UVA Alumni Reminisce and Read

The Virginia Festival of the Book lives in many homes throughout its week-long existence, but one of the most popular locations for book fest events is the UVA bookstore. On Friday morning, March 22, the UVA bookstore parking lot was brimming with action. Lines of cars streamed out of the garage door looking to find a parking spot, and people waited to pay at the meter, shivering and complaining. A woman said to her daughter, “You should consider studying systems; you would learn how to solve unnecessary situations like this.”

The UVA Creative Alumni Reading event was hosted by the UVA Department of Creative Writing and took place on the upper level of the UVA bookstore. It was free to the public, as were the steaming bagels and cheese spreads. UVA Alumni Laura Eve Engel, Libby Burton, James McLaughlin, and Valencia Robin read excerpts from their most recent works of poetry and creative writing.

Libby Burton, my cousin, took the wooden podium first and introduced herself by thanking her parents and two of her teachers, Lisa Russ Spaar and Debra Nystrom, who sat in the audience. Her poetry book Soft Volcano focuses on sex, death, and the small human moments in between. Soft Volcano was selected by Ross Gay as the winner of the 2017 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize.

Laura Eve Engel followed after Burton and revealed that she and Burton were undergraduate students together at UVA. Engel’s book Things that Go is based around a biblical story, but expands out to discuss topics such as ISIS and the American West in a poetic voice. Publishers Weekly called Things That Go a “nimble, philosophical debut.” Engel also thanked her teachers who sat in the folding chairs in front of her, and they beamed at their accomplished alumnus.

James McLaughlin was third to read, and he began by saying, “The gestation period for my book was longer than everyone else here. I started working on this book in the 90’s, and I published it last year.” McLaughlin’s Bearskin strayed from the other featured works because it is a novel, as opposed to a collection of short works. Bearskin is about the intersection of life and unfiltered nature. McLaughlin was named one of “4 Writers to Watch This Summer” by the New York Times in May 2018.

The final reader was Valencia Robin. Robin is the author of Ridiculous Light, a book of poems. Robin is also a painter and created her own cover art for the book. She is the winner of Persea Books’ 2018 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry.