Author’s Corner
We treat the recent works of local authors from independent publishers like national bestsellers by spotlighting them across all our programming and through community collaborations.
Our Spotlighted
November Author
Charlotte Taylor Fryar
Author of Potomac Fever: Reflections on the Nation’s River
Charlotte Taylor Fryar is the author of Potomac Fever: Reflections on the Nation’s River (Bellevue Literary Press, 2025). Her essays, which have been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and recognized in The Best American Essays, can be found in Orion, Fourth Genre, Literary Hub, and the Southern Humanities Review, among other publications. Her writing been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and the Inner Loop, where she is 2025 featured author. Charlotte holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and lives just outside in Washington D.C., less than 700 feet from the banks of the Potomac River. She is the Writer-In-Residence at a boarding school in northern Virginia, and operates a small community herbal clinic. For more information, visit www.charlottetaylorfryar.com/.
As she walks the length of the Potomac River, clambering up its banks and sounding its depths, Charlotte Taylor Fryar examines the geography and ecology of Washington, D.C. with all manner of flora and fauna as her witness. The ecological traces of human inhabitancy provide her with imaginative access into America’s past, for her true subject is the origin of our splintered nation and racially divided capital.
From the gentrified neighborhood of Shaw to George Washington’s slave labor camp at Mount Vernon, Potomac Fever maps the troubled histories of the United States by leading us along the less-trafficked trails and side streets of our capital city, steeped in the legacy of white supremacy and colonialism. In the end, Fryar offers hope for how “we might grow a society guided by the ethics and values of the places we live.”
A compelling synthesis of historical, environmental, and personal narrative, Potomac Fever exposes the roots of our national myths, awash in the waters of America’s renowned river.
In the wake of Black displacement, D.C. is losing its Black sense of place — though it has not yet lost it. A post-racial haze has settled in over the city, clouding the protracted reality of gentrification with the gauzy language of diversity. The city may appear from afar to be diverse, the kind of fictitious global melting pot that makes a metropolitan area, but once you step in, you see division stiffening and segregation hardening.
To live in this city is to live in a constant state of disorientation. I mean this literally, as well as figuratively, spatially, as well as temporally: I often find myself lost in neighborhoods even I, a white newcomer, once knew my way around. Signposts of place — a neon carry-out sign, the funeral parlor with bright green window trim — have disappeared, and I find myself unable to remember where to make my next turn, or indeed, when I even am.
To orient myself in a city that felt at once to be perpetually new and still heavy with history, I tried, particularly during the first years I lived here, to transform Washington, D.C. into a memory palace — a method of mnemonic retrieval many historians rely on to maintain a detailed recollection of the past. In my memory palace, each street and trail became associated in my mind with some aspect of the city’s history. To retrieve these stories later in order to make sense of them, I had only to imagine walking east down Florida Avenue or the tip of Kingman Island and I was there, somewhere in the past.
For a time, I found this to be a useful strategy for locating myself in both place and time in a city that seemed to struggle with both concepts, but I soon became overwhelmed. D.C. is, of course, quite a large city, and there are more histories here than one mind can wrangle. But there is also a unique, dual feature to retrieving memories laid down in place here. For D.C. is not only home to its own history — what might, in any other place, be called local history; it is also the repository for the nation’s history. The struggle over which layer should rise to the surface makes the already unsettled terrain of the capital even trickier to navigate.
This contested aspect of the city’s past has meant that D.C. has always been a place with a split psyche: it belongs to the nation, but not to itself. The belief that Washington, D.C., the imagined Black capital city, belongs only to the white settler nation, has manifested into a widespread, national relationship to the city predicated on ownership, though this relationship is not always interpreted in racial terms. The idea of the capital as a national cynosure, where every American may stake a claim, has long been celebrated. Even Frederick Douglass could not help but to join in on the patriotic and proprietorial feelings such an understanding of the capital can inspire: “The poor man should feel rich and the rich man should feel richer by reason of his relationship to it and his ownership in it, for the capital of the nation belongs alike to all.” When the capital belongs to the nation, Washington, D.C. becomes, of course, property. And in this way, it ceases to be a real place, where its own residents might seek their own sense of belonging — or indeed, a sense of safety.
“Fryar seamlessly weaves a fascinating history of racial, class, and gendered divisions that exist in and outside of Washington, D.C.’s quintessential worlds of interrelated nature and American (in)humanity.”
— Marcie Cohen Ferris, coeditor of Southern Cultures journal and author of The Edible South
“Provocative. . . . Starting with a love of the river and the plants around it, the evocative descriptions are joined by political and social histories that define who lives where and the impacts of pollution and climate change. An important read about a place that defines us all.”
— Jan Blodgett, Main Street Books (Davidson, NC)
Our Spotlighted
October Author
Tamar Shapiro
Author of Restitution
Tamar Shapiro’s first novel, Restitution, was named one of the 49 must-read books of fall 2025 by Town and Country Magazine. Her writing has also appeared in Electric Literature, Poets and Writers, and Literary Hub. A former housing attorney and non-profit leader, Shapiro has attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Summer Program, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, and is a 2026 MFA candidate at Randolph College in Virginia. She grew up in both the U.S. and Germany and now lives in Washington, DC.
