Images from author’s website

In celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, my guest on BookNotes this month is the historical novelist and preservationist Sharon Virts, whose six-part saga Fields of Honor, set during the first half of the 1800s, is grounded in historical fact.

Baltimore poet, Shirley J. Brewer—who says that she earned her MBA from the Maryland Bartending Academy!—is out with her fifth poetry collection. I invited her to read from and talk about it on BookNotes.

British cellist Steven Isserlis and his long-time collaborator Connie Shih perform a program of Beethoven, Schumann, Kabalevsky, and Vítězslava Kaprálová to close out the subscription season of Shriver Hall Concert Series‘ 60th anniversary. I spoke with him by phone from New York.

Poet and essayist Elizabeth Hazen is a Maryland native and a fixture on the Baltimore literary scene. Her new poetry collection, The Sky Will Hold, is out this weekend.

Cover art by Christopher Hitz

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.

Cover design: Beth Steidle
Photo credit: JCPenney

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, and she’s my guest on BookNotes this month.