The primary mission of The Williamsburg Book Festival, a juried event, is to promote and support the art of literary composition in the Williamsburg area.
10:00 am - 4:00 pm
Stryker Center
The 2021 Williamsburg Book Festival supports Literacy for Life,
which provides free tutoring programs, as well as job support and
health literacy lessons for members of our community.
Book festival patrons who donate to Literacy for Life at the festival will have an
opportunity to receive a free book provided by participating authors and speakers.
2021 Schedule of Events
11:00 MAKE YOUR BOOK CLUB EVEN BETTER!
Moderator Katheryn Lovell has worked as a psychiatric RN, maintained a private practice and taught at both the University of New England and Thomas Nelson College. She also chaired Maine’s Workforce Development Board. She has written a novel, Ulysses Revisited, and is an active bookclub member.
Panel members:
Janice Leslie is a veteran teacher of drama, speech & English who has adapted plays, novels, & short stories for Readers Theatre. She is a former high school principal and director of K-12 Curriculum & Instruction, and currently belongs to four book clubs.
Andrew Smith, graduate of UNC at Chapel Hill, is Williamsburg Regional Library Reader services librarian.
Robert and Lisa Pike have been co-hosting the Williamsburg Meetup book club for over a decade. The Meetup presently claims 141 members, and anyone is welcome to join by going to Meetup.com. Bob, who is chairman of the chemistry department at the college of William & Mary, completed graduate school and post-doctorate work at Brown University. Lisa works as a medical transcriptionist. They were featured in the February 2021 issue of Nextdoor Neighbors Magazine.
12:00 POETS LAUREATE ON STAGE
Bill Glose. Winning a war is glory; fighting the war is gory. Bill lived it and survived to write about it in his powerful style. He was named The Daily Press Poet Laureate, and has won both the F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story award and the Main Street Rag Poetry Book award. Glose has published five books plus two poetry chapbooks and edited a short story anthology.
Henry Hart, the 17th Virginia Poet Laureate, is the Hickman Professor of Humanities at the College of William and Mary. In addition to three books of poetry, he has written critical works on Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, and Robert Lowell. His poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Sewanee Review, Denver Quarterly, and numerous others.
Ed Lull, former naval officer, 4-term president of The Poetry Society of Virginia, writer, teacher, and the force behind the panel, Poets Laureate on Stage, has published six books of poetry and a text entitled Creating Form Poetry: A Poet’s Handbook.
Virginia Laureate Emeritus Ron Smith, holds degrees from the University of Richmond and Virginia Commonwealth University in philosophy, English, general humanities, and creative writing. He studied creative writing at Bennington College in Vermont, British drama at Worcester College, Oxford University, and Renaissance and modern culture and literature at the Ezra Pound Center for Literature in Meran, Italy. He is the author of 4 books of poetry, and his 18-poem sequence "To Ithaca" appeared in the Summer 2002 issue of The Georgia Review.
Sofia Starnes, Virginia Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014, is the author of six poetry collections, most recently, The Consequence of Moonlight. She has received six Pushcart Prize nominations and the 2001 Poetry Fellowship for the Virginia Commission for the arts.
2:00 SO YOU WANT TO WRITE A NOVEL?
Mike Krentz tells you what it takes to write your book. He earned a classical degree in English from the University of San Francisco, a Doctor of Medicine degree from the Medical College of Wisconsin, and a Master of Public Health Degree from Johns Hopkins University. Following a civilian career as an emergency physician, he rededicated his professional life to serve America’s Navy and Marine Corps. His last active-duty assignment was as 7th Fleet Surgeon on board the flagship, USS BLUE RIDGE, deployed throughout the Western Pacific. He retired to his earliest life passion as a full-time writer. Mike Krentz teaches at The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk and writes character-driven medical and psychological suspense and military fiction. He has published several books, including Dead Already, “a heart-pounding thriller”; has another novel in press and is under contract for a four-book series.
3:00 Special Event: Headliner Stephanie Storey talks about Creating Art in Fiction
Her debut novel Oil and Marble was hailed as “tremendously entertaining” by The New York Times, has been translated into six languages, and is currently in development as a feature film by Pioneer Pictures. Storey is also the author of Raphael, Painter in Rome, which came out in April 2020 in conjunction with the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death.
Storey has a degree in Fine Arts from Vanderbilt University and attended a PhD program in Art History, before leaving to get an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, and has studied art in Italy and been on a pilgrimage to see every Michelangelo on display in Europe.
Storey has also been a national television producer for nearly twenty years in Los Angeles for shows including Alec Baldwin on ABC, Arsenio Hall for CBS, and Emmy-nominated The Writers’ Room on the Sundance Channel. When not writing novels or producing television, Storey can usually be found with husband Mike Gandolfi — an actor and Emmy-winning comedy writer — traveling the world in search of their next stories.
