music and a Shannon Center Fellow for Advanced Studies. A member of the UVA faculty since 2017, Carson founded the UVA Rap Lab, a “collaborative hip-hop cypher space” and classroom where students are encouraged to explore their experiences and thoughts through the medium of creating music.
The Puzzle Hunt has nothing to do with puzzles like jigsaw puzzles. Instead, it’s like brain teaser puzzles. So we describe it as part escape room, part scavenger hunt, and it starts at IX Art Park. And basically you go around downtown Charlottesville finding and solving puzzles. Basically, there’s four initial puzzles. So at the beginning of the puzzle hunt will give you the coordinates and the map that you need to find the puzzles. The puzzles are around downtown, and you find them, you solve them
For Women’s History Month this year, librarians at UVA recommend a variety of books written by women, ranging from science fiction to memoir to Greek myths. “Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia Butler” by Susana M. Morris (Amistad, 2025) In tracing the interior world of science fiction legend Octavia E. Butler through her writing, journals, archives, and interviews, Susana M. Morris generates a fascinating character study as well as a gripping story of struggle and persistence set against late-20th-century U.S. cultural history.
On Friday, March 6 through Sunday, March 8, the Shenandoah National Park Trust will host the 11th annual Banff Mountain Film Festival at the Paramount Theater in downtown Charlottesville. For Arts this week, we spoke with Molly Strauchler. My name is Molly Strauchler. I’m the events and volunteer manager at Shenandoah National Park Trust, the official philanthropic partner of Shenandoah National Park, and we host the Banff film festival every year at the Paramount the Banff Film Festival is our largest annual fundraiser, and it is an epic cinematic experience over the course of three days. Each screening shows completely different films every night, and they’re all jam packed full of mountain culture and mountain adventure.
Since 2008, the Library of Congress has hosted a “Conversations with African Poets and Writers Series,” bringing award-winning writers such as Chimamanda Adichie or Abdulrazak Gurnah from across the continent and diaspora to share their work. The latest guest is University of Virginia religious studies professor Oludamini Ogunnaike. A Nigerian American academic and poet, he published his poetry collection, “The Book of Clouds,” in 2024.
This week, thousands of American college students will descend upon beaches across the country, donning swim trunks and bikinis for what has become an annual tradition: spring break. It’s no surprise that today’s swimwear is a far cry from styles of decades past, even if tankinis are making a comeback. UVA Today went to the University of Virginia’s Historic Clothing Collection to explore a century of swim fashion with the collection’s manager, Marcy Linton.
You’re listening to WTJU Charlottesville. For Arts This Week, we spoke with Viviane Silvera about her upcoming film See Memory. See Memory is premiering at the Violet Crown on the Downtown Mall this Wednesday, February 25 at 7pm as part of the Fralin Downtown Film Series.
The University of Virginia Library has six locations, an array of cozy study spaces, millions of items available for checkout or browsing, and new resources arriving each day. And did you know we also offer events throughout the year ranging from exhibitions to concerts for UVA and the Charlottesville community? Join us at the Library this spring for craft workshops, writing and editing support, zine tutorials, and live music. All Library events are free. For a full listing of Library events, check out our public calendar.
The University of Virginia’s oldest collegiate a capella group, the Virginia Gentlemen, traveled to Mexico for five days in January, introducing their music to new audiences. Recognizable in their navy blazers and UVA bow ties, the group regularly engages in cultural exchanges with performances on Grounds and outside of Virginia. In San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, they headlined a performance with the Chorale San Miguel and sang at Centro Educativo Naciones Unidas, an international school.
When she’s not creating new pathways for University of Virginia students to train abroad, Awar Biong is writing poetry and creating embroidery at the New City Arts Initiative in downtown Charlottesville, where she is the fall artist-in-residence. Alongside her full-time role as a coordinator for global health training at UVA’s Center for Global Health Equity, her research residency includes organizing a series of events that examine past and present conflicts in the Sudans and hosting a mending circle for refugee women in Charlottesville.
The idea for the art exhibition first occurred to professor Lise Dobrin in December 2024, after she received an email message from a French anthropologist in Papua New Guinea. Dobrin met Nicolas Garnier, who has lived and worked in the Pacific island nation for over 30 years, during her research trips there. Now Garnier was emailing Dobrin to let her know about a collection of drawings that his villager friends were making. Something special was going on, Dobrin recalled Garnier writing, and he wanted her help sharing these vividly drawn scrolls of artwork with the world.
