A harvest of books from faculty and alumnae/i published 2011-2012.
Aaron Apps (MFA candidate)
COMPOS(T) MENTIS: Poetry
BlazeVOX, 2012
Biman Basu (PhD '90)
The Commerce of Peoples: Sadomasochism and African American Literature
Lexington, 2012
Edelstein-Keller Professor of Creative Writing Charles Baxter, editor
Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories
Library of America, 2012
Here--for the first time in a single volume--are all the collections Anderson published during his lifetime: Winesburg, Ohio (1919), The Triumph of the Egg (1921), Horses and Men (1923), and Death in the Woods (1933), along with a generous selection of stories left uncollected or unpublished at his death. Exploring the hidden recesses of small town life, these haunting, understated, often sexually frank stories pivot on seemingly quiet moments when lives change, futures are recast, and pasts come to reckon. They transformed the tone of American storytelling, inspiring writers like Hemingway, Faulkner, and Mailer, and defining a tradition of midwestern fiction that includes editor Charles Baxter.
Ruth Berman (PhD '79)
Bradamant's Quest
FTL, 2011
Mary Casanova (BA '81)
Frozen
University of Minnesota Press, 2012
Feng Sun Chen (MFA candidate)
Butcher's Tree: Poems
Black Ocean, 2012
Mick Cochrane (PhD '85)
Fitz
Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2012
Amanda Coplin (MFA '06)
The Orchardist
Harper Collins, 2012
Professor Maria Damon, with Jukka-Pekka Kervinen
Door Marked X
cPress, 2012
Experimental collaborative poetry from Damon and Finnish artist Kervinen.
Kim Donehower (PhD '97), with Charlotte Hogg and Eileen Schell
Reclaiming the Rural: Essays on Literacy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy
Southern Illinois University Press, 2011
Lauren Fox (MFA '98)
Friends Like Us
Knopf, 2012
Peter Geye (BA '00)
The Lighthouse Road
Unbridled Books, 2012
Gerald Jay Goldberg (PhD '58), as Gerald Jay
The Paris Directive
Nan A. Talese/Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012
Janet Groth (BA '57)
The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker
Algonquin Books, 2012
J. Jack Halberstam (PhD '91)
The Queer Art of Failure
Duke University Press, 2011
J. Jack Halberstam (PhD '91)
Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Queer Ideas Book)
Beacon Press, 2012
Leigh Herrick (BA '88)
Home Front: Poems of the Bush II Years
2012
Patricia Hodgell (PhD '87), as P. C. Hodgell
Honor's Paradox
Baen Books, 2011
Kate Hopper (MFA '05)
Use Your Words: A Writing Guide for Mothers
Viva Editions, 2012
Clay Jenkinson (BA '77)
The Character of Meriwether Lewis: Explorer in the Wilderness
Dakota Institute Press, 2011
Kathleen Jesme (BA '75)
Meridian (Tupelo Press Snowbound Prize)
Tupelo Press, 2012
John Jodzio (BA '99)
Get In If You Want To Live
Paper Darts Press, 2011
Angela Karstadt (Falk) (PhD '99)
Thinking and Writing in Academic Contexts: A University Companion
Studentlitteratur, 2011
Sam Kean (BA '02)
The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code
Little Brown, 2012
Garrison Keillor (BA '66), editor
Good Poems, American Places
Viking, 2011
Erin Felicia Labbie (PhD '01), editor, with Allie Terry-Fritsch
Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Ashgate, 2012
Ellen Lansky (PhD '96)
Golden Jeep
North Star Press of St. Cloud, 2011
Elizabeth Larsen (MFA '02) with Joshua Glenn
Unbored: The Essential Field Guide to Serious Fun
Bloomsbury, 2012
Professor Josephine Lee, editor, with Don Eitel and R. A. Shiomi
Asian American Plays for a New Generation
Temple University Press, 2011
This volume showcases seven exciting new plays that dramatize timely themes that are familiar to Asian Americans. The works variously address immigration, racism, stereotyping, identity, generational tensions, assimilation, and upward mobility as well as post-9/11 paranoia, racial isolation, and adoptee experiences.
