Word Thursdays Live! Featuring Virginia Schwartz and Leslie Sharpe

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Word Thursdays Live! in the Bright Hill Community Library featuring Virginia Schwartz and Leslie Sharpe

Word Thursdays featuring Virginia Schwartz and Leslie Sharpe will read Live in the Bright Hill Community Library on Thursday, July 24, 2025, at 7 PM EST. This reading will also be broadcast on Zoom and streamed on Bright Hill’s Facebook page. To attend the event on zoom, please use this link just before 7 PM EST:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81577446746

Or visit Bright Hill’s Facebook page at 7 PM EST to view the live stream.

To be considered for open mic please email info@brighthillpress.org

Suggested donation is $5, and free to students.

FEATURED WRITERS

Virginia Schwartz – Virginia Frances Schwartz spent her career as a Writing Instructor and Staff Developer in NYC schools. She trained in The Writing Process at Columbia University with Lucy Caulkins for 20 years. In addition, she was a writing instructor in UCLA’s online Creative Writing Program where she fused yoga and meditation to help writers build a sustainable writing practice.

She was the recipient of a Gould Grant from Columbia along with 3 Works in Progress grants from The Society of Children Book Writers & Illustrators. Author of 8 novels, of which Among the Fallen, a “Dickensian #MeToo novel”, is the most recent. It tells the story of a wrongly incarcerated girl in Victorian England who is offered a new life in Urania, a home Charles Dickens managed for homeless girls. Most of her novels are historical fiction: Crossing to Freedom, Initiation, Messenger, If I Just Had Two Wings and Send One Angel Down. Middle grade novels include Nutz! and 4 Kids in 5E & 1 Crazy Year, “a motivational book for reluctant readers and writers”. Recurring themes in her novels include: social justice, immigration, slavery and transformation.

Recipient of Parents Choice Gold, Geoffrey Bilson Historical Award, Notable Book Kuriyama International, Shortlisted for Sunburst for Speculative Fiction & YA Canadian Book of the Year, Violet Downey, NYC Books for the Teenage, Best Book for YA ALA, numerous US state awards, Silver Birch, Red Cedar, MYRCA, Rise YA Feminist Book, White Raven selection, and other nominations.

Triple Conjunction, her current work-in-progress for adult readers, blends speculative, literary and historical fiction. It explores the forbidden friendship between a Christian and a Jew in France’s medieval era, a relationship that alters history five centuries later with the finding of the Colmar Treasure. This story unfolds on a dual timeline with a non human character narrating sections: yersinia pestis, the bacterial agent of the Black Death, a causative force in the persecution of Jews in this era.

Virginia divides her time between Walton and Queens and holds dual citizenship in the US and Canada.
 

Leslie Sharpe – Leslie T. Sharpe is a writer, editor and educator. She began her editing career at Farrar Straus & Giroux and also worked at various book producers, as senior and managing editor, giving her an overview of the publishing business, from the most literary authors to the most commercial projects. Leslie currently works as an editorial consultant for publishers and literary agents.

As a teacher, at her graduate alma mater, Columbia University, Leslie taught nonfiction writing—personal essay and narrative nonfiction—in both the undergraduate and graduate writing divisions. Her popular Columbia seminar, “Can Truth Be Told: Issues in Nonfiction Storytelling,” hosted authors such as James Frey, discussing his controversial work, A Million Little Pieces. She has also taught editing and publishing at NYU and in CCNY’s Publishing Certificate Program, whose goal is to promote diversity within the publishing industry. She currently teaches nature writing with Writers in the Mountains in the Catskills.

As a writer, Leslie was a columnist for New York Newsday, and her essays on a variety of subjects—from birds to baseball to all things New York—have appeared in a variety of publications, including the New York Times, Newsday, The Village Voice, The Villager, City Sun, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, International Herald Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Psychology Today, Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine, Appalachia Journal, and Bluebird: The Journal of the North American Bluebird Society.

Her book, Editing fact and Fiction: A Concise Guide to Book Editing, published by Cambridge University Press, is, for theory, still regarded as the best.

Leslie T. Sharpe is a naturalist and nature writer. Her book, The Quarry Fox and Other Critters of the Wild Catskills (Overlook/Abrams, 2017), the “first literary treatment of Catskills wildlife since John Burroughs,” won a Gold Medal “IPPY” (Independent Book Publishers) Award for excellence. In 2020, the Quarry Fox audiobook, with Leslie reading, was produced by Silver Hollow Audio. In 2019, Leslie was named one of “Fifty Stewards of the Catskills” by the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development. In 2022, her essay, “The Bluebird Chronicles: A Catskills Romance,” was featured in a collection of essays appearing in Appalachia Journal that treated issues of environmental concern, especially climate change, affecting the Catskills. That essay was recently reprinted in Bluebird: The Journal of the North American Bluebird Society. Leslie wrote a series of fun short essays on aspects of the Catskills natural world for Psychology Today. Her critter poems for kids, of which she is very proud, have appeared in Ladybug Magazine. Leslie also served as Vice President of the NYC Audubon Society and editor ofThe Urban Audubon. She regularly appears at local Catskills venues such as John Burroughs Woodchuck Lodge and Slabsides, where she gives informal talks on Catskills wildlife and environmental issues. Leslie is also frequently heard on the popular Catskills program, “The Ginger Radio Hour,” reading her work and discussing aspects of Catskills nature.