Oct. 3: Emily Ogden
New Dominion Bookshop in Charlottesville will host a book talk and conversation with author and UVA professor Emily Ogden on Saturday, Oct. 3, at 7 p.m.
Ogden will be speaking about her new book, Darkness Becomes Bright: On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe, which will be released from Viking in late September.
A conversation with UVA professor Mark Edmundson will follow.
Ogden is the author of On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays and Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism.
The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, and a Mellon Fellowship in the Columbia Society of Fellows, she is a professor of English at the University of Virginia.
Oct. 9: Carolyn Schuyler
New Dominion Bookshop will host a book talk and conversation with author Carolyn Schuyler on Friday, Oct. 9, at 7 p.m.
Schuyler will be speaking about her new book, Everyday Ecotherapy: Nature Connection Practices for Where We Live, Learn, Work, and Play, which will be released from Routledge in late September.
A conversation with Dorothe Bach will follow.
Schuyler is a University of Virginia Visiting Scholar, a Morven Sustainability Lab Community Scholar, and the founder of Wildrock and Nature Connection Lab, two nonprofit organizations seeking to promote nature-connected communities.
Earlier in her career, she worked as a psychotherapist and the founding program director of The Women’s Initiative.
Oct. 10: Duston Spear
New Dominion Bookshop will host a book reading and conversation with author and artist Duston Spear on Saturday, Oct. 10, at 4 p.m.
Spear will be reading from her debut novel, Bird Girl, which was released from Black Rose Writing earlier this month.
A conversation with Liza Nash Taylor will follow.
Spear was born in Richmond, and moved to New York to attend Parsons School of Design. Bird Girl (draws on her years in Soho, where she lived and worked as a young artist in New York’s downtown art scene of the 1970s.
A painter, writer, and interdisciplinary artist, Spear has received awards from Creative Time and Art Matters. For more than 20 years, she taught art and writing in a college program inside a maximum-security prison.
Oct. 16: Gustav Heldt
New Dominion Bookshop will host a book talk with UVA professor Gustav Heldt on Friday, Oct. 16, at 7 p.m.
Heldt will be speaking about Torikaebaya Monogatari: A Japanese Tale of Gender-Swapped Siblings. This new edition of Rosette Willig’s translation of the classic Torikaebaya Monogatari features a brand-new introduction by Heldt.
Heldt is a professor of Japanese literature at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Pursuit of Harmony: Poetry and Power in Early Heian Japan (2008) and Navigating Narratives: Tsurayuki’s Tosa Diary as History and Fiction (2024), as well as translator of The Kojiki: An Account of Ancient Matters (2014).
Oct. 17: Mary Jane Nealon
New Dominion Bookshop will host a book talk and conversation with author Mary Jane Nealon on Saturday, Oct. 17, at 7 p.m.
Nealon will be speaking about her new book, In the Form of Bread: On Becoming Human, which will be released from Four Way Books in mid-September.
A conversation with UVA professor Virginia LeBaron will follow.
Nealon is a retired nurse with an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and was the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellow in 2004–2005.
She has two poetry collections: Rogue Apostle and Immaculate Fuel, both from Four Way Books.
Her memoir, Beautiful Unbroken: One Nurse’s Life, was published by Graywolf Press.
Her newest collection of personal essays, In the Form of Bread: On Becoming Human, will be available in September 2026.
Oct. 23: Oludamini Ogunnaike
New Dominion Bookshop will host a book talk and conversation with author and UVA professor Oludamini Ogunnaike on Friday, Oct. 23, at 7 p.m.
Ogunnaike will be speaking about Yoruba Mythology: Stories of the Orisa from West Africa and the Diaspora (Black Dog & Leventhal, September 2026), which was written with his brother, Ayodeji Ogunnaike.
Data Oruwari, the book’s illustrator, will also be speaking about her work.
A conversation with UVA professor and Carter G. Woodson Institute director Robert Trent Vinson will follow.
Ogunnaike [oh-loo-DAH-mee-NEE oh-goo-NIGH-kay] is a professor of African religious thought and democracy at the University of Virginia. He specializes in the intellectual and artistic dimensions of West and North African Sufism and Yoruba orisa [OH-REE-SHA] traditions.
He is the author of Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions (Penn State University Press, 2020), winner of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) Outstanding First Book Prize; Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: West African Madih Poetry and Its Precedents (Islamic Texts Society, 2020); The Book of Clouds (Fons Vitae, 2024); Curls in the Night of Meaning: The Layla Poetry of the Shadhiliyya (forthcoming with SUNY Press in 2026); and, with his brother Ayodeji, Yoruba Mythology (forthcoming with Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers in September 2026).
Oct. 24: Chelyen Davis and Jody Hobbs Hesler
New Dominion Bookshop will host a reading in celebration of the brand-new iteration of the beloved annual anthology New Stories from the South on Saturday, Oct. 24, at 7 p.m.
Authors Chelyen Davis and Jody Hobbs Hesler will each be reading from their stories in this year’s anthology.
New Stories from the South 2026 is the revival of an iconic anthology of best Southern short stories featuring eminent and emerging voices, with an introduction by Appalachian writer Silas House. It marks the much-anticipated return of the annual story collection, gathering outstanding short stories written by Southern writers or about the American South. Stories were nominated by editors of literary journals and magazines, publishers of short story collections, and by prominent Southern writers who served as contributing editors for this volume.
Chelyen Davis has worked as a political journalist and speechwriter to governors and educators. Her fiction, essays, and poems have appeared in publications such as Appalachian Review, Still: The Journal, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Untelling, and Brown Hound Press.
A native of Southwest Virginia, she lives in Richmond. Her debut collection of short stories, Cannonball, is forthcoming from the University Press of Kentucky in 2027.
Jody Hobbs Hesler is the author of the novel Without You Here, winner of the 2025 Independent Press Award for Literary Fiction, and the story collection What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better.
Her short fiction, essays, book reviews, and author interviews also appear in TriQuarterly, Swing, South Dakota Review, The Pinch, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Pithead Chapel, CRAFT, North American Review, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere.
She teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, and serves as assistant fiction editor for The Los Angeles Review.
Oct. 30: Erika Meitner
New Dominion Bookshop will host a book reading and conversation with poet and UVA MFA alum Erika Meitner on Friday, Oct. 30, at 7 p.m.
Meitner will be reading from her new poetry collection, Assembled Audience, which will be released from Milkweed in late September.
A conversation with UVA professor Kiki Petrosino will follow.
Meitner is the author of six previous books of poems, including Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010), a 2009 National Poetry Series winner; Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry; and Useful Junk (BOA Editions, 2022).
Her poems have been published most recently in The New Yorker, Electric Literature, Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American, The New Republic, Orion, and elsewhere.
Her seventh book, Assembled Audience, is due out from Milkweed Editions in September 2026.
Meitner is currently a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also directs the creative writing program.
Nov. 7: Laura Kolbe
New Dominion Bookshop will host a book reading and conversation with poet Laura Kolbe on Saturday, Nov. 7 at 7 p.m.
Kolbe will be reading from her new poetry collection, The Decadent Movement, which will be released from the University of Pittsburgh Press in late September.
A conversation with Helen Chandler will follow.
Kolbe is a physician, medical ethicist, and writer. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Best American Poetry series and in American Poetry Review, The Baffler, Conjunctions, Harper’s, n+1, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.
Her first collection, Little Pharma, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2021. Her chapbook Keeping House: Six Longer Love Poems was selected by Kwame Dawes as the Center for Book Arts annual contest winner and published in 2025.
She teaches and practices medicine in New York City.
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Chris Graham
