Faculty Publications

Journals

Reed Magazine: A Journal of Poetry and Prose

San Jose State University's Literary Magazine featuring submissions of original poetry and short stories from across the nation. Reed Magazine is one of the oldest student publications west of the Mississippi. In its earlier incarnations it was called El Portal. Reed was first numbered by year and volume in 1946. At the time, the magazine was put together by SJSU's literary society, Pegasus, with help from the Associated Student Body. The magazine continues to be compiled and edited by students in the Department of English & Comparative Literature programs.

Steinbeck Studies

Steinbeck Studies is the authorized publication on the life and works of John Steinbeck. It publishes scholarly articles, essays, photographs, notes, book and performance review, and contemporary references about the author. Manuscripts are subject to blind peer review. Steinbeck Studies is issued twice yearly and includes a membership in the Steinbeck Society. Members will be informed of panels at the American Literature Association as well as events sponsored by the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies and the National Steinbeck Center.

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Publications

• Selena Anderson

  • "A Shameful Citizen" in American Short Fiction 72

    Celebrating emerging Black writers: featuring new stories by Elinam Agbo, Selena Anderson, Desiree C. Bailey, Jonathan Escoffery, Rickey Fayne, Gothataone Moeng, Dantiel W. Moniz, Dennis Norris II, and Maya Perez.

    Guest-edited by Danielle Evans.

     

     

    Best American Short Stories 2020

    “To read their stories felt to me the way I suspect other people feel hearing jazz for the first time,” recalls Curtis Sittenfeld of her initial encounter with the Best American Short Stories series. “They were windows into emotions I had and hadn’t had, into other settings and circumstances and observations and relationships.” Decades later, Sittenfeld was met by the same feeling selecting the stories for this year’s edition. The result is a striking and nuanced collection, bringing to life awkward college students, disgraced public figures, raunchy grandparents, and mystical godmothers. To read these stories is to experience the transporting joys of discovery and affirmation, and to realize that story writing in America continues to flourish.

    Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Tales of Horror

    In this playful, inventive collection, leading literary and horror writers spin chilling tales in only a few pages. Each slim, fast-moving story brings to life the kind of monsters readers love to fear, from brokenhearted vampires to Uber-taking serial killers and mind-reading witches. But what also makes Tiny Nightmares so bloodcurdling―and unforgettable―are the real-world horrors that writers such as Samantha Hunt, Brian Evenson, Jac Jemc, Stephen Graham Jones, Lilliam Rivera, Kevin Brockmeier, and Rion Amilcar Scott weave into their fictions, exploring how global warming, racism, social media addiction, and homelessness are just as frightening as, say, a vampire’s fangs sinking into your neck. Our advice? Read with the hall light on and the bedroom door open just a crack. 

    2020 Emerging Texas Star Award from American Short Fiction 

• Gina Arnold

  • Gina Arnold's books are all about music, media, performance and the experience of seeing rock concerts.

    "Half a Million Strong: Crowds and Power at American Rock Festivals From Woodstock to Coachella." University of Iowa Press, 2018.

    From baby boomers to millennials, attending a big music festival has basically become a cultural rite of passage in America. In Half a Million Strong, music writer and scholar Gina Arnold explores the history of large music festivals in America and examines their impact on American culture. Studying literature, films, journalism, and other archival detritus of the countercultural era, Arnold looks closely at a number of large and well-known festivals, including the Newport Folk Festival, Woodstock, Altamont, Wattstax, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and others to map their cultural significance in the American experience. She finds that—far from being the utopian and communal spaces of spiritual regeneration that they claim for themselves— these large music festivals serve mostly to display the free market to consumers in its very best light.

    Other Publications

    Co-Editor, "The Oxford Handbook of Punk," Oxford University Press, 2021

    Co-Editor, "Music/Video: History/Aesthetics/Media. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017

    "Exile In Guyville," Bloomsbury Academic, 2014

    "Kiss This" St. Martin's Press, 1997

    "Route 666: On the Road To Nirvana," St. Martin's Press, 1993

• Sally Ashton

  • A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poems, ed. Peter Johnson (2019)

    “[A] solid collection of prose poems written by some of the best American practitioners of the genre. It also provides a good way of looking at the prose poem as a legitimate genre by focusing on what the poets themselves have to say [about their own work].… As the … commentaries suggest, hearing poets describe their writing processes can often situate their prose poems in a broader literary, historical, and cultural context, and may even help us to evaluate and appreciate their poems.”

