Faculty Books
D.K. Nnuro
What Napoleon Could Not Do
(Riverhead Books, 2023)
America is seen through the eyes and ambitions of three characters with ties to Africa in this gripping novel.
When siblings Jacob and Belinda Nti were growing up in Ghana, their goal was simple: to move to America. For them, the United States was both an opportunity and a struggle, a goal and an obstacle.
Jacob, an awkward computer programmer who still lives with his father, wants a visa so he can move to Virginia to live with his wife—a request that the U.S. government has repeatedly denied. He envies his sister, Belinda, who achieved, as their father put it, “what Napoleon could not do”: she went to college and law school in the United States and even managed to marry Wilder, a wealthy Black businessman from Texas. Wilder’s view of America differs markedly from his wife’s, as he’s spent his life railing against the racism and marginalization that are part of life for every African American living here.
For these three, their desires and ambitions highlight the promise and the disappointment that life in a new country offers. How each character comes to understand this and how each learns from both their dashed hopes and their fulfilled dreams lie at the heart of what makes What Napoleon Could Not Do such a compelling, insightful read.
Kaveh Akbar, ed.
The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse
(Penguin Classics, 2023)
Poets have always looked to the skies for inspiration, and have written as a way of getting closer to the power and beauty they sense in nature, in each other, and in the cosmos. Compiled by world-renowned poet Kaveh Akbar, this anthology is a holistic and global survey of a lyric conversation about the divine, one which has been ongoing for millennia.
Garrett Stewart
Attention Spans: Garrett Stewart, a Reader
(Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024)
Attention Spans’ chronological review of Garrett Stewart’s critical approach also tracks and maps the evolution of intersecting disciplines from the late New Criticism through structuralism, deconstruction, narrative theory, poetics, and media studies, in which Stewart has been so persistent and so eloquent a voice. Excerpts from his twenty books are framed by editorial retrospect, then linked by Stewart’s own commentary on the variety of his interpretive career across aesthetic forms, from Victorian narrative to recent American fiction, classic celluloid cinema to postfilmic digital effects, inert book sculpture and literary wordplay to the soundscape of singing on screen.
Garrett Stewart
Streisand: The Mirror of Difference
(Wayne State University Press, 2022)
At every stage of her career, Barbra Streisand's genius finds its fullest measure in screen song, first in Emmy-winning TV specials, then in Hollywood blockbusters from Funny Girl to Funny Lady. She goes on, as emerging auteur, to direct her own "musical concepts" in A Star Is Born―before reconceiving the big-screen musical altogether in the writing as well as directing of her own starring role in Yentl ("A Film with Music"). In this intensive reading of the "actress-who-sings," Garrett Stewart notes the gender and ethnic stereotypes that Streisand shattered as the first openly Jewish superstar, while concentrating not just on the cultural difference she made but on the internal differentials of her unholy vocal gift―whose kinetic volatility shapes a kind of cinematic terrain all its own. Down through her filmed return to the concert stage, Stewart elicits the sinuous phonetic text of Streisand's on-screen musical delivery in a keenly attentive mode of audition that puts into fresh perspective the indelible aura of her stardom.
Hannah Bonner
Another Woman
(Eastover Press, 2024)
In the tradition of confessional and lyrical poets like Cynthia Cruz, Linda Gregg, Sylvia Plath, and Franz Wright, Another Woman explores female sexuality, anguish, and abjection within the decline of a romantic relationship as well as through biblical, mythical, or pop cultural figures such as Delilah, Aphrodite, or Karen Carpenter. The collection culminates in new gradations and understandings of what it means to be a woman--and the multiplicity of selves that live within one body.
Christopher Merrill
After the Fact: If And When And Here And Now with Marvin Bell
(White Pine Press, 2024)
The concluding volumes of a ten-year-long conversation in prose poetry between the award-winning poets Marvin Bell and Christopher Merrill. They write from different generations and places around the world on a range of themes from memory to politics, aging and mortality, the vagaries of desire and the imagination.
Bell and Merrill wanted to create a wide-ranging dialogue to explore the meaning not only of their separate experiences but of the very ways in which a collaboration fosters a deeper engagement with each other—and the world. In his penultimate message to Merrill, written just hours before he suffered a heart attack from which he never recovered, Bell said that what he loved about their collaboration was that each new prose poem defined his immediate future—which was what After the Fact provided both of them for ten glorious years.
Tisa Bryant
Unexplained Presence (reissued with new intro)
(Wave Books, 2024)
In Tisa Bryant's Unexplained Presence, readers are spectators of mise-en-scènes in which black subjectivity has been distorted and denied within various visual narratives.
