By Kalela Williams
Director, Virginia Center for the Book
From March 20 to 22, the 2026 Virginia Festival of the Book will bring powerful stories of Black heritage, identity, and culture to the forefront. Across poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, this year’s Festival lineup highlights voices that illuminate history, challenge the present, and inspire the future.
If you’re looking to deepen your reading this Black History Month, start here — then experience these authors live at the Festival next month in Charlottesville.
Poetry
All is in the Telling by Rosa Castellano explores Black girlhood, where intimate, personal moments expand into shared meaning and invite readers into a space of reflection and healing. In All the Possible Bodies, Iain Haley Pollock crafts a portrait of a mixed-race Black man while probing larger questions about power, belonging, and the forces that shape status and the status quo.
Adrian Matejka’s Be Easy: New & Selected Poems channels music, memory, and the life of Jack Johnson into striking verse, while Latorial Faison’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated Nursery Rhymes in Black honors the endurance of Black matriarchs in a small Virginia town.
These poets bring history, resilience, and artistry into sharp contemporary focus.
Fiction
Burn Down Master’s House is hard to put down. Inspired by true stories of resistance, author Clay Cane traces the lives of five enslaved characters determined to claim agency and shape their futures.
Sadeqa Johnson’s The House of Eve and Keeper of Lost Children explore the intersecting lives of Black women navigating postwar Germany and 1950s Washington, D.C., confronting choices that will define generations.
In Where the False Gods Dwell, Denny S. Bryce follows three women traveling with famed choreographer Katherine Dunham to Jamaica, each facing their own personal journeys of secrets, forbidden love, and an unraveling marriage, when they are tested by a devastating hurricane.
Nonfiction
This year’s Festival also features urgent works of history and cultural analysis.
In Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless, Maria Pinto uses fungi as an unexpected lens into ecology, hidden histories, and Black survival. Cheryl Thompson’s Forgotten Souls investigates the disappearance of twenty-seven Tuskegee Airmen during World War II, uncovering stories long overlooked.
Elaine Weiss’s Spell Freedom chronicles the underground Citizenship Schools that fueled the Civil Rights Movement, while Andrew Hammann’s Words Colliding examines nineteenth-century debates over slavery and colonization.
Bringing the conversation squarely into today’s political landscape, Ibram X. Kendi’s Chain of Ideas traces the evolution of racist conspiracy theories and modern authoritarianism. Jelani Cobb’s Three or More Is a Riot examines the last thirteen years of American racial dynamics, culture, and activism.
Don’t Miss It: Tickets to Ibram X. Kendi’s event are going quickly and expected to sell out. Secure your seat today!
