Programs & Events
Spring 2012
Virginia Festival of the Book Events, March 21 - 25
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Poetry: Laurels and Laureates
4:00 PM, Auditorium
Reading with John Casteen (For the Mountain Laurel), Virginia Poet Laureate Kelly Cherry (Hazard and Prospect), and Paul Guest (My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge).
Featuring: Carolyn Cades (moderator), John Casteen, Kelly Cherry, Paul Guest
Poetry: A Reading with Homero Aridjis
8:00 PM, Auditorium
Homero Aridjis, Mexican journalist and poet, reads from his work in Spanish. Rita Dove reads translations.
Hosted by U.Va. Department of English.
Featuring: Homero Aridjis, Rita Dove (moderator)
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Explorers Who Changed Our Understanding of the World
10:00 AM, Auditorium
Ivor Noel Hume (Belzoni: The Giant Archaeologists Love to Hate) and Larrie Ferreiro (Measure of the Earth: The Enlightenment Expedition that Reshaped Our World).
Featuring: Larrie D. Ferreiro, Ivor Noel Hume, Joel Kovarsky (moderator)
Shakespeare Censored: What We Might Learn
2:00 PM, Auditorium
This talk begins with the Spanish Inquisition and is rich with historical and modern examples, leading to conclusions about what censorship means for the history of reading--and for our understanding of the power of the printed page today.
Hosted by Rare Book School, UVA.
Featuring: Barbara Heritage (moderator), Michael F. Suarez
The Many Faces of American Slavery
4:00 PM, Auditorium
Bruce Carveth (Crusade Against Slavery), Kevin Lowther (The African American Odyssey of John Kizell), Michael Plunkett and Edward Gaynor (Rambles of a Runaway from Southern Slavery), and Elizabeth Taylor (A Slave in the White House).
Featuring: Bruce G. Carveth, Edward Gaynor, Kevin G. Lowther, Michael Francis Plunkett, Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, Brendan Wolfe (moderator)
The Education of Andy Warhol
6:00 PM, Auditorium
Andy Warhol was the last of the major Pop artists to appear. He didn't invent Pop; Pop had already happened. Louis Menand discusses why Warhol took so long to emerge as an important artist, and why his work is distinctive and historically important.
Sponsored by Gladys S. Blizzard Lecture and U.Va. Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures.
Featuring: Matthew Affron (moderator), Michael Levenson (moderator), Louis Menand
Fiction: Harbach, Henderson, Preston--Highly Recommended!
8:00 PM, Auditorium
Chad Harbach (The Art of Fielding), Eleanor Henderson (Ten Thousand Saints), and Caroline Preston (The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt) read from and discuss their notable books.
Featuring: Chad Harbach, Eleanor Henderson, Caroline Preston, Christopher Tilghman (moderator)
Friday, March 23, 2012
Science: What We Know vs. What We Think We Know
10:00 AM, Auditorium
Cedar Reiner (Brainworks: The Mind-Bending Science of How You See, What You Think, and Who You Are) and Edmund Russell (Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth) discuss their work on perception in the body and in the world of science.
Featuring: Cedar Riener, Edmund Russell, Michael Sims (moderator)
Innovation and the Internet of Things
12:00 PM, Auditorium
Kevin T. McDonald (Above the Clouds: Managing Risk in the World of Cloud Computing) and Jean and Sean Westcott (The Complete Idiot's Guide to Electronics 101) explore how new technology creates new possibilities.
Featuring: Kevin T. McDonald, Trey Mitchell (moderator), Jean Riescher Westcott, Sean Westcott
Memoirs: Artists at Home and Abroad
2:00 PM, Auditorium
Gary Geddes (Drink the Bitter Root: A Writer's Search for Justice and Redemption in Africa), Gordon Ball (East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg), and Susan Gardner (Drawing the Line).
Featuring: Gordon Ball, Robert Earle (moderator), Susan Gardner, Gary Geddes
Bibliographical Society: From the Middle Ages to T.S. Eliot
4:00 PM, Auditorium
Bibliographical presentations by U.Va. graduate students Tess Goodman (mid-nineteenth-century publishers' bindings and the books' contents), Margaret Marshall (an investigation of the first edition of Eliot's The Waste Land) and Christine Schott (a digital presentation of medieval annotations).
Hosted by Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia.
Poetry: An Evening with Nikki Giovanni, Nikky Finney, and Kwame Alexander
8:00 PM, Auditorium
Readings by Nikki Giovanni (Bicycles: Love Poems), Nikky Finney (Head Off & Split), and Kwame Alexander (Crush: Love Poems).
Sponsored by Miller School of Albemarle.
Featuring: Kwame Alexander, Nikky Finney, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Vaughan (moderator)
