WMRA's November Books & Brews: M. S. Marangione

WMRA’s November 2022 Books & Brews will feature author M.S. Marangione discussing her book, Across The Blue Ridge Mountains,  which is set in the early twentieth century in Elkton, Virginia during  the social and political changes of industrialization, women’s equality,  the Eugenics movement, and the removal of mountain families for the  Shenandoah National Park.

7pm Tuesday, November 15, 2022 - Live, in person, at Pale Fire Brewing Company and available later on WMRA's Youtube Channel and on Facebook.

Signed copies of Across the Blue Ridge Mountains  by M. S. Marangione will be available at the event and online at Stone Soup Books.

WMRA's Books & Brews is made possible thanks to our series sponsor, Gaines Group Architects. The Gaines Group has offices in Charlottesville and Harrisonburg.

About Across the Blue Ridge Mountains

 Mary, the protagonist, makes a fateful decision to run off with a  grifter to escape her abusive mother. The novel follows her exile from  her family, abandonment in a West Virginia coal camp, and how she  eventually flourishes with a family on Hightop Mountain in what is now  Shenandoah National Park. Surrounded by nature, she heals from her  traumas and discovers the power of female friendships. Empowered, she  confronts the long arm of the federal government when over 1,000  families are told to abandon their homes and she fights to save her home  and way of life. Even when the government burns down her home, her  resilience and grace in the face of adversity become her beacon and  ultimately deliver her from herself.

About M.S. Marangione

M.S. Marangione fell in love with the Blue Ridge Mountains when in her early twenties  and moved to Virginia from New York. One evening, when at the Alexandria  Public Library in Northern Virginia, she came across a display on  Shenandoah National Park with photos of the mountain families and books  like Hollow Folk, the Undying Past of Shenandoah National Park,  Recollections; The People of the Blue Ridge Remember. At that time, the  mid-1980s, these were the only books published, and Hollow Folk was  highly biased. Yet, it lit a fire in her to discover more about the  people and families of the Shenandoah National Park.

When  Marangione moved to the Shenandoah Valley, leaving her intelligence  analyst career and becoming a teacher, she dived into the research and  spent many hours locating the old homesites on the SNP. After presenting  at many academic conferences on the subject, one winter’s morning,  Mary’s voice emerged and Marangione started writing Across the Blue  Ridge Mountains.

M.S. Marangione is a Professor of American and  Appalachian Literature at Blue Ridge Community College. Her poetry has  been published in Lumina magazine, Sagewoman, and the North Shore  Woman’s Newspaper.