100 People to Meet in 2025: Storytellers

Dating back to Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulkner, Virginia has hosted its fair share of writers and creative types, a rich tradition that these Virginians carry into the present.

I.S. Berry

Author, “The Peacock and The Sparrow,” Fairfax Station

I.S. Berry flirted with writing even before earning her law degree at the University of Virginia and joining the CIA, where she spent six years as a spy, including in Baghdad from 2004 to 2005. In her first novel, 2023’s “The Peacock and The Sparrow” about a disillusioned spy stationed in the Middle East during the Arab Spring, Berry found a good prism to spin a tale. It also allowed her to channel some of her own experiences; espionage, she says, took a toll on her, and the role was fraught with murky decision-making.

The book landed on numerous “best of” lists and garnered multiple awards, including an Edgar Award for best first novel. Berry is at work on her second novel, another spy thriller.

Marland Buckner

President and CEO, Shockoe Institute, Richmond

Marland Buckner, who spent years in Washington, D.C., as the government affairs director for Microsoft, joined the Shockoe Institute in 2023. It’s the first step of The Shockoe Project, a 10-acre indoor and outdoor historic venue that will include a national slavery museum and provide context for archaeological sites in downtown Richmond, a center for commerce and the slave trade before the U.S. Civil War.

Funded partly with an $11 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, the institute’s goal is to put today’s issues and events into a fact-based, historical context to help visitors consider them in new ways. The former Main Street Station train shed will house the institute’s public exhibition, which is expected to open in late 2025.

Buckner previously served as interim executive director of Richmond’s Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia.

Evan Friss

Professor, James Madison University; author, “The Bookshop,” Harrisonburg

Fifteen years ago, associate history professor Friss had an idea for a book about bookstores but set it aside. He went on to write “The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s” and “On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City,” both of which found relatively small audiences.

Not so for “The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore,” which came out in August and immediately made The New York Times’ bestseller list, among others. Capturing the imagination of a reading public that has increased since the pandemic, the book tells a larger narrative about the history of the bookstore and its central place in America’s cultural life. “It says something about the state of reading today that a book about bookstores is on the bestseller list,” Friss says.

Sarah McCammon

National political correspondent, NPR; author, “The Exvangelicals,” Norfolk

Sarah McCammon grew up in an evangelical Christian household during the 1980s and 1990s. Her work covering President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for NPR helped set the stage for her first book, released by Macmillan Publishers in March. The book, which is part memoir, part nonfiction journalism, outlines the disillusionment some evangelicals have felt after coming of age with the Republican Party as it has taken a far right turn amid more recent social justice movements, including Black Lives Matter and #MeToo.

The book was a fast bestseller, reaching No. 14 on The New York Times’ nonfiction hardcover list.

McCammon, who splits her time between Norfolk and Washington, D.C., says she has an idea for a new book brewing. 

Check out the rest of our 100 People to Meet in 2025.