    —Peter Johnson

     

    Some Odd Afternoon

    "This is about what turns up," writes Sally Ashton in Some Odd Afternoon. What turns up may be the "dangedy-dang twang' of a banjo, a laptop hiding under a hoop skirt, or a living room that becomes a forest of grandfathers, one "a log, another stone, one a river." To step into the opening line of one of her poems is to venture out into a future as uncertain and marvelous as the one unfolding before the youngest son in a fairy tale. We understand how wide the world is when Attention, freed from its daily constraints, becomes a wanderer.

    - Nils Peterson

     

    The Behaviour of Clocks (2019)

    Albert Einstein's thought experiments frame Sally Ashton's new collection of prose poems. Here she offers a poetic inquiry into time—the simultaneity of the past, present, and future in how each informs any moment. Fellow poet Amy Gerstler writes, "Ashton's investigative meditations maintain constant awareness of territories shared by physics and poetry. These wonderfully reflective poems arise from something like a physicist's precision of mind and a shaman's sensitivity of vision."

    Her Name is Juanita (Kore Press, 2009)

    "Ashton is a poet, writer, teacher, and editor of the DMQ Review, an online journal featuring poetry and art. She is author of Some Odd Afternoon, BlazeVOX, 2010, and a prose poem collection, Her Name Is Juanita, Kore Press, 2009. Both books received Pushcart Prize nominations. These Metallic Dayswas published in 2005 as part of Main Street Rag’s Editor’s Choice Chapbook Series. Poems also appear in An Introduction to the Prose Poem, and Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes, as well as journals such as Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, 5am, Mississippi Review and Poet Lore."

• Zehlia Babaci-Wilhite

  • Learning Critical Thinking Skills Beyond the 21st Century for Multidisciplinary Courses: A Human Rights Perspective in Education

    Featuring contributed chapters written by experts within
    the field, Learning Critical Thinking Skills Beyond the 21st
    Century for Multidisciplinary Courses: A Human Rights
    Perspective in Education provides readers with various
    perspectives regarding the intersection of education, human rights, and critical thinking. The text integrates strategies and best practices that support equitable education, elevate human rights, and pave the way for a better future. The text is divided into four modules. In Module 1, readers learn about the history and evolution of human rights, how students can integrate language arts and human rights into STEM/STEAM subjects, and how critical teaching and social justice teaching can increase students’ involvement and understanding. Module 2 features scholarship on leadership and inclusion in cross-cultural and multidisciplinary critical thinking, field theory as a means to analyze the social world critically, and the need across the disciplines for high-quality critical thinking. In Module 3, chapters speak to the critical nature of cultural learning and individual life experience in the quest for sustainability, the dynamics of cultural encounters, the correlation between art and mathematics from an instructional aspect, and how digital storytelling can foster greater academic literacy. The final module features chapters on humanistic literacy, strategies to enhance global literacy, and critical and cultural literacy.

    Promoting Language and STEAM as Human Rights in Education (2019)

    This book argues that integrating artistic contributions – with an emphasis on culture and language – can make Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects more accessible, and therefore promote creativity and innovation in teaching and learning at all levels of education. It provides tools and strategies for managing interdisciplinary learning and teaching based on successful collaborations between researchers, practitioners and artists in the fields of the Arts and STEM subjects. Based on contributions by educators, scientists, scholars, linguists and artists from around the globe, the book highlights how we can demonstrate teamwork and collaboration for innovation and creativity in STEAM subjects in the classroom and beyond.

    Other Publications

    A book chapter entitled: Improving Critical Thinking in STEM for Girls: A Contextualized Education Integrating the Arts and Human Rights. In Robert Arnove, Carlos Alberto Torres, and Lauren Misiaszek (Eds), 5th Edition. Comparative Education: the Dialectic of the Global and the Local. Rowman & Littlefield (Forthcoming).

• Noelle Brada-Williams

  • Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

    Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies focuses on the production, collection, and distribution of accessible high quality research on Asian American Literature for students, teachers, and the general public.
    
