>>My mother will always inspire me.

And I lost my mom, unfortunately, in 2012, and I think about her every single day.

And I think about how I can live her vision and what I can do to, to be the daughter I was raised to be.

And I also just think about, you know, my grandparents, my, my, the people who were part of my life, and also people who I just never knew.

The resilience of them, the resilience of, of, of my ancestry to, to bring, to bring me here and to allow me to do what I do.

Honestly, it's, it's just something breathtaking when you think about that.

My name is Kalela Williams and I'm the director of Virginia Humanities, Virginia Center for the Book.

I have, from the time that I've been a young person, been a writer, and been interested in the arts and how the arts intersect, and I've been interested in creativity and, and how we relate to each other.

I'm also a reader.

I, I'm a history enthusiast.

I love history.

I even do historical interpretation, or at least I used to.

I'm a daughter, I'm a sister, I'm an auntie, a partner, I'm a cat mama.

I'm also someone who thinks a lot about the world and about what's going on and about my place in it and what I can leave behind.

My debut novel is called Tangleroot.

It's the story of a teen girl who is moving from Boston to Central Virginia, and she's not terribly happy about it.

She's not closely connected to her mom.

They don't get along, and she's moving into a house that her enslaved ancestor built.

And so in the process, she's learning about the history of this town and the history of the house that she finds herself within and the history of this community and how that relates to her as an individual.

And so she's discovering herself, she's discovering her relationship with her mom, and she's discovering who she wants to be.

I was introduced to libraries as a child and introduced to used bookstores, and that's what really got me hooked on books.

So Virginia Humanities is the State's humanities council, and Virginia, the Virginia Center for the Book is a department within Virginia Humanities, and there's many other departments.

I have great coworkers in Folklife and in grants, in education and community initiatives, With Good Reason, a radio show, Encyclopedia of Virginia, I could go on and on.

And the Virginia Center for the Book as one of the departments in Virginia Humanities is, there's a Book Arts studio and a Book Arts program.

And so that encompasses an actual print studio, an art studio that focuses on book arts.

And then we also do year-round literary programs such as author readings and of course we're very well known for the Virginia Festival of the Book, which happens every year in March.

Books are a way to talk to people.

Books are ideas.

They're thoughts, they're written down on a page.

People coming together to talk about these ideas and these concepts and, and how they relate to us as individual people, that's what excites me about the Virginia Festival of the Book.

Now, there are some things, you know, there are some perks like meeting famous authors that's, and, and I fan girl like anybody else.

Really, what's exciting to me about the festival is the way that it allows me to think bigger and think broader and think more deeply and think all more imaginatively.

And my dad has shaped me.

My dad is ambitious.

He, he's not afraid of risk.

And, and I found that to be helpful in, in, in my work because if I'm not doing something that's a little scary, I don't know if I'm really pushing what books can do for us.

I think I'm always going to have some sort of role in bringing people together through books.

At least I hope so.