As children in Central Illinois, Kate and Martin were never told much about their mother’s childhood in East Germany. And they rarely asked questions. They were too busy grappling with the heartache left behind by an absent father and the tough love of a mother forced to raise them alone in a country not her own. Decades later, when the Berlin Wall falls, Kate and Martin are faced with a difficult decision: Should they try to reclaim the house in East Germany from which their grandparents fled in the 1950s? But a house is never just a house, and the family secrets they discover reopen old wounds, driving the siblings apart just as divided Germany is coming together. Against the backdrop of German reunification, Restitution asks urgent questions that resonate today. What remains when people leave entire lives behind? What happens when personal histories are erased? And what – if anything – can heal these wounds?
We were sitting on our front porch, Darren and I, when the Berlin Wall fell. One of the defining moments of our generation, and there we were huddled in parkas, watching thick November clouds descend over the barren fields of Central Illinois.
Our car stood in the driveway, parked crookedly like an afterthought, the front passenger seat pushed all the way back, headlights still on, forgotten. In the dimming afternoon gloom, the beams shone wobbly streaks onto cracked concrete. Less than half an hour had passed since we’d returned from the hospital empty-handed, Darren lifting me carefully out of the front seat, his touch as tender as my insides. Yet everything had changed.
Yesterday we’d rushed the contractor along, excited to renovate our house for the baby. A new room on the side, casement windows looking over the fields, a cushioned seat designed for curling up, tiny nose fogging winter glass. Today, construction dust hung in the house, heavy as a shroud, and we sat on the porch with wind-chapped cheeks, watching a lifeless horizon that had felt like home until we returned from the hospital to a loneliness I had not known was possible. We hadn’t yet shared our good news with anyone, not even Mom, so there was no one with whom to share our grief. No calls to make. Just the two of us bound by the weight of lips held tight and shoulders high, our jagged breaths casting white clouds toward the gray ones that fell from above.
“A deeply felt, beautifully crafted exploration of the ways a family can lose and find each other. Restitution’s events are as vast in scope as the division and reunification of Germany, and as particular and human as the struggles and misunderstandings between husband and wife, brother and sister, parent and child; Shapiro is at home in all registers. Deft, wildly intelligent, and moving–a marvelous debut from a writer at the start of what’s sure to be a thrilling career.”
– Clare Beams, author of The Garden and The Illness Lesson
“Rich, immersive, and intelligent, Restitution interrogates childhood memories with adult wisdom. It asks whether what’s broken—in us, our families, our nations—can ever be put back together again. It is gorgeous.”
– Julia Phillips, national bestselling author of Bear and Disappearing Earth
“A mesmerizing, haunting story about the ruptures caused by family secrets and forced departures. A novel steeped in the complex history of German reunification, Restitution is a deeply moving examination of separation—across borders, generations, memories, and the Berlin Wall. Tamar Shapiro asks us to consider: What makes a family? How do we honor and atone for our lineage and legacy? What would we risk to hold onto our homelands? An intricate, piercing novel written by an astounding talent.”
– Crystal Hana Kim, author of The Stone Home and If You Leave Me.
“With lush, evocative, and assured prose, Tamar Shapiro delivers an unforgettable generational saga about foundations—both literal and figurative—and the ways they can hold us up and hold us down. Shapiro does not shy away from the ‘yes and’ nature of family, immersing readers in a narrative of love and anger, home and groundlessness, betrayal and ever-so-complicated redemption. You’ll never believe this is a debut.”
– John Vercher, author of Devil is Fine
“Restitution is a stunning book that moves gracefully through both time and place. Tamar Shapiro’s debut novel, which focuses on an American family and their ancestral home in Germany in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, considers how the past is always connected to the present and how understanding that relationship is often the key to moving forward. Shapiro’s beautiful prose and her exquisite development of both character and place brings this unique and fascinating story to life.”
– Laura Spence-Ash, author of Beyond That, the Sea
“I have rarely encountered a debut novel as potent, moving, and assured as Restitution. Tamar Shapiro twines the past and present, the political and the personal, into a story of tantalizing secrets. How much do we know about the people who raised us? To what extent are we defined by the legacies of family, culture, and country? Is it necessary—or even possible—to atone for the sins of our ancestors? Restitution is a book that lingers in the mind, asking important questions and resisting easy answers. Shapiro is a marvel.”
– Abby Geni, author of The Body Farm, The Wildlands, and The Lightkeepers.
“Tender and deeply-wrought, Restitution is about all the ways war and political division splinter countries and families, but also how they can fracture a person’s spirit. Shapiro takes us into the years immediately following WWII in Germany, through division and reunification, and the ways these shattering events are carried through the lives of ordinary citizens and their descendants. In her nimble hands the story she weaves is hauntingly personal and universal.”
– Elizabeth Gonzalez James, author of The Bullet Swallower
“The year is 1989. The Wall has fallen, and Germany is in the throes of reunification. Kate and Martin, American siblings whose grandparents fled East Germany in the 1950s, now face a dilemma—ought they attempt to reclaim the family home they never knew? And what does that mean for the other family that has lived there for decades? Powerfully intertwining the personal and the political, Tamar Shapiro’s debut tracks a family that begins to fracture under the weight of secrets, betrayals and resentments. Restitution is an elegiac reminder of how our lives play out against the backdrop of the past and are shaped by forces larger than our own.”
– Susan Coll, author of Real Life and Other Fictions and former president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.
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Books published between
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Virtual Craft Chat: Defining Place w/Charlotte Taylor Fryar
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