The chaos lurking beneath the “perfect” family holiday
Just in time for the holidays, Round House Theatre presents the U.S. premiere of Sam Holcroft’s Rules for Living, which runs through January 4 and features a dysfunctional family coming together and trying (far too hard) to have the perfect Christmas dinner.
I am looking at just a crow, only one, and wait for more.
One of the most welcome new books by a DMV poet is J.D. Smith’s The Place That Is Coming to Us (Broadstone Books, 2025). Smith is a long-time mainstay of the D.C.-area poetry community and, from the evidence on view in this collection, his powers have not diminished.
Kinship requires a leap of faith and a keen eye for beauty in darkness
What Haunts Me by Bernadette Geyer is an intimate look at kinship and all the responsibilities and history it comes with. The narrator of these poems is looking at nature, their family, and events to find the source of kinship and whether they are deserving of it.
Of mountains and good men
Dixon, Descending is an extraordinary book. It’s hard to say what I loved more as I read it—the rich characters or the lively, convincing descriptions of both everyday moments and literal, top-of-the-world moments in the lives of the main character, an educator and amateur mountain climber, and his brother.
If you leave, try this book
If You Leave, the richly-drawn debut novel by Margaret Hutton (Regal House Publishing, October 2025), is the story of two women who are unlikely friends. But whereas the trope of unlikely friends usually signals a well-trod exploration of those aforementioned opposites, protagonists Lucille and Audrey offer something fresher and more relatable because they resist those neat, contrasting boxes.
One local writer’s vision of make-believe living
The stories in Lauren D. Woods' debut collection, The Great Grown-up Game of Make Believe (Autumn House Press, October 2025), pendulum between the speculative and the real, embodying how many people live their lives: half in imagination, half in the material world. These tales tremble with an unusual sense of stasis and imbalance, like someone who knows they’re susceptible to vertigo, yet keeps glancing over the edge of a high balcony anyway.
“Part of you wants to believe this poem was written by a human”
Using a wide array of emotional tones and an equally varied set of forms and styles, Knapp engages directly with many of the issues affecting our nation and our planet as a whole. By turns humorous, sad, ironic, witty, angry, resigned, these poems are essential reading and vital acts of resistance.
A bold experiment at the Folger melds ‘Julius Caesar’ with Malcolm X
The Folger Theatre’s Julius X: A Reinvisioning of the Tragedy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare is a bold experiment: Shakespeare’s classic is not adapted here but rather reimagined and transformed into a new work that uses the motifs, themes, and some of the language of Shakespeare’s play to create something completely new. Notably, the central character is not a modern-day Caesar counterpart, or a tyrant at all, but a fictionalized version of Malcolm X.
New production brims with community and joy
‘Merry Wives,’ playing through October 5 at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., is colorful, delightful, and teeming with joy from beginning to end. This reimagining of William Shakespeare’s comedy 'Merry Wives of Windsor' features an all-Black cast and relocates the story from 1590s Windsor, England to present-day South Harlem.
Quirky, strange, vulnerable, and defiant
Hannah Grieco’s debut book is a slim but powerful collection of short stories that are at times funny, at times devastating, and always full of heart, intensity, and life. First Kicking, Then Not (Stanchion, 2025) examines motherhood, caretaking, and mid-life n —particularly the gritty, imperfect parts of womanhood that we often don’t talk about or acknowledge in our society.
Back to school
With the school year now underway, we thought a feature on teacher-writers would be in order. Since we began publishing, Washington Unbound has featured a number of DMV writers who are also professional educators.
Poems of mystery and shape-shifting along the James River
From the get-go, Bernier pulls the rug out from under the reader (gently, but with koan-like force). In this poem, to know does not mean to understand; your gestures have resonance, but not meaning, and when some natural element reaches the sea, it becomes … unreal, a fantasy.
Love is a driving force
Writer and literary activist Mike Maggio is a long-time fixture in the DMV literary community. In addition to his six poetry collections, he has published six novels and maintains a blog in which he reviews, promotes, and publishes the work of other writers, along with news of his own. The latter exemplifies his generosity toward other writers and the community at large.
A summer reading list for dark times
This has been a stressful summer to live through, politically speaking, and it doesn’t feel like the tension is going to break anytime soon. But life goes on, with these long summer days feeling normal and not normal, surreal and not surreal. I’m always on the lookout for summer reads that are also smart—books that feel weighty enough for me to care about, but are entertaining enough for the pool or the beach, or just a long, hot Saturday spent in the air conditioning.
Songs of yearning
Rarely has a collection of poems so perfectly embodied the experiences of the poet as does In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls, by Majda Gama. Gama, born in Beirut to a Saudi father and an American mother and now residing in the D.C. area, has chronicled her life of moving between cultures and identities before coming to at least a temporary rest here.
The Phillips Collection memorializes one of D.C.’s finest artists
Essex Hemphill was a force of nature. The multifaceted artist—poet, performer, visual artist, activist—is the subject of a powerful exhibition at the Phillips Collection, Essex Hemphill: Take Care of Your Blessings.
A fresh perspective on classical music
Martha Anne Toll’s second novel, Duet for One, is a lovely, meditative, lyrical book that drew me in immediately. I want to say that this is a quiet novel, but it's about music and musicians, so that seems like the wrong word. Especially because Toll excels at describing the classical music that permeates this story so well that I can almost hear the music.
One-dollar stories pay off
In Elizabeth Bruce’s Universally Adored & Other One Dollar Stories, the needs that can be satisfied by a single dollar are varied and surprising: a can opener, the comforts of a coin-operated massage bed, forgiveness. The power of these stories emerges in the elaboration of those needs and the sharp glimpses they provide into the fuller breadth of the characters’ lives.
Complicated landscapes of beauty, threat, and unease
Sandra Marchetti’s third full-length collection, Diorama (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2025) depicts a woman in complicated uneasy relationships with the world, nature, and herself. Marchetti presents a dazzling array of poems that demonstrate the sure hand with language of a veteran poet who is also an accomplished writer of prose.
An ambiguous, thrilling adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novel
Emily Burns’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the kind of play that makes me an active participant in the drama and sits with me after the curtain call, getting more and more interesting as I mull it over. Written and directed by Burns, this world premiere is on stage at the Shakespeare Theatre through June 29.