In a self-titled “journey through books,” writer Jesse Ball treated listeners to some of his most beloved original and non-original pieces in an event hosted by the University’s Creative Writing Program.
Ben Sloan, Charlottesville resident and English professor who has taught at Piedmont Virginia Community College and the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women, recently published his second book, entitled “Then On Out Into a Cloudless Sky.” The collection of poetry — depicting stories of childhood memories, longing for connection and many more — draws inspiration from the experiences of others, including his own students.
Tim Longo, whose official title is associate vice president for safety and security and chief of police, is substantially older than 10. But on Monday, he took an audience gathered in the Rotunda Dome Room back several decades, spinning a yarn about the time he ran for the office of “assembly coordinator,” or the “guy that gets to call the shots for the assemblies.”
Every Thursday evening in the belly of Brooks Hall sits a collection of poets, creatives and arts enthusiasts that make up Flux, the University’s student-led poetry and spoken word organization.
A great book collection doesn’t assemble itself. It requires a person with a singular focus, a discerning eye, and a bibliophile’s unwavering devotion. Josephine Lea Iselin, a retired attorney who practiced law for 35 years and was a partner in the New York law firm of Lankenau Kovner Kurtz & Outten, specialized in intellectual property, litigation, and trusts and estates. She also assembled, over the course of many years, one of the finest collections of 19th-century French and English caricature and graphic humor in private hands, and one that would be almost impossible to duplicate today.
Rita Dove taught Safiya Sinclair that “it’s OK to say a thing plainly.”
From David Baldacci’s latest thriller to the history of nurses, University of Virginia faculty and alumni published a range of books last semester. Here’s a selection of what they’ve written or edited that might appeal to a range of readers, with information from publishers and reviewers.
Live Arts Theater announces two nights of theater and poetry at Vault Virginia this December. The Live Arts Playwrights’ Lab presents a staged reading of local playwright John Paul Mandryk’s new play When Liberty Is Sieged at 7:30pm on Monday, December 5, and the next POETRY LIVE! showcase is hosted by local poet James Cole at 7pm on Sunday, December 11. Both events will be presented at Vault Virginia, 300 E Main Street, in Charlottesville. To enter Vault Virginia, audience members should use the door on Third Street SE.
Virginia Humanities announced that Kalela Williams is serving as the new Director of the Virginia Center for the Book. The Virginia Center for the Book, an affiliate of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, works across the Commonwealth to unite communities of readers, writers, artists, and book lovers. It is the home of the Virginia Festival of the Book, which happens every year in March, as well as a book arts studio located in Charlottesville’s Jefferson School City Center.
It’s a life cycle familiar to many. A young couple marries. They grow their family by adding a pooch to the homestead and Fido becomes the center of attention. He may even make an appearance on the family holiday card, bookended by his adoring “mom and dad.” A few years later, husband and wife muster the courage to have an actual child and then comes the question: How to introduce the fur baby to the human baby? An alumna answers this question in her new book.
We are excited to announce that Rabih Alameddine, UVA’s Kapnick Foundation Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, has been selected as the winner of the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his novel The Wrong End of the Telescope (Grove Atlantic). “This year’s judges have done the seemingly impossible,” said Louis Bayard, PEN/Faulkner Awards Committee Chair. “They have found a ‘first among equals’ in a diverse slate of five extraordinary titles. We look forward to celebrating Rabih Allameddine’s exquisite novel, as well as the enduring work of his fellow finalists.”
Specificity is the anchor of poetry as we write it now. Who can forget—or is allowed to forget—William Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrow? We may believe that love is a major concept and value and thus should be celebrated in poems, but we also know that abstractions are not all that vivid or useful in poetry. Behind every personal experience that we might label “love,” there is a specificity to be seized by language and put in a poem. That is: There is a who (or what), a where, and a when—the basics of context, the beginnings of story. What follows is an exercise in developing specificity of context and storytelling.