    
    
    

    Crossing Oceans: Reconfiguring American Literary Studies in the Pacific Rim (Hong Kong University Press, 2004)

    With the increasing globalization of culture, American literature has become a significant body of text for classrooms outside of the United States. Bringing together essays from a wide range of scholars in a number of countries, including China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the United States, Crossing Oceans focuses on strategies for critically reading and teaching American literature, especially ethnic American literature, within the Asia Pacific region. This book will be an important tool for scholars and teachers from around the globe who desire fresh perspectives on American literature from a variety of national contexts. 

    Related Information

    Asian American Literature: Sources for Research

    Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

• Adrienne L. Eastwood

  • The Widow Ranter (Broadview Press, 2022)

    In her final play, Aphra Behn looks across the Atlantic and reimagines Bacon’s Rebellion, the notorious revolt whose participants took up arms against the government of colonial Virginia with the aim of driving the Indigenous population from the region. Heavily fictionalized and featuring a memorable cast of both heroic and comic characters, Behn’s long-neglected tragicomedy is an important and entertaining contribution to the catalogue of transatlantic and Restoration literature. This edition supplements the play with an informative introduction and a robust selection of historical documents that situate it in the context of the historical rebellion and of late-seventeenth-century discourses around empire and colonization.

• Michael Tod Edgerton

  • Vitreous Hide (Lavender Ink, 2013)

    

    Willing the word to become flesh, the poems in Vitreous Hide both reveal and enact yearning—for love, for the beloved, for the words to transform beloved image to beloved substance. Orpheus reaches for Narcissus through a new mirror of myth, now dim with distance, now bright with the possibility of connection. Through the shining skin or surface of prose lines and field composition, these poems reach for the embodiment of the other in order to be, themselves, embodied.

    ---

    "In a theater of the page permeated by sonic play...sound, made overtly and gorgeously lyric, becomes the dominant character, increasingly swept up into a dynamically choreographed typography. It’s a book of big ideas and big feeling, yet carried so lightly on its lyric weave that it becomes almost weightless. A real delight for both ear and mind."

    - Cole Swensen

    "[T]he gay erotics of this work...have no equivalent in modern American poetry. Really you’d have to go back in time and cross many seas...to hear so persuasive, alert, and stunning a love poem."

    - Kevin Killian

    "Edgerton is brilliant to announce that myth and the perils of myth are flesh of our flesh, the perdurable instance of our human birth."

    - Donald Revell 

• Kristin FitzPatrick

  • My Pulse Is an Earthquake

    The nine stories in My Pulse Is an Earthquake take place in the clutches of grief. Characters struggle to make sense of sudden losses of life, love, and community. From 1970 to the present day, children and young adults from the Rockies to the Appalachian Mountains guide readers through the valleys of their lives as dog breeders, immigrants, Catholic school delinquents, rookie policewomen, drummers, ballerinas, teenage brides, and an accountant who keeps a careful inventory of losses.

    In each story, we see the darkness that can surface during the happy moments in life—weddings, births, promotions, the opening night of a director’s favorite play, or the best performance of a dancer’s career, when no one important is there to watch. We enter daydreams and night terrors where the dead are within reach, pointing out how they could have been saved. We wear their clothes and carry their teddy bears or vinyl records everywhere. We crawl around in caves and pound hammers into walls until our own hearts stop beating.

    This collection explores how the unexpected harm to young, vibrant loved ones—from murder, kidnapping, battle, accident, natural disaster, swift illness, or stillbirth—can rupture families, and how the most unlikely healers can bring together those who remain.

• Meghan Gorman-DaRif

  • Derailing the Rail: Indian-Kenyan Solidarity in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction

    While contemporary Kenyan writing has focused extensively on colonial histories and African resistance, particularly in relation to the 1952–60 Mau Mau Uprising, the novels of M.G. Vassanji and Pater Kimani stand out in their focus on the Indian community in Kenya, which, as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has noted, has remained largely marginal and invisible. This chapter analyzes representations of the Indian community in Kenya, particularly in relation to the building of the railway beginning in 1895, through a reading of Vassanji’s 2004 novel The In-Between World of Vikram Lall and Kimani’s Dance of the Jakaranda, published in 2017. I argue that Vassanji’s novel largely resonates with historiographical claims in its depiction of an ambivalent relationship between Indians and Africans in Kenya, but that Kimani’s novel emphasizes solidarity, making an important and timely intervention into imagining the African collective in the aftermath of the post-election violence of 2007.

