Virginia Festival of the Book
Website
As you probably have noticed, Iris is a Charlottesville, Virginia-based magazine, and we also happen to be bibliophiles. Therefore, we get excited every year to enjoy the fabulous Virginia Festival of the Book! The festival, this year from March 18-22, brings together writers, readers, and those in the publishing biz to discuss recent works of crime, family, fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. It’s a great time to generate a list of must-read books of every genre, and particularly those works by up and coming women. So, we would like to share our enthusiasm for these great women authors and their books with those of you who can’t make it to Virginia this March.
Poetry: Jennifer Atkinson, Drift Ice, a lyrical book of poems that explores the limits of words, geographical extremes, and the sublime.
Memoir: Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life, A Story of Race and Family Secrets, explores the complexity of race, identity, privilege, and family.
Wellness: Peach Friedman, Diary of an Exercise Addict, grapples with how eating disorders take different shapes for different people, but ultimately consume ambition, desire, and the joys of life.
Romance: Cathy Maxwell, A Seduction at Christmas, is for the escapist among us who can’t get enough dukes, damsels, and seduction.
Fiction: Karen Salyer McElmurray, Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, explores the deep conflicts between desire and belief against the backdrop of Appalachian music, mining, and culture.
Cooking: Fran McManus, Cooking Fresh from the Mid-Atlantic, wants to help people connect place to taste by unearthing the mysteries of flavor and cultivation.
Crime: Denise Hamilton, The Last Embrace, a love note to L.A. in 1949 that…well we can’t give too much away! But it does involve former OSS spies, Frank Sinatra, and gangsters.