A SAMPLING OF AUTHORS
John Conlee, professor emeritus at the College of William and Mary, taught English Medieval Literature, with an emphasis on Middle English poetry, Middle Scots poetry, the Arthurian legends, and Chaucer. He is the author of six novels for adults plus four books for young readers which feature King Arthur and his dog, Cabal.
In The Chaucer Codex, a young medieval scholar goes to Cornwall to investigate a mysterious manuscript. Does it contain a previously unknown Chaucer poem? As he and his Oxford mentor seek the answer, he is stalked in an eerie, moon-lit churchyard, victimized by determined car thieves, threatened in an alley behind a pub, and encounters beguiling women, one of whom teaches him that Cornish mermaids can pose serious threats to mortal men.
Mary Helen Sheriff is a teacher and professor who studied writing at the Hollins College MFA program.
Boop and Eve’s Road Trip: This American Fiction Award Winner is, according to Kirkus Reviews, “…a heartwarming trek through the South as grandmother and granddaughter uncover secrets held for generations as well as confront family issues, all while having a little fun…A touching intergenerational romp…”
Sally Stiles editor, teacher with an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, is the author of 7 books, poetry, short stories and hundreds of magazine articles.
Like a Mask Dancing, A Tanzanian Story, Author Kathleen Jabs writes: “This novel is a wonderfully, compassionate and rich story... written with the keen insight of an insider...exposes the complexity, the futility and ultimately, the hope, of living and accepting a community as they are.... A novel with a true sense of place and wonder, written with tenderness and grace.”
The Haiku Guide to Cruising / The Pacific Northwest, A celebration of aha! moments aboard a small trawler on a 1700 nautical-mile cruise from Puget Sound to Alaska. Photographs accompany the inspiring haiku. Author Dalia Pagani says: "The poems and the photos exalt each other..."
Peter Stipe earned a Bachelors degree in History from Boston University and a Masters in Education from Tufts. In addition to publishing four books, he is an accomplished artist, working with photography and in watercolor. A competitive long-distance runner for many years, Peter has completed numerous marathons with six finishes in the top fifty places in the Boston Marathon and participated in the 1972 U.S. Olympic Trials. A New Englander for most of his life, he now lives and writes in Williamsburg, Virginia.
The Fairy Garden, Peter Stipe’s fourth book, is a fantasy told from the viewpoint of a thirty- year old woman going through a divorce. As a young girl, she discovered fairies in her grandfather's Williamsburg, VA garden. Her grandfather is an understanding man, but her parents are aloof and self-obsessed. Whenever she encounters a crisis in her life, she turns to the fairies for guidance. Imagine a fantasy wrapped around a coming-of-age story.
Guyanese-born ERWIN THOMAS, author of ten books, earned a PhD degree in International Journalism & Broadcasting from the University of Missouri, Columbia, an MS in Television from Brooklyn College of CUNY and a BS Radio-TV & Film from the University of Oregon. He was a professor and director of the Graduate Program, Department of Mass Communications & Journalism, at Norfolk State University.
Prior to that, he was a newscaster at KWAX-FM, Eugene, Oregon, and producer-director at BCTV, Brooklyn, NY. His present interest is writing about World Religions & Beliefs.
EVE MONK’s peaceful childhood in Eastern Germany was disrupted in October 1938, when more than 12,000 Polish Jews were forced to leave their homes in a single night. They were beaten and led away, being allowed only one suitcase per person for their belongings. Their remaining possessions were seized by Nazis and looters. The horror of witnessing this event left an indelible mark on her memory.
As a 16-year-old, she was forced into the Hitler Youth and drafted to spend several months in 1944 digging trenches and learning tele-typing and Morse Code to help the Nazi war effort. Her book, Twenty-Three Years: Childhood, War, Escape, tells her story.
DAVID CARIENS is a retired CIA officer who served in Eastern Europe and as an editor at the BBC-FBIS facility outside London. He teaches Intelligence Analysis and Writing for the FBI, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crime Center (FinCEN) and has taught for members of the U.S. Intelligence Community including the Department of Homeland Security as well as the National Counterterrorism Center.
He is a director of the Writers Guild of Virginia. A victims’ rights advocate, he donates profits for his work on behalf of school shooting victims and their families.
RESOURCES FOR WRITERS
Williamsburg Regional Library
Books, DVDs, audio books, meeting rooms and theater presentations are just the beginning of help provided by WRL. Besides offering a wealth of research resources, you can find a large selection of on-line writing courses through Universal.
WILLIAMSBURG BOOK FESTIVAL SUPPORTERS INCLUDE
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The Williamsburg Book Festival is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
Williamsburg Book Festival, Inc. is formed exclusively for charitable and educational and literary purposes. Specifically, the organization hosts promotional and educational events, seminars and workshops that promote and support the craft of literary composure and the exposure of writers to the reading public.