• Sherri Harvey

  • Welcome to the Jungle!

    A story about a trip to Borneo to save the orangutans from extinction.

• Katherine D. Harris

  • Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments

    
    

    
    Edited by Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, Katherine D. Harris, and Jentery Sayers. Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities is an open access, peer-reviewed, curated collection of reusable and remixable resources for teaching and research. Organized by keyword, the annotated artifacts can be saved in collections for future reference or sharing. Each keyword includes a curatorial statement and artifacts that exemplify that keyword. You can read the keywords comprehensively, as you would a printed collection, and browse artifacts, exploring certain types or subject matter. 

    Forget Me Not: The Rise of the British Literary Annual, 1823–1835

    By November 1822, the British reading public had already voraciously consumed both Walter Scott’s expensive novels and Rudolf Ackermann’s exquisite lithographs. The next decade, referred to by some scholars as dormant and unproductive, is in fact bursting with Forget Me Nots, Friendship’s Offerings, Keepsakes, and Literary Souvenirs. By wrapping literature, poetry, and art into an alluring package, editors and publishers saturated the market with a new, popular, and best-selling genre, the literary annual. In Forget Me Not, Katherine D. Harris assesses the phenomenal rise of the annual and its origins in other English, German, and French literary forms as well as its social influence on women, its redefinition of the feminine, and its effects on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century print culture. Harris adopts an interdisciplinary approach that uses textual and social contexts to explore a forum of subversive femininity, where warfare and the masculine hero were not celebrated.

    The Forgotten Gothic: Short Stories from British Literary Annuals, 1823-1831 (zittaw press, 2012)

    This astonishing collection of 95 rare Gothic tales from British Literary Annuals tales takes us further than perhaps eighteenth or nineteenth-century scholars are comfortable with – to the Gothic's afterlife. Once touted as a literary "dead zone" – the Annuals of the 1820s and 30s are unexpectedly populated with dozens of terrifying and horrific Gothic tales. A groundbreaking collection, Forgotten Gothic illustrates the continued development of the Gothic genre even after its supposed death in 1820.

• Allison Johnson

  • The Scars We Carve: Bodies and Wounds in Civil War (LSU Press, April 2019)

    In The Scars We Carve: Bodies and Wounds in Civil War Print Culture, Allison M. Johnson considers the ubiquitous images of bodies―white and black, male and female, soldier and civilian―that appear throughout newspapers, lithographs, poems, and other texts circulated during and in the decades immediately following the Civil War. Rather than dwelling on the work of well-known authors, The Scars We Carve uncovers a powerful archive of Civil War–era print culture in which the individual body and its component parts, marked by violence or imbued with rhetorical power, testify to the horrors of war and the lasting impact of the internecine conflict.

    Religion and Its Reformation in America, Beginnings to 1730: An Anthology of Primary Sources

    Anthology documenting anglophone Christianity in North America.

     

     

     

     

    The Left-Armed Corps: Writings by Amputee Civil War Veterans (LSU Press, 2022)

    The Left-Armed Corps collects and annotates a unique and little-known body of Civil War literature: narrative sketches, accounts, and poetry by veterans who lost the use of their right arms due to wounds sustained during the conflict and who later competed in left-handed penmanship contests in 1865 and 1866. Editor Allison M. Johnson organizes the selections thematically in order to highlight issues crucial to the experiences of Civil War soldiers, veterans, and amputees, offering invaluable insights into the ways in which former fighting men understood and commemorated their service and sacrifice. A detailed introduction provides background information on the contests and comments on the literary and historical significance of the veterans and their writings. Chapter subjects include political and philosophical treatises by veterans, amateur but poignant poetic testaments, and graphic accounts of wounding and amputation. The Left-Armed Corps makes accessible this archive of powerful testimony and creative expression from Americans who fought to preserve the Union and end slavery.

