Books Written by English Faculty, Staff and Students

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  Amber Notes

  Judith A. Rypma

  Once again Rypma weaves words into poetic patterns that explore everything from the forbidden fruits to the healing gems of our lives. In this latest book, Amber Notes, she also “transports us across a lifetime and around the globe,” as Atlanta Review editor Dan Veach puts it. Richard Katrovas, author of 14 books, concurs, adding that “an insect in amber is the perfect emblem for this dance.”

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  Cyclorama (Poets Out Loud)

  Daneen Wardrop

  In a stunning cycle of persona poems, Daneen Wardrop offers us a panoramic view of the inner lives of those forgotten among the violence and strife of the American Civil War: the nurse and the woman soldier, the child and the draftee, the prostitute, the black slave, and the Native American soldier. Each one speaks out to be seen and heard, bearing witness to the mundanity of suffering experienced by those whose presence was ubiquitous yet erased in the official histories of the War Between the States. Cyclorama takes its name from the theater-sized, in-the-round oil paintings popular in the late nineteenth century, and with each poem, Wardrop adds a panel to her expansive, engrossing portrait of the bloodshed and tears, the tedium and fear experienced by the Civil War living and the dying. With pathos and lyric force, she brings sharply into focus perspectives on an unfathomable experience we thought we already knew and understood.

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  Civil War Nurse Narratives 1863-1870

  Daneen Leigh Wardrop

  Civil War Nurse Narratives, 1863–1870, examines the first wave of autobiographical narratives written by northern female nurses and published during the war and shortly thereafter, ranging from the well-known Louisa May Alcott to lesser-known figures such as Elvira Powers and Julia Wheelock. From the hospitals of Washington, DC, and Philadelphia, to the field at Gettysburg in the aftermath of the battle, to the camps bordering front lines during active combat, these nurse narrators reported on what they saw and experienced for an American audience hungry for tales of individual experience in the war.

  As a subgenre of war literature, the Civil War nurse narrative offered realistic reportage of medical experiences and declined to engage with military strategies or Congressional politics. Instead, nurse narrators chronicled the details of attending wounded soldiers in the hospital, where a kind of microcosm of US democracy-in-progress emerged. As the war reshaped the social and political ideologies of the republic, nurses labored in a workplace that reflected cultural changes in ideas about gender, race, and class. Through interactions with surgeons and other officials they tested women’s rights convictions, and through interactions with formerly enslaved workers they wrestled with the need to live up to their own often abolitionist convictions and support social equality.

  By putting these accounts in conversation with each other, Civil War Nurse Narratives productively explores a developing genre of war literature that has rarely been given its due and that offers refreshing insights into women’s contributions to the war effort. Taken together, these stories offer an impressive and important addition to the literary history of the Civil War.

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  Paper Lantern: Love Stories

  Stuart Dybek

  Ready! Aim! On command the firing squad aims at the man backed against a full-length mirror. The mirror once hung in a bedroom, but now it's cracked and propped against a Dumpster in an alley. The condemned man has refused the customary last cigarette but accepted as a hood the black slip that was carelessly tossed over a corner of the mirror's frame. The slip still smells faintly of a familiar fragrance. So begins "Tosca," the first in this vivid collection of Stuart Dybek's love stories. Operatically dramatic and intimately lyrical, grittily urban and impressionistically natural, the varied fictions in Paper Lantern all focus on the turmoil of love as only Dybek can portray it. An execution triggers the recollection of a theatrical romance; then a social worker falls for his own client; and lovers part as giddily, perhaps as hopelessly, as a kid trying to hang on to a boisterous kite. A flaming laboratory evokes a steamy midnight drive across terrain both familiar and strange, and an eerily ringing phone becomes the telltale signature of a dark betrayal. Each story is marked with contagious desire, spontaneous revelation, and, ultimately, resigned courage. As one woman whispers when she sets a notebook filled with her sketches drifting out to sea, "Someone will find you."

  Some of Dybek's characters recur in these stories, while others appear only briefly. Throughout, they-and we-are confronted with vaguely familiar scents and images, reminiscent of love but strangely disconcerting, so that we might wonder whether we are looking in a mirror or down the barrel of a gun. "After the ragged discharge," Dybek writes, "when the smoke has cleared, who will be left standing and who will be shattered into shards?" Paper Lantern brims with the intoxicating elixirs known to every love-struck, lovelorn heart, and it marks the magnificent return of one of America's most important fiction writers at the height of his powers.

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  Wild Grass on the Riverbank

  Hiromi Ito and Jeffrey Angles

  Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles. Set simultaneously in the California desert and her native Japan, tracking migrant children who may or may not be human, or alive, Hiromi Itō's WILD GRASS ON THE RIVERBANK will plunge you into dreamlike landscapes of volatile proliferation: shape-shifting mothers, living father-corpses, and pervasively odd vegetation. At once grotesque and vertiginous, Itō interweaves mythologies, language, sexuality, and place into a genre-busting narrative of what it is to be a migrant.

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  Raising Girls in Bohemia: Meditations of an American Father: A Memoir in Essays

  Richard Katrovas

  A provocative collection of personal and political essays by an American writer, Raising Girls in Bohemia chronicles the life of a father raising three perfectly bilingual, culturally bifurcated, Czech-American daughters. While tracing what fatherhood has taught him about the world, Katrovas delves into a range of intricately related yet far-flung subjects including fine dining, sexual epithets, gender identity, racism, poetry, and education, tracing the contours of his ignorance about all things. Through the course of these fine essays, Katrovas unveils what it means to be an American and to be a man, and especially what it means to be a father of three daughters, born in Prague, in what we can only hope is the twilight of patriarchy.

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  Remembering Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro: African Storytellers of the Karamoja Plateau and the Plains of Turkana

  Mustafa Kemal Mirzeler

  The Jie people of northern Uganda and the Turkana of northern Kenya have a genesis myth about Nayeche, a Jie woman who followed the footprints of a gray bull across the waterless plateau and who founded a "cradle land" in the plains of Turkana. In Remembering Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro, Mustafa Kemal Mirzeler shows how the poetic journey of Nayeche and the gray bull Engiro and their metaphorical return during the Jie harvest rituals gives rise to stories, imagery, and the articulation of ethnic and individual identities.

  Since the 1990s, Mirzeler has travelled to East Africa to apprentice with storytellers. Remembering Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro is both an account of his experience listening to these storytellers and of how oral tradition continues to evolve in the modern world. Mirzeler's work contributes significantly to the anthropology of storytelling, the study of myth and memory, and the use of oral tradition in historical studies.

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  America's Garden of Art

  Joseph Antenucci Becherer; David S. Hooker; Larry ten Harmsel; and Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park,

  Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan, opened to the public in 1995, marrying an internationally acclaimed sculpture collection with beautiful green spaces. Today, this midwestern treasure is one of America's most visited cultural destinations, attracting over half a million visitors each year. "America's Garden of Art" chronicles the development and rapid growth of this innovative public garden, with stunning photography that captures the natural and man-made tableaux across all four seasons. The pictorial narrative by photographer William J. Hebert, along with essays by historian Larry Harmsell and Dr. Joseph A. Becherer, Chief Curator and Vice President, Horticulture and Sculpture Collections and Exhibitions, convey a vibrant portrait of Fred and Lena Meijer's legacy, and illustrate the layered beauty of this uniquely American institution.

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  Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew

  Margaret Dupuis and Grace Tiffany

  The impetus for this Approaches to Teaching volume on The Taming of the Shrew grew from the editors' desire to discover why a play notorious for its controversial exploration of conflicts between men and women and the challenges of marriage is enduringly popular in the classroom, in the performing arts, and in scholarship. The result is a volume that offers practical advice to teachers on editions and teaching resources in part 1, "Materials," while illuminating how the play's subtle and complex arguments regarding not just marriage but a host of other subjects--modes of early modern education, the uses of clever rhetoric, intergenerational and class politics, the power of theater--are being brought to life in college classrooms. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," are written by English and theater instructors who have taught in a variety of academic settings and cover topics including early modern homilies and music, Hollywood versions of The Taming of the Shrew, and student performances.

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  Oliver Ellsworth His Central Role in the Establishment of Federal Sovereignty

  Edward Jayne

  After the passage of the Constitution in 1787 the central government of the United States still lacked full federal sovereignty. Two years later this deficiency was remedied with the passage of the Judiciary Act, which gave the federal Supreme Court the power to review and reverse state Supreme Court decisions. The author of this crucial legislation was Oliver Ellsworth, who had served on the Committee of Detail that had written the first draft of the Constitution and later effectively became the Senate majority leader.

  With the Judiciary Act, Ellsworth gave "teeth" to federal sovereignty in a single tortuous 307-word sentence, one of the most important sentences in our nation's official historical documents. In retrospect it seems that he intentionally obscured its meaning and buried ti in Section 25 of the Judiciary Act to ensure its passage. Today the sentence is all but forgotten.

  Most historians ignore Ellsworth's contribution of judicial review by attributing its origin to Chief Justice Marshall's Marbury v. Madison decision fifteen years later. They also overlook Ellsworth's other contributions: his role in naming the United States, achieving the Connecticut Compromise linked with slave-states demands, guaranteeing the U.S. having set the stage for the Louisiana Purchase. Sometimes historians mention his brief tenure as the third Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, but seldom do they note his many remarkable successes during the rest of his career. Here, then, is the fully story.

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  Afrocentric Teacher-Research: Rethinking Appropriateness and Inclusion

  Staci Maree Perryman-Clark

  This work reports on a qualitative teacher-research study that examines the ways in which African American and other students perform expository writing tasks using an Afrocentric ebonics-focused first-year writing curriculum. The book conceptualizes a theory of Afrocentric teacher-research that includes all students in addition to African Americans.

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  Lybeaus Desconus

  Eve Salisbury and James Weldon

  Middle English Texts

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  Paint

  Grace Tiffany

  Emilia Bassano is only a teenager when she's pitched among the poets, politicians, and painted women of the Elizabethan court. Withdrawn and pensive by nature, she devises a remarkable strategy to preserve her own solitude. At first it works. But she's soon shocked to find that, so far from truly hiding, she's attracted the gaze of every courtier and aspiring poet on the scene, including the canniest, hungriest, and strangest one of them all.

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  The Apocalyptic Adventures of Private Winfred Scott Biegle

  Clifford Davidson

  A modernist novel, describing a dystopian military in the imaginary dictatorship of Atlantis, written more than a half century ago when the author was a conscript in the army during the Cold War. As editor of the post newspaper at the Granite City Engineer Depot, Clifford Davidson was in a privileged position for observing the military mentality of the time, in particular the propensity for bullying intended to turn men into mindless killing machines. From other soldiers he was also able to hear disturbing stories at first hand about World War II and the very recent Korean War, only concluded four years earlier. Private Biegle was invented as an anti-hero to satirize those who those accepted authoritarianism as normative and patriotism as uncritical obedience. In other words, in the pages of the novel the author was exploring the very subversion of civil society by probing the implications of the master-slave dichotomy that had been introduced by Hegel and relatively recently put to good use in feminist thought by Jessica Benjamin. But the novel also deserves to be understood as an antic expression that foreshadows the media personality Stephen Colbert, who has popularized irony for so many in this century. Those who have read it have declared it "a good read."A critical introduction to the writing of this Orwellian novel and its relation to literature of the mid-twentieth century is provided by Oscar Haugen in the Afterword. The Apocalyptic Adventures of Winfed Scott Biegle is a work previously only known to a few readers, and now is available to a larger readership in the present edition.

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  Deadbeat

  Jay Baron Nicorvo

  Jay Baron Nicorvo's debut collection revolves around a central character, called Deadbeat--a descendant of John Berryman's Mr. Bones, Marvin Bell's Dead Man and Ted Hughes's Crow, to name an irrepressible few. The poems weave together a domestic narrative as Deadbeat himself muddles through courtship, marriage, divorce, estrangement and, of course, fatherhood. An effigy for America and our culture of recession, Deadbeat is brought to life with honesty, sympathy and love in all of its complications.

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  Teaching Literature in Virtual Worlds : Immersive Learning in English Studies

  Allen Webb

  What are the realities and possibilities of utilizing on-line virtual worlds as teaching tools for specific literary works? Through engaging and surprising stories from classrooms where virtual worlds are in use, this book invites readers to understand and participate in this emerging and valuable pedagogy. It examines the experience of high school and college literature teachers involved in a pioneering project to develop virtual worlds for literary study, detailing how they created, utilized, and researched different immersive and interactive virtual reality environments to support the teaching of a wide range of literary works. Readers see how students role-play as literary characters, extending and altering character conduct in purposeful ways, and how they explore on-line, interactive literature maps, museums, archives, and game worlds to analyze the impact of historical and cultural setting, language, and dialogue on literary characters and events. This book breaks exciting ground, offering insights, pedagogical suggestions, and ways for readers to consider the future of this innovative approach to teaching literary texts.

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  Teaching the Literature of Today's Middle East

  Allen Webb, David Alvarez, Blain H. Auer, Monica Mona Eraqi, Jeffrey A. Patterson, and Vivan Steemers

  Providing a gateway into the real literature emerging from the Middle East, this book shows teachers how to make the topic authentic, powerful, and relevant.

  Teaching the Literature of Today’s Middle East:

  • Introduces teachers to this literature and how to teach it

  • Brings to the reader a tremendous diversity of teachable texts and materials by Middle Eastern writers

  • Takes a thematic approach that allows students to understand and engage with the region and address key issues

  • Includes stories from the author’s own classroom, and shares student insight and reactions

  • Utilizes contemporary teaching methods, including cultural studies, literary circles, blogs, YouTube, class speakers, and film analysis

  • Directly and powerfully models how to address controversial issues in the region

  Written in an open, personal, and engaging style, theoretically informed and academically smart, highly relevant across the field of literacy education, this text offers teachers and teacher-educators a much needed resource for helping students to think deeply and critically about the politics and culture of the Middle East through literary engagements.

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  Traces of Gold: California's Natural Resources and the Claim to Realism in Western American Literature

  Nicolas Witschi

  From Gold Rush romances to cowboy Westerns, from hard-boiled detective thrillers to nature writing, the American West has long been known mainly through hackneyed representations in popular genres. But a close look at the literary history of the West reveals a number of writers who claim that their works represent the "real" West. As Nicolas Witschi shows, writers as varied as Bret Harte, John Muir, Frank Norris, Mary Austin, and Raymond Chandler have used claims of textual realism to engage, replicate, or challenge commonly held assumptions about the West, while historically acknowledged realists like William Dean Howells and Mark Twain have often relied on genre-derived impressions about the region.

  The familiar association of the West with nature and the "great outdoors" implies that life in the West affords an unambiguous relationship with an unalloyed, non-human, real nature. But through a combination of textual scholarship, genre criticism, and materialist cultural studies, Witschi complicates this notion of wide open spaces and unfettered opportunity. The West has been the primary source of raw materials for American industrial and economic expansion, especially between the California Gold Rush and World War II, and Witschi argues that the writers he examines exist within the intersections of cultural and material modes of production. Realistic depictions of Western nature, he concludes, must rely on the representation of the extraction of material resources like minerals, water, and oil.

  With its forays into ecocriticism and cultural studies, Traces of Gold will appeal to students and scholars of American literature, American studies, and western history.

  Source: Amazon.com

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  Once Upon a River : A Novel

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Bonnie Jo Campbell has created an unforgettable heroine in sixteen-year-old Margo Crane, a beauty whose unflinching gaze and uncanny ability with a rifle have not made her life any easier. After the violent death of her father, in which she is complicit, Margo takes to the Stark River in her boat, with only a few supplies and a biography of Annie Oakley, in search of her vanished mother. But the river, Margo's childhood paradise, is a dangerous place for a young woman traveling alone, and she must be strong to survive, using her knowledge of the natural world and her ability to look unsparingly into the hearts of those around her. Her river odyssey through rural Michigan becomes a defining journey, one that leads her beyond self-preservation and to the decision of what price she is willing to pay for her choices.

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  Oz: Poems

  Nancy Eimers

  A broomstick horse, clay marbles, WWII tin fighter plane, Cold War dollhouse with bomb shelter, "all the toys are vanishing," says Nancy Eimers in Oz, her fourth collection of poetry. These poems offer a paradoxical, moving elegy of things we left--or that left us--behind, not just the toys that grow obsolete, but a lost cat, a name, a monarch wing, a melting glacier, all the children at Terezin--an "immensity" that "recedes so incrementally we can't-- / we just can't / put a human face on it." Eimers looks closely at what we lose and how we let go of it, sorrowfully or with secret relief, or some irresoluble hope of recovery.

