Virtual Author Event: Vanessa Riley

Thursday, February 5th, 2026, at 7:00 PM EST

Content was copied from Mahwah Library.

Join us for an unforgettable experience as we chat online with Vanessa Riley about her newest book, Fire Sword and Sea, based on the folk story of the female pirate Jacquotte Delahaye.

The Caribbean Sea, 1675. Jacquotte Delahaye is the mixed-race daughter of a wealthy tavern owner on the island of Tortuga. Instead of marriage, Jacquotte dreams of joining the seafarers and smugglers whose tall-masted ships cluster in the turquoise waters around Tortuga. In Haiti she becomes Jacques, a dockworker, earning the respect of those around her while hiding her gender.

Jacquotte discovers that secret identities are fairly common in the chaotic world of seafaring, which is full of outsiders and misfits. As Jacques, Jacquotte falls in love with Lizzôa d’Erville, a beautiful courtesan who deals in secrets and sex. While others see their work clothes as a disguise, Lizzôa’s true self is as a woman.

For the next twenty years, Jacquotte raids the Caribbean, making enemies and amassing a fortune in stolen gold. When her fellow pirates decide to increase their profits by entering the slave trade, Jacquotte turns away from piracy and the pursuit of riches. Risking her life in one deadly skirmish after another, she instead begins to plot a war of liberation.

Don’t miss out on this exciting discussion! Register now to embark on a seafaring journey of self discovery and reclamation of personal power.

About the Author: Vanessa Riley is an award-winning author and proud recipient of the 2024 Georgia Mystery/Detective Fiction Author of the Year. She writes Sagas and Book Club Fiction that brings to life the hidden narratives of Black women and women of color in novels like Island Queen and Queen of Exiles. Her stories celebrate strong sisterhoods, diverse communities, and resilience across historical fiction, romance, and mystery genres.Her work has been featured in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Publishers Weekly, and The New York Times.

Link to register: https://libraryc.org/mahwahlibrary/106657?uMarketingSource=_LSC_ME_02_0

Joe Hill on Book Tour

Now is your chance to meet Joe Hill, who is Stephen King’s son. He wrote NOS4A2, which was made into a series. I highly recommend you watch it and pick up the book.

Here is the link to RSVP: https://www.joehillfiction.com/appearances?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=HCP%202025.10.22%20King%20Sorrow&utm_term=HCP%20CLUSTER%20Crime%20and%20Thrillers%20OR%20Horror%20Action%20PLUS%20AP

Free Virtual Book Talk: Beyond Blue and White

Virtual book talk with author Genevieve Wheeler Brown exploring the hidden history of Delftware and the women behind it.

Date and time

Thursday, September 18 · 6 – 7pm EDT

Location

Online

About this event
Community • Historic
Discover the Untold Story Behind Delftware—And the Women Who Shaped It

Join us virtually on Thursday, September 18 at 6 PM for a special conversation with author and decorative arts advisor Genevieve Wheeler Brown as she introduces her new book, Beyond Blue and White: The Hidden History of Delftware and the Women Behind the Iconic Ceramic (Pegasus Books, releasing August 5).

Broadcast live online from the West Parlor of Van Cortlandt House Museum, Genevieve will share surprising stories of artistry, influence, and women’s labor—set against the backdrop of VCHM’s own historic Delft tile collection.

Don’t miss this opportunity to explore how the museum’s collection connects to a broader, often overlooked legacy.

This book talk is fully online. Registration is required to receive Zoom webinar link. Admission is free. Donations are appreciated.

About the book:

“When over seventy-five pieces of rare and intriguing 17th and 18th century Delftware are rediscovered in a historic Manhattan townhouse, decorative art advisor and writer Genevieve Wheeler Brown quickly recognizes that, together, these pieces tell an amazing story. What begins as a curatorial exercise quickly evolves not only into an exploration of this colorful, expressive, and sometimes even humorous decorative art, coveted for hundreds of years, but also an unexpected uncovering of forceful female lives yet untold. Connecting the accounts of women across centuries, Beyond Blue and White allows us to craft a more complete picture of female experience through the lens of material culture.

We meet female Delftware makers, including Barbara Rotteveel founder of “The Three Bells” Delftware factory in 1671. We are introduced to female Delftware patrons such as Queen Mary II, who found her means of expression while creating a vogue in the 17th century for Delft blue and white across royal courts. And then there are the female collectors beginning in the 19th century who saw the artistry and craft in these ceramics others had overlooked. Foremost among them was Mrs. J. Pierpont Morgan and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt II who came together with fellow New York women and laid the groundwork for women in the museum world while preserving decorative arts with an educational mission.

With illustrations of period objects, documents, maps, paintings, prints and drawings, Beyond Blue and White is a colorful celebration of an iconic decorative art and dynamic women living in extraordinary times. Wheeler-Brown’s rich narrative encourages us to see beyond the dazzling cobalt glaze of Delftware to consider that these vessels are also our connection to a history with a fascinating group of women at its center.”

About the author:

As a decorative art advisor and writer with over thirty years in the art world, including a decade with Christie’s in New York and London, Genevieve Wheeler Brown has been actively involved in the community of Delftware. She has also participated on the Antiques Roadshow as an appraiser with an eye out for overlooked “treasure.” In her role, she has held innumerable objects, from fake Stradivari violins to gold-mounted Faberge eggs, considering their value but also the stories they can tell.

Link to RSVP for event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/virtual-book-talk-beyond-blue-white-with-genevieve-wheeler-brown-tickets-1553027911289?aff=oddtdtcreator

Currently Reading: The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

I’m reading this book to have a book discussion to celebrate Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Imagine being on an island where things start to disappear one by one. Even those memories need to disappear. Then slowly, people start disappearing, too. This amazing story is about losing your self identity, having the government be in control of everything, and making sure all memories and things disappear forever.

Goodreads Blurb

On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses—until things become much more serious. Most of the island’s inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.

When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.

A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.

Author Biography

Yōko Ogawa (小川洋子) was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, graduated from Waseda University, and lives in Ashiya. Since 1988, she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel The Professor and his Beloved Equation has been made into a movie. In 2006 she co-authored „An Introduction to the World’s Most Elegant Mathematics“ with Masahiko Fujiwara, a mathematician, as a dialogue on the extraordinary beauty of numbers.

A film in French, “L’Annulaire“ (The Ringfinger), directed by Diane Bertrand, starring Olga Kurylenko and Marc Barbé, was released in France in June 2005 and subsequently made the rounds of the international film festivals; the film, some of which is filmed in the Hamburg docks, is based in part on Ogawa’s “Kusuriyubi no hyōhon“ (薬指の標本), translated into French as “L’Annulaire“ (by Rose-Marie Makino-Fayolle who has translated numerous works by Ogawa, as well as works by Akira Yoshimura and by Ranpo Edogawa, into French).

Kenzaburō Ōe has said, ‘Yōko Ogawa is able to give expression to the most subtle workings of human psychology in prose that is gentle yet penetrating.’ The subtlety in part lies in the fact that Ogawa’s characters often seem not to know why they are doing what they are doing. She works by accumulation of detail, a technique that is perhaps more successful in her shorter works; the slow pace of development in the longer works requires something of a deus ex machina to end them. The reader is presented with an acute description of what the protagonists, mostly but not always female, observe and feel and their somewhat alienated self-observations, some of which is a reflection of Japanese society and especially women’s roles within in it. The tone of her works varies, across the works and sometimes within the longer works, from the surreal, through the grotesque and the–sometimes grotesquely–humorous, to the psychologically ambiguous and even disturbing.

My review will be posted soon.