Friday
October 18
1 PM
In Cold War Country: How Nashville’s Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism, Joseph M. Thompson reveals how country music’s business leaders partnered with the Pentagon to encourage military service. The partnership provided an economic boost to white country stars, while marginalizing Black artists and fueling divisions over the meaning of patriotism. This immersive history not only chronicles the evolution of music, but also how it shaped race relations, partisanship, and images of the United States abroad.” Sponsored by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.
Location: Virtual via Zoom. Register for free on Eventbrite.
2:15 PM
In The Hunger Book: A Memoir from Communist Poland, Agata Izabela Brewer reminisces about her loving grandparents, while recalling her life with an unstable, alcoholic mother, the need to forage for food amid Stalinist-era apartment buildings, martial law, and a nuclear disaster in nearby Ukraine. Brewer reflects on these experiences from her perspective as an immigrant and a mother in a memoir Kirkus calls “a memorable meditation on hunger for food and love, childhood in a totalitarian regime, and resilience.” Sponsored by Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.
Location: Virtual via Zoom. Register for free on Eventbrite.
6 PM
Michael Martinez’s latest poetry collection, Tarta Americana, channels the renowned 1950s singer-songwriter Richie Valens in order to challenge our conceptions of race, identity, and desire. Poet Dan Beachy-Quick says, “Tarta Americana is both bildungsroman and protest song, a story of family and love, of the pain of growing up, and wide-eyed witness to the casual racism that culminates in cruel violence.” Sponsored by Mason Creative Writing.
Location: Chubby Squirrel Brewing Company, 10382 Willard Way, Fairfax, VA
7:30 PM
Four George Mason poetry alumni read from their latest collections. Alyse Knorr’s Ardor considers lesbian love and family-building across landscapes. Siwar Masannat grapples with the relationship between privacy and visibility in Cue. In Thine, Kate Partridge engages with ecopoetics within the context of the American West. Emily Tuszynska’s Surfacing follows a woman embarking on the baffling experience of motherhood. Sponsored by Mason Creative Writing.
Location: Chubby Squirrel Brewing Company, 10382 Willard Way, Fairfax, VA
7:30 PM
Bestselling author Silvia Moreno-Garcia closes the festival with her novel The Seventh Veil of Salome, an historical epic about the drama on and off the screen for a 1950s Hollywood actress who wins the role of a lifetime. Kirkus Reviews calls her writing “Intelligent, exciting, and written absolutely beautifully… Moreno-Garcia proves, once again, that she is a master of her craft.” Moreno-Garcia is also the author of Mexican Gothic, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, and many other books. Sponsored by the Friends of the Reston Regional Library, and the Friends of the City of Fairfax Regional Library.
Location: Stacy C. Sherwood Community Center, 3740 Blenheim Blvd, Fairfax
Free tickets will go on sale on September 20. Reserve yours on Eventbrite.
Virtual Events
A celebration of LGBTQ+ poets, featuring Fairfax Poet Laureate Danielle Badra, as well as Tanya Olson, author of Born Backwards, Jocelyn Heath, author of In the Cosmic Fugue, Jan Beatty, author of Dragstripping, and J. Jennifer Espinoza, author of I Don’t Want to Be Understood.
Watch, starting October 18:
In their new book, Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back. Ulises Ali Mejias and Nick Couldry argue that the role of data in society needs to be grasped as not only a development of capitalism, but as the start of a new phase in human history that rivals in importance the emergence of historic colonialism. This new form of ‘data colonialism’ gives shape to a social order based not on the extraction of natural resources or labor, but on the appropriation of human life through data. Resisting it will require strategies that decolonial thinking has foregrounded for decades.
Watch, starting October 18:
