New Dominion Bookshop will host a book talk and signing with clinical psychologist and author Kay Redfield Jamison on Saturday at 4 p.m.
Jamison will be speaking about her recent book, Fires in the Dark: Healing the Unquiet Mind, which was released from Knopf this past spring. She argues that not only patients but also doctors must be healed. She draws on the example of W. H. R. Rivers, the renowned psychiatrist who treated poet Siegfried Sassoon and other World War I soldiers, and discusses the long history of physical treatments for mental illness, as well as the ancient and modern importance of religion, ritual, and myth in healing the mind. She looks at the vital role of artists and writers, as well as exemplary figures, such as Paul Robeson, who have helped to heal us as a people.
Fires in the Dark is a beautiful meditation on the quest and adventure of healing the mind, on the power of accompaniment, and the necessity for knowledge.
Jamison is the Dalio Professor in Mood Disorders and a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, as well as an honorary professor of English at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
She is the co-author of the standard medical text on bipolar disorder and author of An Unquiet Mind, Night Falls Fast, Exuberance, and Touched with Fire. Her most recent book, Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Jamison is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She is a recipient of the Lewis Thomas Prize, the Sarnat Prize from the National Academy of Medicine and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship.
A conversation with Ben Martin, the assistant director of Programs in Health Humanities at the Center for Health Humanities and Ethics at the UVA School of Medicine, will follow.
Martin is an academic hospitalist and assistant director of Programs in Health Humanities at the Center for Health Humanities and Ethics at the UVA School of Medicine. His research interests focus on the intersection of fiction and clinical medicine. He studied English and American literature at Middlebury College and was awarded the Donald E. Axinn Prize for his creative thesis. His writing has most recently appeared on Literary Hub.
This in-person event will be free to attend and open to the public.
New Dominion Bookshop is located at 404 E Main St. on the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville.
For more information, visit ndbookshop.com.
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Crystal Graham
