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Coming up later this month, the Barbara Rose Johns Farmville-Prince Edward Community Library will open a new exhibit. Beginning on Tuesday, April 11, “Expanding the Audience for Veterans’ Voices” will debut.

The new project features works written by veterans and families about their experiences serving their country.

Dr. Michael Lund, Professor Emeritus of Longwood University, will begin the event at 6 p.m. with a brief presentation, “Shaking the Hand of History.” Also Anita Carroll, a Bedford County resident, will recount how she wrote “My Gold Star Experience,” one of the works in the exhibit, and explain the therapeutic power of writing.

Lund’s project was funded by Longwood University and a Virginia Humanities’ “Rapid Grant” for Spring 2023. His Home and Abroad program received an earlier Virginia Humanities award in 2019, which aided the printing and distribution of the written works of Southside Virginia veterans and their families.

Lund founded Home and Abroad in 2015 to provide veterans with group and individual instruction in writing and to help citizens appreciate military history. “I feel that citizenship in a country with an all-volunteer military mandates civilian understanding of what is undertaken to protect the nation’s way of life,” Lund states. He served as an Army correspondent in Vietnam.

Home and Abroad encourages those who served at home and supported those on deployment to write about their contributions also.

The exhibit will also be traveling this spring to other public libraries in the region, including Buckingham, Charlotte, Cumberland and Nottoway.

More information can be viewed on Lund’s website, http://homeandabroadva.com.