Moving from cultural analysis to cinematic (re)creation, Bryant's prose traverses like a tracking shot through John Schlesinger's Darling, Patricia Rozema's Mansfield Park and Virginia Woolf's Orlando, giving voice to characters whom have otherwise been structurally silenced. As Pulitzer–prize winning author Margo Jefferson aptly points out in her afterword, Tisa Bryant doesn't merely write about film; she is an "auteur," a "cultural anthropologist," and a "virtuosic critic-artist." Since its original publication with Leon Works in 2007, Unexplained Presence has been foundational among poets, scholars, and film critics and with this publication, Tisa Bryant's legacy as one of the most innovative voices in contemporary literature is preserved.
Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder
The Revolution Will Be Improvised
(University of Michigan Press, 2024)
The Revolution Will Be Improvised: The Intimacy of Cultural Activism traces intimate encounters between activists and local people of the civil rights movement through an archive of Black and Brown avant-gardism. In the 1960s, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists engaged with people of color working in poor communities to experiment with creative approaches to liberation through theater, media, storytelling, and craft making. With a dearth of resources and an abundance of urgency, SNCC activists improvised new methods of engaging with communities that created possibilities for unexpected encounters through programs such as The Free Southern Theater, El Teatro Campesino, and the Poor People’s Corporation.
Reading the output of these programs, Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder argues that intimacy-making became an extension of participatory democracy. In doing so, Rodriguez Fielder supplants the success-failure binary for understanding social movements, focusing instead on how care work aligns with creative production. The Revolution Will Be Improvised returns to improvisation’s roots in economic and social necessity and locates it as a core tenet of the aesthetics of obligation, where a commitment to others drives the production and result of creative work. Thus, this book puts forward a methodology to explore the improvised, often ephemeral, works of art activism.
Kaveh Akbar and Paige Lewis, eds.
Another Last Call
(Sarabande Books, 2023)
In 1997, Sarabande published Last Call, a poetry anthology that became a formative text on the lived experiences of addiction. Now, more than twenty-five years later, editors Kaveh Akbar and Paige Lewis offer this companion volume for a new generation. Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction & Deliverance showcases work from poets like Joy Harjo, Afaa M. Weaver, Diane Seuss, Layli Long Soldier, Sharon Olds, Jericho Brown, Ada Limón, and Ocean Vuong, as well as many new and powerful voices.
Emeritus Books
Phillip Round
Inscribing Sovereignties: Writing Community in Native North America
(The University of North Carolina Press, 2024)
Before European settlers arrived in North America, more than 300 distinct languages were being spoken among the continent's Indigenous peoples. But the Euro-American emphasis on alphabetic literacy has historically hidden the power and influence of Indigenous verbal and nonverbal language diversity on encounters between Indigenous North Americans and settlers. In this path-breaking work, Phillip H. Round reveals how Native North Americans sparked a communications revolution in their adaptation and resistance to settlers' modes of speaking and writing. Round especially focuses on communication through inscription—the physical act of making a mark, the tools involved, and the social and cultural processes that render the mark legible. Using methods from history, literary studies, media studies, linguistics, and material culture studies, Round shows how Indigenous graphic practices embodied Native epistemologies while fostering linguistic innovation.
Alumni Books
Jerald Walker
Magically Black and Other Essays
(Amistad, HarperCollins Publishers, 2024)
In Magically Black and Other Essays Jerald Walker elegantly blends personal revelation and cultural critique to create a bracing and often humorous examination of Black American life. He thoughtfully addresses the inherent complexities of topics as eclectic as incarceration, home renovations, gentrification, the crip walk, pimping, and the rise of the MAGA movement, approaching them through various Black perspectives, including husband, father, teacher, and writer. The collection’s overarching theme is captured in the titular essay, which examines the culture of heroic action African Americans created in response to their enslavement and oppression, giving proof to Albert Murray’s observation that the “fire in the forging process . . . for all its violence, does not destroy the metal that becomes the sword.”
Student Books
Darius Stewart
Be Not Afraid of My Body: A Lyrical Memoir
(Arcadia Publishing, 2024)
Darius Stewart spent his childhood in the Lonsdale projects of Knoxville, where he grew up navigating school, friendship, and his own family life in a context that often felt perilous. As we learn about his life in Tennessee―and eventually in Texas and Iowa, where he studies to become a poet―he details the obstacles to his most crucial desires: hiding his earliest attraction to boys in his neighborhood, predatory stalkers, doomed affairs, his struggles with alcohol addiction, and his eventual diagnosis with HIV. Through a mix of straightforward memoir, brilliantly surreal reveries, and moments of startling imagery and insight, Stewart’s explorations of love, illness, chemical dependency, desire, family, joy, shame, loneliness, and beauty coalesce into a wrenching, musical whole.
“Darius Stewart has reimagined the form of the American memoir. Be Not Afraid of My Body is a gift, an assembly of grace, wit, candor, outrage, bewilderment, charm, and wisdom of stunning beauty.” ―John D’Agata