Books Written by English Faculty, Staff and Students

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  Sprawl: Poems

  Andrew Collard

  Sprawl is a reconstruction of the constantly shifting landscape of metropolitan Detroit, which extends over six counties and is home to over four million people, from the perspective of a single parent raising a young child amid financial precarity. Part memoir, part invention, the book is Andrew Collard's attempt to reconcile the tenderness and sense of purpose found in the parent-child relationship with ongoing societal crises in the empire of the automobile. Here, a mansion may contrast with a burned-out home just up the street. How does one construct a sense of place in such a landscape, where once-familiar neighborhoods turn to strip malls or empty lots and the relationships that root us dissolve? Sprawl suggests that there is solace in recognizing that when we ask this question, we are never alone in asking. Within the larger geographical space of the metropolis are the in-between places of personal significance: the gas stations, burger joints, malls, and parking lots where many of the defining moments of ordinary lives occur. These poems take deep inspiration from such places, insisting on the value of the people found there, along with their experiences. What might be considered high and low culture are as inextricably linked in the formal cues of the poems as they are in the Michigan landscape, influenced by pop music, midcentury modern aesthetics, comic books, and cars. While the sprawl of the title refers to the seemingly endless succession of businesses and neighborhoods extending north from Detroit ("a sprawl this extensive breeds / empty pockets"), it also invokes the sprawl of history through poems that move between the past and present. One sequence of poems built on old newspaper clippings draws attention to a Chrysler plant that once constructed Redstone missiles. Elsewhere, two poems refer to the Detroit newspaper strike of the 1990s, a local controversy with lasting implications for the community. Sprawl ultimately illuminates the relationship of one place to other places, contextualizing its characters and locales within a wider societal frame.

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  The New Work of Writing Across the Curriculum: Diversity and Inclusion, Collaborative Partnerships, and Faculty Development

  Staci Perryman-Clark

  The New Work of Writing Across the Curriculum is a descriptive analysis of how institutions can work to foster stronger intellectual activities around writing as connected to campus-wide diversity and inclusion initiatives. Author Staci M. Perryman-Clark blends theory and practice, grounds disciplinary conversations with practical examples of campus work, and provides realistic expectations for operations with budgetary constraints while enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion work in higher education. Many of these initiatives are created in isolation, reinforcing institutional silos that are not used strategically to gain the attention of senior administrators, particularly those working at state-supported public institutions who must manage shrinking institutional budgets. Yet teaching and learning centers and WAC programs gain tremendously from one another by building explicit partnerships on campus-wide diversity initiatives that emphasize cultural competence. In addition, both cultural competence and written proficiency enhance the transferable skills necessary for completing undergraduate education requirements, and this work can be leveraged to draw the attention of senior administrative leadership. Faculty development and WAC need to make diversity and inclusion initiatives a priority for professional development. The New Work of Writing Across the Curriculum reviews initiatives that point to increased understanding of diversity and inclusion that will be of significance to administrators, WAC specialists, faculty developers, and diversity officers across the spectrum of institutions of higher learning.

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  Auras : stories

  Kevin Fitton

  The twelve stories that make up Auras span time from the 1940’s to the present day, They cover ground from New England to the Midwest to the South. But in another respect, all of these stories live in the same place, asking a different version of the same question: Is it possible to fix broken things?

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  Foundations in Written Communication: Strategies, Behaviors, Success

  Brian Gogan, Eman Sari Al-Drous, Josh Scheidler, and Savannah Xaver

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  Poets and the Fools Who Love Them: A Memoir in Essays

  Richard Katrovas

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  Woman with a Cat on Her Shoulder and Other Riffs

  Richard Katrovas

  A poetic meditation on the terror of extinction. The Woman with a Cat on Her Shoulder is a gathering of "punk formalist" lyrics that collectively are a meditation not on mortality so much as on the terror of extinction, how that terror is the reservoir of love. Katrovas declaims from the margins of faith, the cliff edge of doubt, seeking to measure the conductivity of private troubles to public issues. Katrovas' "riffs" are verse essays jotted in the antechambers of nightmares and erotic dreams.

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  How Other People Make Love

  Thisbe Nissen

  In How Other People Make Love, Thisbe Nissen chronicles the lives and choices of people questioning the heteronormative institution of marriage. Not best-served by established conventions and conventional mores, these people-young, old, gay, straight, midwestern, coastal-are finding their own paths in learning who they are and how they want to love and be loved, even when those paths must be blazed through the unknown. Concerning husbands and wives, lovers and leavers, Nissen's stories explore our search for connection and all the ways we undercut it, unwittingly and intentionally, when we do find it. How do we hold ourselves together-to function, work, and survive-while endlessly yearning to be undone, unraveled, and laid bare, however untenable and excruciating? How Other People Make Love contains nine stories. "Win's Girl" features a single woman who works at an Iowa slaughterhouse and uses the insurance money from a car accident to update the electric system in her dead parents' old house, only to be unwittingly embroiled with a shady electrician who ultimately forces her to stand up for herself. In "Home Is Where the Heart Gives Out and We Arouse the Grass," a young woman flees after cheating on her husband and winds up at a Nebraska roadside motel populated by participants in a regional dog show who help her decide what to do next. In "Unity Brought Them Together," a young man heads to his favorite New York coffee shop intending to finish the Christmas cards his vacationing fiancée insists on sending, but winds up meeting another displaced young midwestern man there and going home with him instead. All these stories explore the question, "how do we love?" as well as the answers we find, discard, follow, banish, and cling to in all our humanness and desperation. How Other People Make Love asserts that there aren't right and wrong ways to love; there are only our very complicated and contradictory human hearts, minds, bodies, and desires-all searching for something, whether we know what that is or not. These are stories for anyone who has ever loved or been loved.

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  Foundations in Written Communication: Strategies, Behaviors, Success

  Brian Gogan, Samantha Atkins, Ireland Atkinson, Kate Mitchell, Beth Spinner, and Savannah Xaver

  Chronicling success -- Constructing success -- Reflecting on projects -- Tracing an equity event -- Proposing projects -- Building a position -- Reworking a position -- Narrating a reflection.

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  Twice There Was a Country

  Alen Hamza

  Poetry. "Alen Hamza is a lyric poet of the first order, and TWICE THERE WAS A COUNTRY proves it with poems that alchemize past and present, personal and political, and grief and celebration in a way that leads to absolute stillness: 'Silence has a mother in it and summer / refuses to move on.' Throughout this volume, Hamza acts as an Adam of sorts, naming people and places and events with the exactitude that allows him to reclaim all that was ever lost: 'Those under us are not dead. / They are dancers. We are the music.' This is a brilliant debut."--Jericho Brown "Alen Hamza writes poems that oscillate between forgetting and remembering, between the two gods of his soul--Bosnia and Herzegovina and America--between two languages, and between the life that passed and the life that is passing... His poems face you with your own life and hurt and cure you with the same intensity."--Lidija Dimkovska "With these darkly magnetic poems, Alen Hamza locates us in a world of political upheaval, personal dislocation and emotional fracture with a stunning balance and decorum. Reading TWICE THERE WAS A COUNTRY, I feel like I am being guided by a gentle firm hand while bombs are exploding around us, and surely this is one of the best things poetry can do."--Dean Young "TWICE THERE WAS A COUNTRY explores Hamza's identity as a Bosnian refugee attempting, and equally resisting, to assimilate to the cultural politics of the United States. Hamza's poems are playful and often surreal; their examination of how language shapes both our political and cultural identities is timely and nuanced. Here, the legacy of wartime trauma is approached with an ironist's touch and a fabulist's sense of play, paying exquisite attention to the ways in which both English and Bosnian get used--or misused--by speakers desperate to remake but also preserve their sense of self. '[I]n the end I realize I really wanted / to be a poem,' Hamza writes, and it is in the beauty of these poems that the many contradictions inherent to the immigrant's identity come to life."--Paisley Rekdal "Alen Hamza delicately shows us what happens to the internal psyche during exile and during its aftermath. There's longing, displacement, absurdity, yes; but oh there's also humor, surprise, and joy... Hamza acknowledges that 'this age calls for chewing,' and in this brilliant debut, he gives us 'American-chewed words.'"--Javier Zamora

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  Children's and Young Adult Comics

  Gwen Athene Tarbox and Derek Parker Royal

  A complete critical guide to the history, form and contexts of the genre, Children's and Young Adult Comics helps readers explore how comics have engaged with one of their most crucial audiences.
  
  In an accessible and easy-to-navigate format, the book covers such topics as:
  
  - The history of comics for children and young adults, from early cartoon strips to the rise of comics as mainstream children's literature
  - Cultural contexts – from the Comics Code Authority to graphic novel adaptations of popular children's texts such as Neil Gaiman's Coraline
  - Key texts – from familiar favourites like Peanuts and Archie Comics to YA graphic novels such as Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese and hybrid works including the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series
  - Important theoretical and critical approaches to studying children's and young adult comics

  
  Children's and Young Adult Comics includes a glossary of crucial critical terms and a lengthy resources section to help students and readers develop their understanding of these genres and pursue independent study.

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  With All My Heart

  Erin Hult and Alan Farmer

  In Erin's second poetry collection, she continues to use writing as a way to express her thoughts and feelings. Erin navigates controversial and emotional topics in a relatable, original way. Paving a path for young women like her, she encourages her readers to seek help for mental illnesses, step away from unhealthy relationships, and learn to love themselves. As Erin approaches her early twenties, she is just figuring out love and the other intricacies of life, allowing her readers to follow her along the way.

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  Shelter in Place

  Catherine Kyle

  In her collection, Shelter in Place, Catherine Kyle offers unapologetic mirrors and terrifying prophecies; these graceful, imaginative poems are not afraid to look into the deep dark--within and without--into the places we often close our eyes against. Refusing retreat, spurning sanctuary, Kyle's poetry is interrogatory, seeking answers: if we advocate awareness as a "balm," especially now "in the age of the image," how can we stare into the faces of suffering and do nothing? She goes on to ask: "if this world is a story, / what is its moral," an answer that relies on our acceptance of responsibility as "the sovereign or the heir." Will we be parent or legacy, liberator or disciple? Kyle reminds us that although we often give in--make deals with crossroads demons, relinquish our "hands" for "gloves," the "softest kid skin," take the easy outs--through it all we have a choice; we can choose to be museums, to "make shelters of / our bodies," to "carry the ghosts / of what is lost." We can "become custom jobs," play our parts, save empathy, create change. Even as Kyle's poetry terrifies and punctures us with worry, it rebels, refusing to relinquish hope, goading us into bravery. Shelter in Place is a warning, a slap in the face, a kick in the ass, a pre-apocalyptic prayer, a guide to action where "agency" equals "lullaby elegy power." Kara Dorris, author of Night Ride Home and Untitled Film Still Museum.

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  Dangerously Speaking

  Jessica McLarty

  Change is constant and learning new skills teaches us communication techniques. Staying encouraged is capable of being included in existance. Living comfortably comes with being able to express one self in ways that will heal the soul and record the moments. Spontaneity also helps keep this life refreshed. A relationship with art is one without waiting, sometimes.

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  Black Perspectives in Writing Program Administration: From Margins to the Center

  Staci M. Perryman-Clark and Collin Lamont Craig

  Editors Staci M. Perryman-Clark and Collin Lamont Craig have made a space for WPAs of color to cultivate antiracist responses within an Afrocentric framework and to enact socially responsible approaches to program building. This framework also positions WPAs of color to build relationships with allies and create contexts for students and faculty to imagine rhetorics that speak truth to oppressive and divisive ideologies within and beyond the academy, but especially within writing programs.

  Contributors share not just experiences of racist microaggressions, but also the successes of black WPAs and WPAs whose work represents a strong commitment to students of color. Together they work to foster stronger alliance building among white allies in the discipline, and, most importantly, to develop concrete, specific models for taking action to confront and resist racist microaggressions. As a whole, this collection works to shift the focus from race more broadly toward perspectives on blackness in writing program administration.

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  Theodore Roosevelt: A Literary Life

  Thomas Bailey and Katherine Joslin

  Of all the many biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, none has presented the twenty-sixth president as he saw himself: as a man of letters. This fascinating account traces Roosevelt’s lifelong engagement with books and discusses his writings from childhood journals to his final editorial, finished just hours before his death. His most famous book, The Rough Riders—part memoir, part war adventure—barely begins to suggest the dynamism of his literary output. Roosevelt read widely and deeply, and worked tirelessly on his writing. Along with speeches, essays, reviews, and letters, he wrote history, autobiography, and tales of exploration and discovery. In this thoroughly original biography, Roosevelt is revealed at his most vulnerable—and his most human.

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  Introducing Science Through Images: Cases of Visual Popularization

  Maria Gigante

  As funding for basic scientific research becomes increasingly difficult to secure, public support becomes essential. Because of its promise for captivating nonexpert publics, the practice of merging art and imagery with science has been gaining traction in the scientific community. While images have been used with greater frequency in recent years, their value is often viewed as largely superficial. To the contrary, Maria E. Gigante posits in Introducing Science through Images, the value of imagery goes far beyond mere aesthetics--visual elements are powerful communication vehicles. The images examined in this volume, drawn from a wide range of historical periods, serve an introductory function--that is, they appear in a position of primacy relative to text and, like the introduction to a speech, have the potential to make audiences attentive and receptive to the forthcoming content. Gigante calls them "portal" images and explicates their utility in science communication, both to popularize and mystify science in the public eye. Gigante analyzes how science has been represented by various types of portal images: frontispieces, portraits of scientists, popular science magazine covers, and award-winning scientific images from Internet visualization competitions. Using theories of rhetoric and visual communication, she addresses the weak connection between scientific communities and the public and explores how visual elements can best be employed to garner public support for research.

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  For When You Need It the Most

  Erin Hult

  This poetry collection was written over the span of two years. It touches on some of the hardest situations women of all ages are dealing with. The author writes about her own experiences with mental illness, unhealthy relationships, and more in a way that makes it relatable for her readers. She uses poetry as therapy, in hopes readers can identify with her words and use them as a healing experience, as she did.

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  An Archaeology of Disbelief: The Origin of Secular Philosophy

  Edward Jayne and Elaine Anderson Jayne

  An Archaeology of Disbelief traces the origin of secular philosophy to pre-Socratic Greek philosophers who proposed a physical universe without supernatural intervention. Some mentioned the Homeric gods, but others did not. Atomists and Sophists identified themselves as agnostics if not outright atheists, and in reaction Plato featured transcendent spiritual authority. However, Aristotle offered a physical cosmology justified by evidence from a variety of scientific fields. He also revisited many pre-Socratic assumptions by proposing that existence consists of mass in motion without temporal or spatial boundaries. In many ways his analysis anticipated Newton's concept of gravity, Darwin's concept of evolution, and Einstein's concept of relativity. Aristotle's follower Strato invented scientific experimentation. He also inspired the pursuit of science and advocated the rejection of all beliefs unconfirmed by science. Carneades in turn distorted Aristotelian logic to ridicule the god concept, and Lucretius proposed a grand secular cosmology in his epic De Rerum Natura. In the two dialogues, Academica and De Natura Deorum, Cicero provided a useful retrospective assessment of this entire movement. The Roman Empire and advent of Christianity effectively terminated Greek philosophy except for Platonism reinvented as stoicism. Widespread destruction of libraries eliminated most early secular texts, and the Inquisition played a major role in preventing secular inquiry. Aquinas later justified Aristotle in light of Christian doctrine, and secularism's revival was postponed until the seventeenth century's paradoxical reaction against his interpretation of Aristotle. Today it nevertheless remains possible to trace western civilization's remarkable secular achievement to its initial breakthrough in ancient Greece. The purpose of this book is accordingly to trace the origin and development of its secular thought through close examination of texts that still exist today in light of Aristotle's writings.

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  Continuation

  Jessica McLarty

  Poetry that provides sensation through rhythmic intrigue.

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  Jean Baudrillard: The Rhetoric of Symbolic Exchange

  Brian Gogan

  Jean Baudrillard has been studied as sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. Brian Gogan establishes him as a rhetorician, demonstrating how the histories, traditions, and practices of rhetoric prove central to his use of language. In addition to Baudrillard’s standard works, Gogan examines many of the scholar’s lesser-known writings that have never been analyzed by rhetoricians, and this more comprehensive approach presents fresh perspectives on Baudrillard’s work as a whole.

  Gogan examines both the theorist and his rhetoric, combining these two lines of inquiry in ways that allow for provocative insights. Part one of the book explains Baudrillard’s theory as compatible with the histories and traditions of rhetoric, outlining his novel understanding of rhetorical invention as involving thought, discourse, and perception. Part two evaluates Baudrillard’s work in terms of a perception of him—as an aphorist, an illusionist, an ignoramus, and an ironist. A biographical sketch and a critical review of the literature on Baudrillard and rhetoric round out the study.

  This book makes the French theorist’s complex concepts understandable and relates them to the work of important thinkers, providing a thorough and accessible introduction to Baudrillard’s ideas.

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  Chaucer and the Child

  Eve Salisbury

  This book addresses portrayals of children in a wide array of Chaucerian works. Situated within a larger discourse on childhood, Ages of Man theories, and debates about the status of the child in the late fourteenth century, Chaucer’s literary children―from infant to adolescent―offer a means by which to hear the voices of youth not prominently treated in social history. The readings in this study urge our attention to literary children, encouraging us to think more thoroughly about the Chaucerian collection from their perspectives. Eve Salisbury argues that the child is neither missing in the late Middle Ages nor in Chaucer’s work, but is,rather, fundamental to the institutions of the time and central to the poet’s concerns.

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  Swastika into Lotus

  Richard Katrovas

  In Swastika into Lotus, Richard Katrovas, a "punk formalist," casts a wary eye on poetry, poetry readings, higher education, the UFO cottage industry, organized religion, fine dining, climate change denial, and national right-wing politics. The book's humor is dark, by turns self-deprecating and fierce, and yet many of the poems are unabashed in their assertions of both filial and romantic love. Heaving traditionally "formal" verse through a looking glass, Katrovas has produced a book that is not for the passive-aggressively "sensitive."

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  Hitchcock's Appetites: The Corpulent Plots of Desire and Dread

  Casey McKittrick

  In Hitchcock's Appetites, Casey McKittrick offers the first book-length study of the relationship between Hitchcock's body size and his cinema. Whereas most critics and biographers of the great director are content to consign his large figure and larger appetite to colorful anecdotes of his private life, McKittrick argues that our understanding of Hitchcock's films, his creative process, and his artistic mind are incomplete without considering his lived experience as a fat man.

  Using archival research of his publicity, script collaboration, and personal communications with his producers, in tandem with close textual readings of his films, feminist critique, and theories of embodiment, Hitchcock's Appetites produces a new and compelling profile of Hitchcock's creative life, and a fuller, more nuanced account of his auteurism.

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  Gunpowder Percy

  Grace Tiffany

  “What are the three parts of powder? Anger. Nostalgia. Love.” These are what drive Thomas Percy, a Catholic Englishman chafing under the rule of the Scotsman James I in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Percy’s passions, fueled by an obsession with the medieval-history plays staged at Shakespeare’s Globe playhouse, erupt at last in a wild plan to save the soul of a kingdom – by killing its Protestant king.

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  Crossings in Text and Textile

  Katherine Joslin and Daneen Wardrop

  Crossings in Text and Textile explores the diverse range of transatlantic representations of clothing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. This collection of essays demonstrates that fashion history and literary history, when examined together, prompt fresh understandings of the complexities of race, class, and sexual identity. By bridging material culture and discourse, Crossings establishes the significance of fashion--while neglecting none of its aesthetic appeal--to offer historicized readings on a variety of topics, from Jane Austen's nuanced display of social interactions through the economics of muslin to the 1871 Park and Boulton cross-dressing trial and Jessie Fauset's selection of apparel to express racial power. The geographic span of textiles from different economic areas around the globe includes Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. By making use of transatlantic texts to consider the political and social positioning of both workers and consumers, the collection further expands upon the emerging cross-disciplinary study of reading dress. A true "state of the field" work, Crossings in Text and Textiles charts new scholarly ground at the nexus between fashion, textiles, and literature, appealing to a broad interdisciplinary audience of scholars and students.