Join French Connections and many other vendors and exhibitors on February 23-26, 2023, as we celebrate the 34th annual Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival at the Hampton Roads Convention Center! As we get ready to celebrate the 34th annual Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival, we reflect on all the positive times we’ve spent together and the joyfulness of all those years of quilts. We consider ourselves fortunate to have been part of this Festival. The Merchants Mall will feature everything for quilt, fiber, wearable & textile artists, and home sewers. In addition, MAQF will present the finest collection of quilt, garment, and fiber art exhibitions including quilt and wearable art prize money competitions. Rounding out the event will be workshops and lectures presented by leading instructors along with demonstrations throughout the Merchants Mall.

A rock and roll drummer abandons his successful music career to pursue his true passion and discovers a deeper understanding of artistic fulfillment in this episodic memoir of swapping one dream for another In the mid-1990s, fresh out of high school, Nic Brown was living his childhood dream as a rock and roll drummer. Signing a major label record deal, playing big shows, hitting the charts, giving interviews in Rolling Stone, appearing on The Tonight Show—what could be better for a young artist? But contrary to expectations, getting a shot at his artistic dream early in life was a destabilizing shock. The more he achieved, the more accolades that came his way, the less sure Brown became about his path. Only a few years into a promising musical career, he discovered the crux of his discontent: he was never meant to remain behind the drums. In fact, his true artistic path lay in a radically different direction entirely: he decided to become a writer, embarking on a journey leading him to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, publish novels and short stories, and teach literature to college students across the country. Bang Bang Crash tells the story of Nic Brown’s unusual journey to gain new strength, presence of mind, and sense of perspective, enabling him to discover an even greater life of artistic fulfillment. Nic Brown is the author of the novels In Every Way, Doubles, and Floodmarkers, which was selected as an Editors' Choice by The New York Times Book Review. He is the fiction editor of the South Carolina Review, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times and the Harvard Review, among many other publications. As a drummer, he has worked with Athenaeum, Ben Lee, Longwave, Skeleton Key, and Eszter Balint. A graduate of Columbia University […]