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  Bogeywoman

  Jaimy Gordon

  A Los Angeles Times Best Book or the Year
  
  National Book Award Winner Jaimy Gordon’s bold and daring coming of age novel combines the teenaged angst of Catcher in the Rye with the humor and tragedy of Girl, Interrupted.
  
  Ursie Koderer knows herself to be a monster--doomed to be different from other girls--very different. When she’s discovered cutting herself at camp, she goes AWOL, and lands in a Baltimore psychiatric hospital. Ursie, now known as the Bogeywoman, joins up with the other misfits on the adolescent ward. They start a bughouse rock group, steal a nitrous oxide machine. As a mental patient Ursie is a success. But then she’s implicated in the accidental burning of a friend. Locked away, the Bogeywoman meets the beautiful, mysterious Doctor Zuk, a woman psychiatrist from somewhere east of the Urals. Their affair is the main event in this gorgeous novel of love, crime, liberation, and flight to something like a new world.

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  Traffic Stop: Poems

  Janet Ruth Heller

  A poetry chapbook.

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  Scorpio Rising : Selected Poems

  Richard Katrovas

  Culled from six previous collections, Scorpio Rising: Selected Poems, is the culmination of a thirty-five-year career. Katrovas's early poems reflect a harrowing childhood on the highways of America as his parents fled the FBI. They also probe the gas-lit backstreets of New Orleans's French Quarter where "the protean human heart/is nature's crime against us." Witness to Prague's Velvet Revolution while on a Fulbright Fellowship, Katrovas in his later poems meditates upon his own American identity as he raises bi-cultural, bilingual daughters. Katrovas's formal verse has an edge we do not usually associate with traditionally formal poetry. Understanding that all gendered identity is a construction, Katrovas explores, as few lyric poets have, the linguistic and emotional contours of "masculinity."

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  Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories

  Melinda Moustakis

  In her debut collection, Melinda Moustakis brings to life a rough-and-tumble family of Alaskan homesteaders through a series of linked stories. Born in Alaska herself to a family with a homesteading legacy, Moustakis examines the near-mythological accounts of the Alaskan wilderness that are her inheritance and probes the question of what it means to live up to larger-than-life expectations for toughness and survival.

  The characters in Bear Down, Bear North are salt-tongued fishermen, fisherwomen, and hunters, scrappy storytellers who put themselves in the path of destruction--sometimes a harsh snowstorm, sometimes each other--and live to tell the tale. While backtrolling for kings on the Kenai River or filleting the catch of the Halibut Hellion with marvelous speed, these characters recount the gamble they took that didn't pay off, or they expound on how not only does Uncle Too-Soon need a girlfriend, the whole state of Alaska needs a girlfriend. A story like "The Mannequin at Soldotna" takes snapshots: a doctor tends to an injured fisherman, a man covets another man's green fishing lure, a girl is found in the river with a bullet in her head. Another story offers an easy moment with a difficult mother, when she reaches out to touch a breaching whale.

  This is a book about taking a fishhook in the eye, about drinking cranberry lick and Jippers and smoking Big-Z cigars. This is a book about the one good joke, or the one night lit up with stars, that might get you through the winter.

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  Sand Theory : Poems

  William Olsen

  The poems in Sand Theory, William Olsen’s fifth collection to date, bristle with intellect, sensitivity, and ambition. Engaging poets from William Blake to Theodore Roethke, Olsen takes aim at grand questions of spirituality, the instability of meaning, and the individual’s relationship with the natural world. Yet Olsen’s lithe and sinuous poems wear their metaphysical concerns lightly, shifting easily between the immediate perceptions of a passing moment and observations offered as if from a great distance, outside of time and space. The energy of Olsen’s poems is generated by his ability to meld the intellectual and the emotional, the abstract and the concrete, into a seamless whole while maintaining a sense of wit and playfulness. Sand Theory cements Olsen’s standing as one of the most vital poets writing today, an audacious chronicler of “the supremely open moment.”