Book City ★ Roanoke

Identity and Action: Season one of the BOOK CITY ★ Roanoke podcast continues with poet Ashley Rhame.  Ashley writes and performs with astonishing frequency. She's active in bringing people together in The Speakeasy, evenings of music and poetry. She is the program lead for Girls Rock Roanoke , and she works full time for Roanoke Public Libraries at the new Melrose Branch. "Without poetry, I d...

Identity and Action: Season one of the BOOK CITY ★ Roanoke podcast continues with Gregory Samantha Rosenthal.  Dr. Rosenthal, an assistant professor of public history at Roanoke College, has led the charge in reviving and building the Roanoke LGBT Memorial Library at the Roanoke Diversity Center .  Rosenthal says they learned of the pieces of past libraries even before moving to the regi...

Identity and Action: Season one of the BOOK CITY ★ Roanoke podcast continues with Roanoke County Director of Library Services Shari Henry. This season we’re looking at our engagement with the written word—how it shapes our identity and how we put that into action in the world around us. Libraries are a center of this engagement for individuals and for communities and they play a variety of roles....

Identity and Action: Season one of the BOOK CITY ★ Roanoke podcast continues with writer, artist, and professor Cathryn Hankla, author most recently of Lost Places: On Losing and Finding Home (Mercer University Press, 2018).  The works brings together memoir, criticism, and descriptive writing toward a mosaic of our relationship to place and home in a collection of interwoven essays. This sea...

Identity and Action: Season one of the BOOK CITY ★ Roanoke podcast continues with a conversation with Marisa Mazek Blankinship, Roanoke Public Libraries staff member, writer, reader, and point person in the city's collective literacy action. She coordinates the collaborative third grade-level equivalency effort Star City Reads, now bringing together more than 30 organizations effecting measur...

Identity and Action: Season one of the BOOK CITY ★ Roanoke podcast continues with a conversation with Bryan Hancock, the founder and host of Soul Sessions, Roanoke's open-mic spoken word evening. Also known as performer Harvest Blaque, Hancock has built a supportive and inclusive environment for sharing original work and celebrating others.  This season of the podcast we're looking at our eng...

Identity and Action: Season one of the BOOK CITY ★ Roanoke podcast continues with a conversation with Ben Bazak and Gail Steele of the Raleigh Court Library Book Club for a discussion of David Brooks' The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life (Random House, 2019). This season we look at our engagement with the written word. How it shapes our identity and how we put that into action in the wo...

Identity and Action : Season one of the BOOK CITY ★ Roanoke podcast launches with a conversation with biographer and curator Heath Hardage Lee. This season we look at our engagement with the written word. How it shapes our identity and how we put that into action in the world around us. Lee addresses the role of biography in uncovering untold stories of women leading in times of change and the rel...

Authors, readers, and resident city builders gather in BOOK CITY ★ Roanoke to discuss how the written word shapes our identity and helps us act in the world. BOOK CITY ★ Roanoke projects explore engagement and equity at the intersection of books and place.