The Charlottesville Reading Series is excited to partner with the The Garage (250 1st St N) to bring words and music outside for a summer reading & performance! Grab a blanket, your lawn chairs, and some friends and join us in welcoming writers Aaron Belz and Natasha Oladokun and songwriter Abe Wilson to the series.

Aaron Belz lives in Hillsborough, NC. His books include The Bird Hoverer (BlazeVOX, 2007), Lovely, Raspberry (Persea, 2010) and Glitter Bomb (Persea, 2014). Michael Robbins calls him “one of the best comic poets we have”; Marjorie Perloff says “The poems in Glitter Bomb pull no punches: irreverent, devastating, even nasty at times, they capture the present moment in all its absurdity and hyperreality.”

Abe Wilson is one of three songwriters and the piano player in the Charlottesville based Americana act Sons of Bill. Described as “one of the best records of the year” by El Pais, Sons of Bill’s 2014 release “Love and Logic” gained the quintet both critical and popular success at home and abroad. Sons of Bill is currently working one their fifth record, due out in 2017.

Poet Natasha Oladokun holds an MFA from Hollins University, where she was a Teaching Fellow. Writing is where she works out her own sense of closeness to and distance from God. But her poetry is also a place to name how language itself is both true and deceptive, useful and unsatisfying as a way to reach towards God and each other, to name who He is and who we are.