THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, March 29, 1996 TAG: 9603290528
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B4 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE LENGTH: Short : 49 lines
The second Virginia Festival of the Book began Thursday, and organizers said they are trying to broaden the event's audience and scope.
``We are expecting a much larger crowd this year,'' said Victoria Sours, project coordinator for the festival and a development officer at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the festival's chief sponsor. ``We're really trying to branch out to all areas of the state.''
The inaugural event last March showcased Charlottesville writers such as Rita Mae Brown, Mary Lee Settle and John Casey. This year, poet Henry Taylor of Loudoun County, novelist Clyde Edgerton, originally from Durham, N.C., and Richard Nixon biographer and historian Stephen Ambrose of Bay St. Louis, Miss., are among those participating.
The festival - expanded from three to four days - started Thursday on Charlottesville's Downtown Mall with an appearance by Rita Dove, a University of Virginia English professor and former U.S. poet laureate.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCollough, who narrated Ken Burns' ``Civil War'' documentary, was scheduled to give a keynote speech Friday.
Spread across the four days of the festival are 125 events and seminars for academics, rare book collectors, aspiring authors and just plain lovers of the printed and spoken word.
The first two days' programs include an emphasis on children and families, with events planned at a half-dozen local schools, a guided Internet tour for children at the central library and a poetry reading for young adults at a teen center.
Other highlights include fiction readings Friday night by John Casey, Howard Norman and Elinor Lippman, poetry readings Saturday night by Rita Dove and Henry Taylor and a discussion and book-signing Friday and Saturday by Ambrose. His book, ``Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and The Opening of the American West,'' was published last month.
Charlottesville is also the site for the Virginia Blues Festival and the Virginia Festival of American Film, but a book festival seems the most appropriate for the university town.
A survey published in 1994 in U.S. News and World Report ranked Charlottesville third nationally behind Seattle and Austin, Texas, in books read per capita. by CNB