• Erik Johnson

  • How to Teach a Play: Essential Exercises for Popular Plays

    Most students encounter drama as they do poetry and fiction – as literature to be read – but never experience the performative nature of theater. How to Teach a Play provides new strategies for teaching dramatic literature and offers practical, play-specific exercises that demonstrate how performance illuminates close reading of the text. This practical guide provides a new generation of teachers and theatre professionals the tools to develop their students' performative imagination.

• Revathi Krishnaswamy

  • Postcolonial and the Global Edited by Revathi Krishnaswamy, John C. Hawley, John C. Hawley (University of Minnesota Press, 2007)

    This interdisciplinary work brings the humanities and social sciences into dialogue by examining issues such as globalized capital, discourses of antiterrorism, and identity politics. Essayists from the fields of postcolonial studies and globalization theory address the ethical and pragmatic ramifications of opposing interpretations of these issues and, for the first time, seek common ground.

     

    Effeminism: The Economy of Colonial Desire(University of Michigan Press, 1999)

    A fascinating study of "the inevitable intimacy between colonizer and colonized," Effeminism: The Economy of Colonial Desire attempts to chart the flow of colonial desire by examining the complex encodings of fears, fascinations, and anxieties in the works of British writers in India. The author examines the works of Flora Annie Steel, Rudyard Kipling, and E. M. Forster, and finds their works to be deeply implicated in the politics of colonial rule and anticolonial resistance. Krishnaswamy refuses to characterize the colonial encounter in terms of unchanging and monolithic Manichean oppositions, repeatedly drawing attention to fissures, contradictions, and slippages that attend the production of English manliness and Indian effeminacy. By restoring both the political in the unconscious and the unconscious in the political, the book proposes to understand colonialism in terms of historical failure, ideological inadequacy, and political contention.

• Linda Mitchell

  • Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage and Social Relations in Thirteenth Century England (Palgrave MacMillan, 2003)

    Although numerous studies of medieval women and a number of biographies of medieval queens and noblewomen have appeared in recent years, comparatively few studies have sought to combine biographical and prosopographical approaches in order to develop portraits of specific women in order to highlight different life experiences of medieval women. The individual chapters can be read as separate histories of their specific subjects as well as case studies which together provide a coherent picture of the medieval English noblewoman.

• Keenan Norris

  • By the Lemon Tree (Nomadic Press, 2003)
    

    Set in the Central California countryside and the Southern California desert, By the Lemon Tree’s old school stories chronicle the collision of wide-eyed childhood with the end of lives human and animal. In “Twice Good” a downtrodden city administrator shows up for a Black Panther protest forty years too late. “Funeral in Fresno” introduces us to an impatient reverend who is forced to confront his past and his future, while in the title story, a young boy born and raised in East Oakland bears witness to life and death in an ancient rural world.

    Brother and the Dancer (Heyday Books, 2013)

    Winner of the 2012 James D. Houston Award, Keenan Norris's first novel is a beautiful, gritty, coming-of-age tale about two young African Americans in the San Bernardino Valley--a story of exceptional power, lyricism, and depth. Erycha and Touissant live only a few miles apart in the city of Highland, but their worlds are starkly separated by the lines of class, violence, and history. In alternating chapters that touch and intertwine only briefly, Brother and the Dancer follows their adolescence and young adulthood on two sides of the city, the luminous San Bernardino range casting its hot shade over their separate tales in an unflinching vision of black life in Southern California.

    The Confession of Copeland Cane (The Unnamed Press, 2021)

    He is also just a regular teenager coming up in a terrifying world. A slightly eccentric, flip-phone loving kid with analog tendencies and a sideline hustling sneakers, the boundaries of Copeland’s life are demarcated from the jump by urban toxicity, an educational apparatus with confounding intentions, and a police state that has merged with media conglomerates―the highly-rated Insurgency Alert Desk that surveils and harasses his neighborhood in the name of anti-terrorism.

    Recruited by the nearby private school even as he and his folks face eviction, Copeland is doing his damnedest to do right by himself, for himself. And yet the forces at play entrap him in a reality that chews up his past and obscures his future. Copeland’s wry awareness of the absurd keeps life passable, as do his friends and their surprising array of survival skills. And yet in the aftermath of a protest rally against police violence, everything changes, and Copeland finds himself caught in the flood of history.

