The first thing you may notice about Jim Coan’s intimate class is that every student is writing. No one is typing on a laptop or tablet. No phones are out. It’s very analog. The professor of psychology is in his 20th year at the University of Virginia, and his teaching style has undergone a complete makeover.
A broad cross-section of artists, cultural workers, and community leaders has been selected to serve on the Steering Committee for the Charlottesville Area Arts Council planning project. The Steering Committee will guide the community-driven process to explore the creation of a future Arts Council for the Charlottesville area. Their role is to provide insight, ensure broad community perspectives are represented, and co-create recommendations for how a future Arts Council can equitably serve the city’s diverse arts and culture ecosystem. The committee members were chosen from a pool of 59 applications submitted by local artists, organizers, educators, administrators, and community supporters.
Chet’la Sebree is the author of Blue Opening, a poetry collection published earlier this month, as well as Field Study, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and other work. She is an assistant professor at George Washington University and teaches in Randolph College’s low-residency MFA program. She spoke to C-VILLE about her new book, its themes of chronic illness and the body, and what it’s like to care for self and others in this moment.
A library is home to a host of books, yes, but also artifacts, objects and even movies. The University of Virginia Library’s collection is no different. It contains everything from the earliest printed materials to the Tibetan Book of the Dead to student-made advertisements for something called the “experimental university.” These items, along with roughly 200 others, will be on display for a yearlong exhibition, “The ABCs of the UVA Library,” hosted in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, as well as the Shannon, Clemons, Fiske Kimball Fine Arts, and Charles L. Brown Science & Engineering libraries. The exhibition opens Wednesday, two days after Leo Lo, the new University librarian and dean of libraries, steps into his role.
Commerce Street Books — in business since June 28 — hopes to pull its customers both closer to literature and closer to one another. The independent bookstore was founded by Class of 2015 alumnus Philip Lorish, who hopes to support what he calls the “practice of reading” in the Charlottesville community.
For decades, the books were believed lost, numbering among the pieces of University of Virginia history that fell victim to the 1895 Rotunda fire. Then Amanda Greenwood, an archivist in the University’s Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, discovered centuries-old medical and anatomical texts.
After earning his doctorate in religious studies from the University of Virginia’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, Philip Lorish’s path hasn’t been a traditional one. He first worked as a consultant for startups looking for insight into the intersection of technology and ethics, then decided to pursue his dream of opening an independent bookstore in Charlottesville.
University of Virginia professor Deborah Parker has been awarded the 2025 Mary Lynn Kotz Art in Literature Award for her book Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian Through Her Letters. Presented by the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the award honors outstanding literary works inspired by art and recognizes excellence in both creative and scholarly writing.
Dr. A.D. Carson, award-winning rapper, performance artist, and Associate Professor of Hip-Hop at the University of Virginia, announces that his forthcoming book, Being Dope, is officially available for preorder from Oxford University Press, with a global publication date set for November 19, 2025.
In his newest book, UVA religious studies professor Charles Marsh explores the ways in which his Christian upbringing affected his mental health. For years he suffered from panic attacks and depression, but “we did not do therapy—my family, my particular evangelical coterie,” he writes. With vulnerability and humor, Marsh explains how he finally sought mental health treatment.
When he picked up the phone, University of Virginia English professor and author Bruce Holsinger expected to hear his publicist’s voice. Instead, he heard the instantly recognizable voice of Oprah Winfrey. “Your publicist is not calling you. She set you up, Bruce. I’m calling about ‘Culpability,’ and I want to choose it as my summer read for 2025,” Winfrey said in their phone conversation she recorded and posted to Instagram.
For Disability Pride Month 2025 — marking the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) — Carla Arton, Keith Weimer, Erin Dickey, Christine Ruotolo, and Bethany Mickel from the UVA Library are proud to spotlight a selection of works that have made the journey from page to screen, offering powerful representations of disability in both written and visual forms. This year’s theme — “adaptation” — invites us to reflect on how stories of disability are told, retold, and transformed when moving from text to film.
