Local Poets Share Their Stories at The Virginia Festival of the Book

During this year’s annual Virginia Festival of the Book Festival, three local poets, Janine Joseph, Gregory Orr, and Kiki Petrosino shared their stories during an event titled “The Turning Point: Shaping a Poetic Life.” The Virginia Festival of the Book has defined its purpose as “bringing together writers and readers to promote and celebrate books, reading, literacy, and literary culture.” This year’s event was opened and moderated by the Chief Operating Officer of the Virginia Humanities Kevin McFadden. 

The first poet to be introduced by McFadden and share their story was Janine Joseph. Joseph is a poetry professor at Virginia Tech and an organizer for Undocupoets, an organization that promotes the work of current and previously undocumented poets in the United States. Joseph read pieces from her recent collection, Decade of the Brain. This work reflects Joseph’s experiences during a ten-year recovery process after suffering brain damage and memory loss in a car accident that took place in 2008. 

Next introduced was poet and Professor Emeritus of English at UVA, Gregory Orr. He presented excerpts from his recent work Selected Books of the Beloved. This book has been described as a “celebration of the transformative power of poetry and our extraordinary capacity to feel and to love.” During this presentation, he shared that he had been accumulating the pieces of poetry in this book for more than twenty years before the book was published in 2022. 

The last to share her work during this event was the Professor of Poetry at UVA, Kiki Petrosino. She presented a memoir published in August 2022 titled Bright. This book is a collection of full-length essays that describes Petrosino’s experience growing up in an interracial family. During the reading, she shared that the idea for the memoir only arose after writing her last book, White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia. White Blood explores Petrosino’s genealogical and intellectual roots while acknowledging the racial history in the upper South. She explained that writing Bright allowed her to explore the connection between these concepts further.

McFadden closed this event by introducing additional questions for each of the poets, giving them time to demonstrate their passion for reading and writing further. 

A recording of the event is available on the Viriginia Festival of the Book website.