George Levine (PhD '69)
Darwin the Writer
Oxford University Press, 2011
George Levine (PhD '69), editor
The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now
Princeton University Press, 2011
Professor Nabil Matar, editor with Judy A. Hayden
Through the Eyes of the Beholder: The Holy Land, 1517-1713
Brill, 2012
The collection examines the view of holiness in the "Holy Land" through the writings of pilgrims, travelers, and missionaries. The period extends from 1517, the Ottoman conquest of Syria and Palestine, to the Franco-British treaty of Utrecht in 1713 and the consolidation of European hegemony over the Mediterranean. The writers in the collection include Christians (Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic), Muslims, and Jews. This book is the first to juxtapose writers of different backgrounds and languages, to emphasize the holiness of the land in a number of traditions, and to ask whether holiness was inherent in geography or a product of the piety of the writers.
Professor Nabil Matar, editor
Henry Stubbe's The Rise and Progress of Mahometanism
Columbia University Press, 2012
Professor Matar edits, introduces, and annotates this edition of the first European text (1671) to acknowledge Muhammad as Islamic Prophet (rather than "imposter") and to offer a full account of his life.
Tim Nolan (BA '78)
And Then (American Poetry Series)
New Rivers Press, 2012
Sheila O'Connor (BA '82)
Keeping Safe the Stars
Putnam Juvenile, 2012
Professor Paula Rabinowitz, editor with Cristina Giorcelli
Exchanging Clothes : Habits of Being II
University of Minnesota Press, 2012
The second in a four-part series charting the social, cultural, and political expression of clothing, dress, and accessories, Exchanging Clothes focuses on the concept of transnational "circulation and exchange." These essays focus on not only the global exchange of material commodities across time and space but also of the ideas, images, colors, and textures related to fashion.
Anna Reckin (MFA '99)
Three Reds: Poems
Shearsman, 2011
Karen Rigby-Huang (MFA '04)
Chinoiserie: Poems
Ahsahta Press, 2012
Katie Robison (PhD candidate)
Downburst
Quil Press, Inc., 2012
Associate Professor Katherine Scheil
She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America
Cornell University Press, 2012
In the late 19th century hundreds of clubs formed across the United States devoted to the reading of Shakespeare. From Pasadena, California, to the seaside town of Camden, Maine; from the isolated farm town of Ottumwa, Iowa, to Mobile, Alabama, on the Gulf coast, Americans were reading Shakespeare in astonishing numbers and in surprising places. Composed mainly of women, these clubs offered the opportunity for members not only to read and study Shakespeare but also to participate in public and civic activities outside the home. Katherine West Scheil uncovers this hidden layer of intellectual activity that flourished in American society well into the 20th century.
Professor Julie Schumacher
Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls
Delacorte, 2012
The story of a mother-daughter book club most of the daughters didn't want to join. The members of "The Unbearable Book Club" were all going into eleventh grade A.P. English. But they weren't friends: "We were literary prisoners, sweating, reading classics, and hanging out at the pool. If you want to find out how membership in a book club can end up with a person being dead, you can probably look us up under mother-daughter literary catastrophe."
John Sitter (PhD '69)
The Cambridge Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Poetry
Cambridge University Press, 2011
Angela M. Smith (PhD '07)
Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema (Film and Culture Series)
Columbia University Press, 2012
Robert Stark (PhD '07)
Ezra Pound's Early Verse and Lyric Tradition: A Jargoner's Apprenticeship
Edinburgh University Press, 2012
Cheryl Strayed (BA '97)
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Knopf, 2012
Cheryl Strayed (BA '97)
Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life From Dear Sugar
Vintage, 2012
Francine Marie Tolf (MFA '06)
Prodigal: Poems
Pinyon Publishing, 2012
Sarah Wadsworth (PhD '00), with Wayne Wiegand
Right Here I See My Own Books: The Woman's Building Library at the World's Columbian Exposition
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
Michael Walsh (MFA '06)
Sleepwalks illustrated chapbook
Red Dragonfly Press, 2012
Kari J. Winter (PhD '90)
The American Dreams of John B. Prentis, Slave-Trader (Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900 Series)
University of Georgia Press, 2011
David Wojahn (BA 1976)
World Tree (Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize winner)
University of Pittsburgh, 2011
