by Jessica Harris

Jessica Harris is based in Charlottesville, Virginia, and has written for Vinegar Hill Magazine for three years. She’s passionate about accessible arts education, community-based work and, of course, 70s & 80s music.

It’s March in Charlottesville, which means the beginning of our busy season.

Now and through the fall, the calendar is full of exciting events, festivals or other sorts of happenings. You name it, Charlottesville’s got it.

Every March for the past 30 years, the Virginia Festival of the Book takes place with a full lineup of speakers, book talks, panels, workshops and readings. The Festival is always chock-full of dynamic programming. 

This year is no exception.

The 2026 festival features over 100 authors and a wide array of genres, event formats and topics. The majority of the programs are completely free to attend, and all are open to the public. The festival is hosted by the Virginia Center for the Book, part of Virginia Humanities, which preserves and promotes stories from the Commonwealth, and an affiliate with the Library of Congress. 

This year’s theme is “Revolutions,” in line with the semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. 

“We’re looking at revolution not just as a revolt or an upheaval, but also a new way of thinking, a new way of doing things, a spin, a cycle,” said Kalela Williams, director of the Center for the Book.

The festival lineup amplifies revolutionary people, either unsung or more well known. 

“We’re widening that view to really consider revolution from a lot of different angles, not so much drums and fifes, but also what is revolution really?” Williams said.

As we consider this idea of revolutions, it is essential that Black people and Black narratives be centered. Both here in the United States and across the globe, our ancestors have been at the heart of transformational and fundamental change. The festival amplifies a multiplicity of stories and storytelling, and ensures that an assortment of perspectives are shared. 

One such way the festival is sharing Black stories is a staged reading of a book called A Miserable Revenge. Attendees might not have heard of this book, partly because it sat in someone’s house for decades as the author wrote the novel in the 1870s. It was passed down to a descendant and was never published. The novel features a Black man’s perspective writing about “white life” in the early 1800s. The author’s descendant wanted to see this book come to life, so she helped secure a grant to fund the publication of the book, and a staged reading of one of the chapters will occur at this year’s festival. 

Another such way Black stories are told is through a live recording of the well-known podcast “Our Ancestors Were Messy.” The podcast highlights gossip columns in Black newspapers in the 18th and 19th centuries. It features topics that might have been more taboo — namely, the community gossip that made the news in early Black American history. 

(There are countless other programs featuring Black authors or stories – see below for a more comprehensive list!) 

Williams and her team have lined up an assortment of stories of all shapes, color and sizes. She is no stranger to literary public programming. In 2009, she served as the assistant director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University, having received a master’s of fine arts in fiction prior to the role. 

An author herself, her novel, Tangleroot, will have excerpts performed as a preview event at the festival. As the event description states, “puppetry and a staged reading will animate the shadowy past of former Tangleroot Plantation, where a Boston teen is coming to live with her mother, in the house their enslaved ancestor built.”

Kalela Williams(Tangleroot) at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center during the Virginia Festival of the Book on Friday, March 21, 2025. Credit: Pat Jarrett/Virginia Humanities.

Williams’s focus has always been on community. After working with Furious Flower, she worked with the Free Library of Philadelphia for 9 years, and then with Mighty Writers before planting roots in Virginia and starting her directorship in October of 2022. 

Driven by this community focus, this year, the festival is taking an intentional turn towards expansion. 

“We love Charlottesville,” Williams said, “and we’re excited that this year we’re going to have a larger footprint in Charlottesville. We’re going to be all along the Downtown Mall and different venues.”

Williams’s desired outcomes for the festival center on connectivity and exploration. Her goal is that attendees might leave feeling a greater sense of community and appreciation of place.

“I hope that people walk away feeling connected to their communities, wherever they’re coming from, whether it’s here in Virginia, whether it’s somewhere else in this country, whether it’s abroad,” Williams said. 

So whether you’re looking for a new book to check out, want to come hear some juicy historical gossip, or just make connections with your neighbors – the Virginia Festival of the Book promises to be just the place for you.

Check out some highlights of the Festival’s programs highlighting the Black experience below!

Events Centering Black experiences: 

Black Authors: