Books by WMU Authors from 2025-2029

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  City of Lyrics: Ordinary Poets and Islamicate Popular Culture in Early Modern Delhi

  Nathan L. M. Tabor

  For centuries, Urdu-speaking poets and their audiences have gathered for mushāʿirahs, literary competitions for spoken-word verse. Today the mushāʿirah is a global phenomenon, as audiences in the millions convene in person and online for hours of poetic performance. Tracing these modern gatherings back to their origins, Nathan L. M. Tabor introduces readers to the popular emergence of the mushāʿirah in eighteenth-century Delhi. Scores of poets composed two-line lyric poems, called ġhazals, that they muttered, sang, shouted, and spat out in contentious salon spaces across India's largest metropolis. Delhi's mushāʿirahs circulated lyrics, satires, and songs for both common and elite poets, who traded and assessed words as an urban commodity that defined hierarchy, taste, and notions of delight.

  Via poets' verse exchanges and their histories of Dehli's literary scene, City of Lyrics reconstructs the social networks the mushāʿirahs produced. By understanding the roots of this uniquely Islamic literary practice, readers will gain insight into global popular culture today, which increasingly takes shape according to the tastes and values of the Muslim world yet is enjoyed by wide audiences of Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

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  The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: The Continuing Adventures of Judith Shakespeare

  Grace Tiffany

  "Witty, resilient, and fiercely intelligent, Judith emerges as a heroine for the ages. Her journey, rich in historical authenticity and imaginative storytelling, offers insights that resonate across the centuries."--Christina Baker Kline, New York Times bestselling author of The Exiles

  For readers of Hilary Mantel and Madeline Miller, a deeply engrossing work of historical fiction--a tale of a woman of the Shakespeare family struggling to manage both her private grief and public danger.

  At the age of sixty-one, Judith Shakespeare, a midwife-apothecary and twin of the long-dead Hamnet, must flee provincial Stratford on horseback to avoid arrest for witchcraft. Her traveling companions are a zealous Puritan woman and child who have been displaced by civil war--the bloody seventeenth-century strife between Royalists and Roundheads. Judith is also leaving her marriage, which has foundered since the wrenching loss of two adult sons to the plague.

  The sequel to the author's My Father Had a Daughter, a tale of Judith in her youth, The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter revisits this character for the ages--Shakespeare's sharp-tongued, witty youngest child, no less feisty in her maturity. Four-hundred years after Judith's death, Grace Tiffany brings her back onto center stage. Judith's latest tale offers profound insights--into friendship, motherhood, marriage, religious extremism, and war--which remain resoundingly true today.

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  The Detective Novel in Puerto Rico

  Benjamín Torres Caballero

  The Detective Novel in Puerto Rico is the first comprehensive book-length study in English of the detective novel on the island from its origins (1984) to the present (2024). It describes the historical events that served as catalysts and led to the inception of the genre on the island, as well as its subsequent development, from the 1984 publication of Wilfredo Mattos Cintrón’s El cerro de los buitres to the present. In the process, this study establishes a canon for the genre on the island over the last 40 years. It covers 20 authors and some 50 works, many of them hybrid texts, for instance, Rafael Acevedo’s science fiction detective novel Exquisito cadáver (2001). Each text is analysed from one or more critical approach, whether it be socio-political, intertextual, or ideological. The reader will come away with an overview of what has developed in a relatively short span of time into a diverse and innovative literary genre on the island. This volume will be of interest to scholars of Puerto Rican, Caribbean and Latin American literature and academic libraries.

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  Empowering Youth to Confront the Climate Crisis in English Language Arts

  Allen Webb, Richard Beach, and Jeff Share

  Discover how English teachers and their students confront the climate crisis using critical inquiry, focusing on justice, and taking action.

  Working in today's politically polarized environment, these teachers know first-hand about teaching and learning in communities that support and resist climate education. This much-needed book describes outstanding English instruction that includes creative and analytical writing; critical place-based learning; contemporary "cli-fi"; young adult, Indigenous, and youth-authored literature; Afrofuturism; critical media analysis; digital media production; and many other ways in which students can explore the crisis and have their voices heard and respected. While the focus is on high school and middle school English Language Arts, there are also relevant and inspiring elementary and college examples.

  This resource provides everything teachers need to help young people understand and address the climate emergency through supportive and empowering transformational learning.

  Book Features:

  • Emphasizes addressing the climate crisis as an important dimension of English language arts.
  • Illustrates relevant and effective ways to use writing, critical inquiry, literature, media, speaking, the arts, and publishing.
  • Provides examples of students connecting local climate impacts with national and global events; critically analyzing climate denial, delay, and inaction; considering questions of justice; imagining different futures; and developing their voices and activism.
  • Shares teaching methods, classroom stories, and student work from cities, suburbs, and rural classrooms.
  • Examines questions of climate justice: Who causes the crisis? Who suffers? Why do governments fail to act? What is the experience of climate refugees? What type of world will young people inherit?
  • Explains how students can take action, join with others, and become involved in solutions.
  • Additional resources are available for each chapter at http://climatecrisisela.pbworks.com