Booknotes – WBJC

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs—AWP—is holding its 2026 Annual Conference & Bookfair at the Baltimore Convention Center through this Saturday. One of the thousands of attendees is Natasha Williams, whose memoir The Parts of Him I Kept: The Gifts of My Father’s Madness has been published by Baltimore’s Apprentice House Press. […]

Nathan Leslie—Writer. Editor. Organizer. Educator—is out with his latest novel titled Van Boyle, which one reviewer describes as “a compelling, heart-rending tale of a former major league ballplayer who has lost everything and now subsists in the wilds of Maryland.”

Dr. Marjory Serrano-Coyer is a violinist, educator, performer, and passionate communicator. She has brought all these gifts together in her informative book, Concertmaster Leadership: A Guide for Violinists.

Jeannie Vanasco, who teaches creative writing at Towson University, has been on the receiving end of a silent treatment from her mother. It’s the subject of her third memoir.

Best Small Fictions is the first-ever contemporary anthology solely dedicated to anthologizing the best internationally published short hybrid fiction in a given calendar year. The Series Editor is Nathan Leslie, who is my guest on BookNotes this month.

Five centuries before cat videos took over the Internet felines were gracing the margins of medieval manuscripts, and an exhibition called Paws on Parchment is currently on display in the Medieval Gallery at The Walters Arts Museum. It’s been curated by Lynley Anne Herbert, the Robert and Nancy Hall Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, […]

“I want to combine narrative and image, language and paint. I want them together.” And that is what happens in Deborah Brown English‘s debut illustrated novel, Time’s Breath: An Odyssey in words and Pictures.

Dan Fesperman, former foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun turned author of intrigue and suspense, is coming out with his thirteenth novel this month. It’s called Pariah, and it was a pleasure to speak to Dan about it.

You know Claire McCardell through ballet flats, mix-and-match separates, pockets, zippers, leggings, and more, yet she remains the most influential fashion designer you’ve never heard of. Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson has set out to change that with her book, Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free. […]

The Opposite of Cruelty, newly released by Blair Publishing, is the second poetry collection from Steven Leyva. It was an enormous pleasure to catch up with an old MFA alum.