    Set in East Oakland, California in a very near future, The Confession of Copeland Cane introduces us to a prescient and contemporary voice, one whose take on coming of age in America becomes a startling reflection of our present moment.

• Kristian O'Hare
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    Tennessee Williams Literary Festival Writing Contest 1st Place Winner—Very Short Fiction

    "Our Judge and TWF20 Speaker Jac Jemc had this to say about the winning story:

    There is so much to admire in Hard Swallow: the activated details- "the moonlight fights with the neon", the sensory descriptions- a mouth that plainspoken yet inscrutable dialogue- "Blue is wrongfor roses." what made me choose this story though is the vivid and affecting shifts in emotional register, fromthe absurdity of a sideshow-like act in a strip club to the melancholy, tender encounter outside the bar, to the random loss of romantic opportunity, and back again. The story runs a concise, perfect lap through the evening of an outsider."

• Daniel Rivers

  • Grizzly Country: Settler Worlding and the Politics of Species on the California Frontier

    Grizzly Country draws together an archive of literary, visual, and popular culture to examine the ways that white settlers transformed the California Grizzly (Ursus Arctos Californicus) into both a symbol of imperial manhood and an embodiment of colonial anxieties about California’s seeming untameability. While attending to the environmental and colonial histories of wilderness enclosure, Native enslavement, and grizzly eradication, this article argues that popular representations of wild, unruly grizzlies were often used to frame Native nations and the undomesticated outdoors as obstacles to a properly domesticated and commercially productive
    U.S. California.

• Avantika Rohatgi

  • Global Rights and Perceptions: A Call to Awareness and Action (Third Edition)

    In Global Rights and Perceptions: Call to Awareness and Action students read from a wide variety of original sources ― foreign policy journals, non-fiction books, medical journals, and current affairs magazines, including the New Statesman, the Journal of Medical Ethics, Foreign Policy, and the Journal of American and Comparative Culture. The textbook also includes representative student papers on global issues to stimulate students’ imaginations and exemplify compelling writing strategies. This varied exposure gives students several gateways through which to approach complex social issues and raises awareness about how widespread these issues are and how seriously they are being considered by academic, journalistic, literary, and social entities. It includes current articles on Social Media, Video Gaming, Trump's Immigration Policies and Artificial Intelligence.

• Ryan Skinnell

  • Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric & Writing Studies: Essays in Honor of Sharon Crowley. Co-edited w/ Andrea Alden, Kendall Gerdes, & Judy Holiday. (Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2019).

    Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing Studies collects sixteen chapters by established and emerging scholars that take up and extend the practices of inventive, rhetorical theorizing that characterize Sharon Crowley’s body of work. The book shows that doing theory is a contingent and continual rhetorical process that is indispensable for understanding situations and their potential significance—and for discovering the available means of persuasion.

    Rhetoric’s Demagogue | Demagoguery’s Rhetoric. Ed. Ryan Skinnell & Jillian Murphy. (Special Issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly 49.3. 2019).

    Rhetoric’s Demagogue | Demagoguery’s Rhetoric is a special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly edited by Ryan Skinnell and SJSU alumna Jillian Murphy. In this issue, the contributors consider what rhetoric can teach us about demagoguery—what it is, how it works, and what we can do to address it.

     

     

    Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us About Donald J. Trump. Ed. Ryan Skinnell. (Exeter, UK: Societas, 2018).

    In Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us About Donald J. Trump, eleven prominent rhetoric experts explain how Donald Trump’s persuasive language and symbols work.

     

     

     

    Bureaucracy: A Love Story. Co-edited w/ Gabriel Cervantes, Dahlia Porter, & Kelly Wisecup. (Denton, TX: Aquiline Books, 2018).

    Bureaucracy: A Love Story draws together research done by scholars and students in the Special Collections at the University of North Texas to illuminate how bureaucracy structures our contemporary lives across a range of domains.

     

     

     

    Conceding Composition: A Crooked History of Composition’s Institutional Fortunes. (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2016).

    Conceding Composition is a wide-ranging historical examination of composition’s institutional value in American higher education. The book considers the rhetorical, political, organizational, institutional, and promotional options that conceding composition opened up for institutions of higher education and considers what the first-year course and the discipline might look like with composition’s transience reimagined not as a barrier but as a consummate institutional value.

