Roanoke Valley Television
Roanoke City Mayor Joe Cobb and Roanoke City Public Library staff are determined to tap into the special way in which reading brings people together with the creation of The Cobb Collective, a new library program that aims to share the mayor’s passion for reading with Roanokers across the city. At this monthly event, residents are invited to come together at the library to swap books, share meaningful takeaways and engage in dialogue ignited by that month’s chosen genre or theme.
For the next eight months, Cobb will host a themed book club at one of the following libraries: Main, Belmont, Williamson Rd., and Raleigh Court.
The first meeting, held Thursday, Jan. 21 at the Main Library, was centered around business books. Fifteen people, plus Cobb, gathered in the library’s meeting room.
“We talked about what we do in the world,” Cobb said. And then they began to talk about books. Cobb had arrived with a stack of books that had been meaningful in his life.
Some were books that are relevant to Cobb’s current hobbies, like Finding Ultra by Rich Roll—his son-in-law sent him that one because Cobb is training for the Blue Ridge Half Marathon, coming up in April.
“It's essentially about creating a meaningful and sustainable lifestyle,” Cobb said.
Other books have been on his shelf and in his heart for much longer. Though it isn’t strictly a business book, Cobb said Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life by Henri J.M. Nouwen has been one of the most meaningful books he has read.
In the second chapter of that book, “[Nouwen] defines hospitality as the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter our lives and become a friend instead of an enemy,” Cobb said. “That has inspired virtually everything I do in terms of how I seek to be present in a variety of settings, how I seek to be present as a leader, as a listener.”
That idea has impacted how Cobb helps to create spaces for people. For areas over which he has influence, he considers whether they are welcoming, whether they allow people to express what they need to express and whether those folks can do so in a meaningful, transformative way, he said.
It is this thoughtfulness that enables him to so deeply connect with people. That same intentionality encourages Cobb to embrace the importance of reading physical books.
He can feel their weight in his hands. The significance of their pages. He returns to them time and time again. There’s a value in that. Something sacred.
“There's something very intimate about holding a book, holding the story of someone's life, of their experience, of their expertise, in your hands and taking it in and immersing yourself in it,” Cobb said.
He’s also very much interested in learning how authors pieced their books together, in examining how a book is written, in examining what shaped the structure of the book. Cobb learned to study a book so closely during his years studying with author Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones.
“I'm always fascinated by how authors,” he pauses. “How the idea emerges, and then how they go about writing it and creating the structure.”
Cobb reads. A lot. It doesn’t matter the genre. Though Cobb usually reads nonfiction, memoir or poetry, he has mixed in some romantasy, which combines fantasy and romance, in preparation for the February book club meeting. That month’s theme? Romance, of course.
Cobb has been drawn into Venessa Vida Kelley’s When the Tides Held the Moon.
He found the title via BookRiot, which featured it on a list of the top 25 queer books of 2025. The novel addresses what it is like to live a life in which a person is straddling multiple cultural worlds. The story itself is about a Puerto Rico man living in New York City who falls in love with a merman (there’s the fantasy part), with underlying narratives of hybridity and colonialism, Cobb said.
As they discuss the book, he reads the author’s back notes, which explains the connection between mermaid tales, hybridity, and colonialism, which begin to explain the internal conflict between emotional safety and economic security and picks apart themes that go deeper than one might have expected out of any book that bears the corset-busting bruise of romance in its label.
Cobb hopes people will attend the book club meetings to get to know him and members of their community a little better. Perhaps they will make new friends. While there’s the opportunity to get to know someone through a book discussion, residents can also bring up what they think of the city’s operations or anything else that’s been on their minds at all.
Once everyone gets to chatting, that hour will be Gone, Girl.
The upcoming dates and themes are as follows:
- Feb. 11, Belmont Library: Romance
- Mar. 7, Williamson Rd. Library: Bilingual Picture Books
- Apr. 14, Raleigh Court Library: Poetry