A unique literary experience where audiences can drink local microbrews while listening to local masterpieces. Join us the first Tuesday of every month to find out why literature is better with beer.

The Virginia Festival of the Book brings readers and writers together for a five-day celebration of books, reading, literacy, and literary culture. The 18th Annual Festival will be held March 20–25, 2012.

Produced by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (VFH), the largest of the fifty-six state (and territory) humanities councils, the Festival is a program of the Virginia Center for the Book, an affiliate of the Library of Congress Center for the Book.

Michelle Boisseau, author of A Sunday in God-Years, and John Casteen, author of Free Union: Poems, will discuss and sign their books of poetry. A Sunday in God-Years is centered on the long poem “A Reckoning,” made up of 15 shorter poems/sections (some sections are documents like wills and runaway slave notices). The poems in Free Union revolve around physical work, the Appalachian landscape, and family relationships. Casteen, for ten years a designer and builder of custom furniture, covers subjects ranging from the farm to the shop floor, from the rivers of the Piedmont to the wooded shoulders of the Blue Ridge, and from the hyper-attentiveness of childhood through the anxieties and joys of fatherhood.