Charlottesville Words

Some highlights from the most recent email from the Book Festival’s Associate Program Director, Kevin McFadden. For more information, see the Virginia Festival of the Book, or subscribe to email updates.

I. Walter Mosley: Inspiration to Write That Book

VABook! 2008 Headliner Walter Mosley has written 29 books across many genres: novels, thrillers, essays, sci-fi, and politics. Among his latest is a collection of self-help and inspiration for writers, This Year You Write Your Novel. It’s Mosley’s step-by-step guide for beginning and stalled writers to finally sitting down and getting that book out of you. Hear him on NPR.
Since that interview, he has released his final Easy Rawlins mystery, Blonde Faith. Read the first chapter in the New York Times.
Walter Mosley will be inspiring a Paramount crowd on Sunday, March 30 at 4PM, in a benefit for the Virginia Foundation Center for the Book–the program parent at the VFH that brings you the Book Festival and many other worthy book and literacy events. Tickets $38-$52-$65; patron level tickets are $125 and include a pre-reception and copy of Blonde Faith. Tickets must be purchased through the Paramount.

Mosley and his Virginia Festival of the Book appearance are being celebrated among the Small Press Month events featured this March, events highlighting the valuable work produced by independent publishers.
For more information on Walter Mosley, see his website.
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II. A Perfect Mess Is Now The Place To Be

The Virginia Festival of the Book is pleased to announced that former newsman Roger Mudd has agreed to be the featured speaker at the Festival’s March 26 Business Breakfast, replacing Eric Abrahamson (A Perfect Mess), who had to drop out due to a schedule conflict. “We are thrilled to have someone of Mudd’s stature speaking at the breakfast,” said Susan Coleman, Director of the VFH Center for the Book, which produces the Festival. Individual tickets remain available, although tables of ten seats have sold out.

Mudd was the documentary host and correspondent for The History Channel from 1995 until he retired in 2004. Between 1961 to 1992, he was a Washington correspondent for CBS News, NBC News and the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour on PBS. He won the George Foster Peabody award for “The Selling of the Pentagon” in 1970 and for “Teddy” in 1979 and the Barone Award for Distinguished Washington Reporting in 1990.

Business Breakfast attendees will be among the first to hear Mudd talk about his memoir, The Place to Be, due to be released the end of March. As one of the leading figures in broadcast news, in his book Mudd looks back with wit and wisdom on the period in the 1960s and 70s when CBS’s Washington bureau was instrumental in setting the agenda at home and abroad on issues like Vietnam, civil rights and Watergate.

If you’d like to from the limited remaining tickets for this event, go online here.
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III. Focus on Fiction: Audio and Video Links

• Nathan Englander reads from his The Ministry of Special Cases on YouTube
• Colm Tóibín discusses The Master (audio)
• Adriana Trigiani sets the stage for her novels (video)
• Jacqueline Winspear on An Incomplete Revenge (audio)
• Alan Cheuse on The Fires (audio)

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