    What We Wish We’d Known: Negotiating Graduate School. Co-edited w/ Judy Holiday & Christine Vassett. (Southlake, TX: Fountainhead Press, 2015).

    What We Wish We’d Known: Negotiating Graduate School contains 15 chapters written by graduate students who explore the ways they have made sense of, and made choices about, graduate school challenges, including choosing a committee, teaching as a graduate student, and writing a dissertation. In addition to the main chapters, there are 28 responses to the major chapters written by graduate students from around the country.

• Alan Soldofsky

  • Compendium: A Collection of Thoughts on Prosody, by Donald Justice. Edited by David Koehn & Alan Soldofsky (Omindawn Publishing 2017).

    As prosody is the very medium of the poet’s domain, Donald Justice saw prosody as a set of nomenclatures for the poet composers to use in making their music. The collage process Justice employed to present his instructional materials possesses a composer’s quality, the structure of which possesses a unique beauty. His insights serve as a sort of de facto taxonomy, an organically designed system that he uses to present his lecture on each respective aspect of the evolution of poetic form. There is no formal thesis here, but rather a kind of scrapbook that has a broader motive. The material possesses no hidden secrets; the treasures lie in plain sight and simply need be discerned to open the artist’s mind to their possibilities.

    In the Buddha Factory (Truman State University Press, 2013)

    Captivating and truthful, In the Buddha Factory is rich in detail, honest in tragedy, and poignant in observation. Through a mastery of style and language placed against the backdrop of Silicon Valley, Soldofsky explores the tension of opposites of place and no place, rich and poor, and finite and the limitless. These poems capture the intricacies of family, aging, and identity, and renders them in words both insightful and lyrical.

• Nick Taylor

  •  Double Switch (Penguin Random House, 2016)

    T. T. MONDAY is the pseudonym of novelist Nick Taylor.

    Relief pitcher/private investigator Johnny Adcock doesn’t have an office; he has the bullpen. That’s where he meets Tiff Tate, the femme-fatale stylist responsible for half the looks in Major League Baseball, from Brian Wilson’s beard to Big Papi’s gold ropes. Tiff has a problem. Her new client, the rookie phenom Yonel Ruiz, has been threatened by a cartel of smugglers. Adcock is her last best hope. As he embarks on this potentially deadly mission, Adcock tangoes with a mysterious, sexy assassin known only as La Loba. And he still has the playoffs to worry about.

    The Setup Man (Penguin Random House, 2014)

    T. T. MONDAY is the pseudonym of novelist Nick Taylor.

    Johnny Adcock is an aging Major League pitcher, who moonlights as a private investigator. Major League Baseball, as it turns out, is a prime source of employment for a discreet detective who has both the brains and the brawn to handle the unique problems of professional athletes. On the bus after a game, teammate Frankie Herrera confides in Adcock that he has a “problem with his wife.” It sounds like the standard story of a pro athlete’s marriage gone sour. However, when Frankie dies in a car crash, Adcock knows there are way too many questions still unanswered, and he dives head first into the most dangerous investigation of his budding second career.

• Mary Warner 

  • Critical Insights: Historical Fiction
    Editor: Virginia Brackett, Park University, Missouri (January 2018)

    In combination this volume’s chapters open wide a door to discussion of the importance and the joy of historical fiction for readers at all levels. They also invite readers to compare fictional presentations of “true” events and persons to that of traditionally understood historical narratives. Such consideration may result in a clearer understanding of the nature of historical fiction on the part of readers and writers alike.

    Adolescents in the Search for Meaning: Tapping the Powerful Resource of Story (Scarecrow Press, 2006)

    As is painfully evident from the reports of school shootings, gang violence, and adolescent suicide, many teens live troubled lives. Even those who live a "normal" life are confronted by some of the challenges adults face. However, few of them have the same resources as adults for surviving such challenges. In addition, teens are also engaged in establishing independence and finding their identities. Building on the idea that "story" is a powerful source of meaning, particularly those stories that resonate with our own lives, Mary Warner suggests that the stories of other young adults offer a resource yet to be fully tapped. As such, readers are provided with insight into the young adult perspective from the results of a survey of over 1400 teens and through feedback from authors of young adult literature.