W&L English Professors to Read at the Virginia Festival of the Book
Four members of Washington and Lee’s English Department will be featured at the 19th Annual Virginia Festival of the Book, produced by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. R.T. Smith, Deborah Miranda, Lesley Wheeler and Laura Brodie will give readings this week in Charlottesville. The sessions are free and open to the public.
The festival, which takes place March 20-24, is held in venues throughout Charlottesville and Albemarle County, and is now the largest educational book event in the mid-Atlantic, drawing a cumulative annual attendance of more than 20,000. Full details on the five-day festival are available at vabook.org.
Brodie, a visiting professor at W&L, will be reading at 12 p.m. on Thursday, March 21, at the Barnes and Noble in the Barracks Road Shopping Center. Her session is “Fiction: Hauntings,” and she will read from her most recent book, “All the Truth.” Her other books are “Love in a Time of Homeschooling” and “The Widow’s Season.”
Miranda, associate professor of English, presents on Thursday, March 21, at 2 p.m., at the City Council Chambers, 605 E. Main St. She will take part in the “Poetry: Song and Poetry from the Indigenous Americas” session. Her new book is “Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir.”
Smith, Washington and Lee writer-in-residence and editor of Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review, will read at 4 p.m. on Friday, March 22, at the New Dominion Bookshop on the Downtown Mall. The session is called “Short Fiction: Tales of Longing, Violence and Romance.” Smith will read from his fourth collection of fiction, “Sherburne,” a book of linked crime stories set in the Virginia Highlands.
Wheeler, the Henry S. Fox Professor of English, will give a reading at 4 p.m. on Friday, March 22, at the Barnes and Noble in the Barracks Road Shopping Center. Her session is “Poetry: Original Stories,” and she will read from her most recent book, “The Receptionist and Other Tales” (2012) and from “Heterotopia” (2010), which won the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize.
The president of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities is Rob Vaughan, a member of Washington and Lee’s Class of 1966.
