The Virginia Festival of the Book brings together writers and readers to promote and celebrate books, reading, literacy, and literary culture over five days in Charlottesville and Albemarle County. The 25th annual Virginia Festival of the Book begins today and ends Sunday, March 24.

Author Susan Devan Harness will discuss her book Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption (Nebraska, 2018)on two panels on Friday, March 22. The first will begin at 10:00 a.m. with Harness in conversation with Nicole Chung, author of All You Can Ever Know (Catapult, 2018), to discuss growing up as transracial adoptees, yearning to belong, and struggling to find their birth families. They encounter both heartbreak and joy in these captivating explorations of family myth and culture.

Later in the day at 4:00 p.m. Harness will join Jeffery L. Hantman, author of Monacan Millennium (Univ of Virginia Press, 2018), and Greg Smithers, author of Native Southerners (Univ of Oklahoma Press, 2019), for a discussion concerning early American history, being born Native and raised outside of the community, and contemporary representation of Native American narratives.

On Saturday, March 23, author and former ambassador Prudence Bushnell will discuss her book Terrorism, Betrayal, and Resilience: My Story of the 1998 U.S. Embassy Bombings (Potomac Books, 2018) at 2:00 p.m. She will be joined by Farhana Qazi author of Invisible Martyrs: Inside the Secret World of Female Islamic Radicals (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2018) in a discussion that will probe the catalysts, thoughts and situations motivating terrorists in the Middle East and Africa, and failures of the U.S. national security community to understand these.

Book sales and signings will follow each of these events. The festival is free to attend and open to the public.