NewsTo Be Seen and Belong:
There’s a fresh mural, finished just last October, on the north wall in Virginia Humanities’ new Dairy Market headquarters. The color palette features warm earth tones–browns, oranges, reds–an almost perfect contrast to the cool blues and creams in the surrounding decor. But for the subgroup of Virginia Humanities staff and board members that made up our Community Engagement Committee, the most important aspect of the mural wasn’t how it would make the space look, but how it would make the space feel.
NewsSHELF LIFE—Music, Grace & Grit: Black Voices in Verse
Poets Ashley M. Jones (Reparations Now!), Khalisa Rae (Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat), and Crystal Wilkinson (Perfect Black) confront their complex Southern inheritance, mourning the horrors of racism while …
NewsThe Cotton Gin of the Midwest
Many are familiar with the legacy of the cotton gin, the first machine to separate cotton seeds from cotton fiber, patented by Ely Whitney in 1794. The cotton gin made the widespread cultivation of short-staple cotton profitable just as the removal of Indians from vast swaths of the southeast opened up new farming territory for […]
NewsSHELF LIFE: Any Murders in the Building?
Step into cozy-reading for the winter with Maggie Blackburn (Once Upon a Seaside Murder), Amita Murray (Arya Winters and the Tiramisu of Death), and RV Raman (A Will to Kill). …
NewsREPLAY: Friendsgiving
For many, the Thanksgiving holidays are a time to gather with your biological relatives. But what if you don’t have the traditional, Norman-Rockwell family?
NewsMack’s Corner with Virginia Poet Laureate Luisa A. Igloria
Join Mack and friends as they explore the power and possibility of poetry for young readers with Luisa A. Igloria, 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia and author …
NewsSHELF LIFE—Beloved Beasts: Michelle Nijhuis in Conversation with Oliver Milman
Michelle Nijhuis discussed Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, her vibrant history of the modern conservation movement seen through the lives and ideas of the people …
NewsQ&A with Shelf Life author Michelle Nijhuis
Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, is a journalist and project editor at The Atlantic, where she edits for the Planet section. …
NewsVirginia Tribal Communities Tell Their Own Stories
In Encyclopedia Virginia
The question of how Indigenous stories are told—and by whom—is part of a long-overdue reckoning with the mainstream historical narrative in VA…
NewsThe Missed Opportunity of the Emancipation Monument
Our new entry on Archer Alexander, the formerly enslaved man who served as the model for the Emancipation Monument dedicated on the eleventh anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, touches on the controversy the monument generated, both when it was dedicated in 1876 and more recently when a replica of the monument was removed from […]
