Arts & Culture

In recent months, Richmonders have been deciding how best to memorialize the city's difficult history with race and slavery. Between state and city funds there are almost 20 million dollars to spend on a slavery museum and improvements to the city's Slave Trail.

Lumpkin's Jail, or "the devil's half acre" was the city's most notorious slave jail from the 1830's to the Civil War -- when Richmond was one of the largest hubs of slave trading in America.

For the past five years a think-tank in Richmond has been researching, crunching numbers and collecting interviews to answer the question: What does the region's future look like?  Thursday night, for the first time, they delivered some of their findings to a packed auditorium at the Richmond Times Dispatch. 

Virginia Tech’s Director of Creative Writing has a new book out. It’s a collection of prayers. He says the work of crafting a prayer is like what writers struggle with every day, expressing emotion, desires, hopes and dreams.  But as you’ll hear in this story, the book is a very different take on what you may think of as a prayer.

For most gardeners, this is a quiet time of year, but for one Virginia garden, this is the busy season.  Sandy Hausman reports on why about 60,000 people from around the state will be showing up there over the next few weeks.

On a cold autumn night, you wouldn’t expect crowds to gather in a garden, but executive director Shane Tippett says that’s exactly what you’ll find at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond.

The chorus of holiday songs will reach a fever pitch in the next few weeks.  But there are other ways to celebrate the season.  Every year, the Radford University music department rekindles a holiday tradition known as the “Madrigal Dinner.”