Local Nonfiction

The inspiring true story of an enslaved woman who liberated an infamous slave jail and transformed it into one of the nation’s first HBCUs  In The Devil’s Half Acre, New York Times bestselling author Kristen Green draws on years of research to tell the extraordinary and little-known story of young M ... Read More about

There's No Accounting for the Strangeness of Things tells the story of a young woman, driven by the siren song of wretched excess, who must take the world apart before she is able to put it back together again. Fortunately, the journey lands in a discovery of what it means to find home, to feel the ... Read More about

Finalist for the Library of Virginia’s People’s Choice Award  Winner of the International Poe Festival’s Saturday “Visiter” Award    As seen in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Baltimore Sun When life’s got you down and things aren’t going your way, who better to turn to than Ed ... Read More about

Most early African Virginians came from the lands of the medieval Empire of Mali, founded by the original Lion King. Since the first Africans arrived in 1619, Virginia's history has been linked to Africa and to Mali. Virginia's culture is filled with West African music, food, and other influences--i ... Read More about

Lost and Found by David Gerson reveals the vulnerability and inner strength that it takes to grow up gay and Jewish in the South. His discoveries about his supposed "lioness" mother who failed to protect him and his siblings, his bear of a father who remained always in the shadows, and other memorab ... Read More about

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks meets Get Out in this “startling…powerful” (Kirkus Reviews) investigation of racial inequality at the core of the heart transplant race. In 1968, Bruce Tucker, a black man, went into Virginia’s top research hospital with a head injury, only to have his heart tak ... Read More about

Cindy Cunningham's memoir, Wild Woman: Memoir in Pieces is the story of how a precocious child, raised by the Bible and emotionally absent parents, survives a violation that steals her youth and sends her on a journey of bad boys and dangerous girls, mental institutions, losing her daughter, and a d ... Read More about