Charlottesville Reading Series: Artists for September event

The Charlottesville Reading Series will host a reading and performance on Friday, September 20, from 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM at New Dominion Bookshop (404 East Main St).

The event will feature a reading by fiction writer Joanna Pearson and a performance by artist A. D. Carson. The event is free to attend, and complimentary refreshments will be available at intermission.

Pearson’s first collection of short stories, Every Human Love, was published in 2019 by Acre Books. Her fiction has appeared in Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions,Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, Kenyon Review Online, and Mississippi Review, as well as other journals. She holds an MFA from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and an MD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and she now lives in North Carolina, where she works as a psychiatrist. For more information, visit joannapearson.wordpress.com.

Carson is an award-winning performance artist and educator from Decatur, Illinois. He received his PhD from Clemson University doing work that focuses on race, literature, history, and rhetorical performances. A 2016 recipient of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Award for Excellence in Service at Clemson, Carson worked with students, staff, faculty, and community members to raise awareness of historic, entrenched racism at the university through his See the Stripes campaign, which takes its name from his 2014 poem. His dissertation, “Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions,” was recognized by the Graduate Student Government as the 2017 Outstanding Dissertation. Carson is currently assistant professor in Hip-Hop and the Global South at the University of Virginia. You can follow A.D. Carson on Twitter and Instagram at @aydeethegreat. For more information, visit aydeethegreat.com.

About the Charlottesville Reading Series

Founded by Julia Kudravetz and Amie Whittemore in 2014, the Charlottesville Reading Series presents in-person readings of poetry, prose, and song in a monthly event for community members in Charlottesville. We recruit emerging and established writers form diverse backgrounds, both locally and nationally. For more information about the series, please visit readingseries.org.