Join us for an afternoon with Virginia writers J. Thomas Brown, JoAnn Meaker, and John Maxwell, who will be reading from their historical novels about strong women in history. This event is free and open to the public.
J. Thomas Brown is a novelist currently living in Richmond, Virginia. He has co-produced local TV writing shows and coordinated poetry readings at the Richmond Public Library. His short stories have appeared in The Zoo Fence and The Scarlet Leaf Review, as well as in River City Poets Anthology: Lingering in the Margins and Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, Volume III. His debut novel, The Land of Three Houses, is inspired by true events: as a boy in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, his home was taken by eminent domain and demolished to create Nockamixon State Park. A second novel, an adventure fantasy called The Hole in the Bone, was released in December of 2018.
Award-winning author JoAnn Meaker was born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island. After retiring from teaching, she and her husband moved to the Richmond area from Ontario, NY, a rural town near Rochester. She’s written several books: Images of America: Ontario, a pictorial history of the town; two historic fiction books, My Dear Emma and Four Branches; an anthology of short stories, A Line of Shorts; a children’s fantasy, Nola’s Gift; and Stories Beneath the Stones: Richmond National Cemetery, which includes data and stories of the Civil War soldiers buried in the Richmond National Cemetery. Her work also appears in several anthologies.
John Maxwell is a chef and Virginia television personality. Although his culinary career has taken him around the world, he and his wife, Judy, make their home in Richmond, Virginia. His novels—Susanna, Mother of Columbus and Phillippa, Wife of Columbus—are available on Amazon. Beatriz, Mistress of Columbus, the third in the series, will be finished in mid-2019. Looking at the world of Christopher Columbus through the eyes of the women in his life, John Maxwell takes what truths can be discovered about Columbus before his first voyage, and weaves a narrative that gives voice to these incredibly strong women.