Books by Diane Glancy

A minister's wife finds herself in hell. The story of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16:19-31 gives a chilling insight into the afterlife. It is a story that is not often addressed because it makes clear the separation of people upon death. Frank Winscott, a retired minister, works at comparing translations of the Bible. Eugena has ignored her husband's work and his sermons all her life. Instead, she finds meaning in her potter's shed, where she makes different forms of ziggurats that she places in her kiln, a little symbol of hell. Though Eugena rejects Frank's insistence that there is a heaven and hell, she finds that she has worked with the shape of both and never knew it. In the end, she realizes that heaven and hell are in the shape of ziggurats, one rising and the other sinking. Her beloved ziggurats become the ironic witness of what her husband preached. Meanwhile, Frank and Eugena struggle to make sense of their lives after the death of their addict son, Daniel. When he is killed in a car accident, Frank and Eugena argue over whether Daniel's death was truly an accident, or whether his car may have been pushed off the road. The novel begins, ""Another letter from the afterlife, you might say. But this one starts before the afterlife and continues into it."" When Eugena dies, she travels through hell to find her son, Daniel. Frank sends the last chapter from heaven. The novel was influenced by Dante's The Divine Comedy and begins with an epigraph from The Inferno, ""What I was living, that I am dead.""

A professor hears the voices of Biblical women. She begins writing. What was it like for Dorcas to die and be brought back to life? What was it like for Philip''s daughters to live with the threat of persecution after Christ was crucified? What did Miriam feel when she sat in the leprosy tent? What did they all say as the professor wove her own story between their voices? It was Michal, David''s first wife, who made a bolster of goat''s hair for David''s bed when Saul, her father, was trying to kill him. The bolster made it look as if David were there. Likewise, these women''s voices are not their actual voices, because they were not recorded in Scripture, but a similitude of what such women might have said. The narrator struggles with their stories beneath Scripture. Michal is maligned because she scorned David when he danced before the ark, but after the death of her sister, she raised her sister''s sons. David hanged them all when the Gibeonites told him that Saul had broken a covenant with them. They asked that Saul''s male descendants be killed. What was it like for Michal to see her nephews hanged? What did she have to say?""Diane Glancy is the kind of visionary whose poetic spirit sees beyond, twisting the ordinary with astonishing verbal leaps of imagination, turning things inside out so that we see what they are made of. In these stories, she interweaves a personal narrative with visions and voices from another time, another sphere. The result is quite extraordinary.""--Luci Shaw, author of Scape""Uprising of Goats is an impeccably researched, intricately rendered, hauntingly beautiful journey through what has traditionally been a realm of silent mystery. It''s clear that Diane Glancy does not simply imagine the world of biblical women, but inhabits the same quietly electrifying space.""--Paula Huston, author of A Land Without SinDiane Glancy is emeritus professor at Macalester College. Her books and films are listed online at www.dianglancy.org and www.dianeglancy.com..

At the end of the Southern Plains Indian wars in 1875, the War Department shipped seventy-two Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Caddo prisoners from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. These most resistant Native people, referred to as "trouble causers," arrived to curious, boisterous crowds eager to see the Indian warriors they knew only from imagination. Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education is an evocative work of creative nonfiction, weaving together history, oral traditions, and personal experience to tell the story of these Indian prisoners.Resurrecting the voices and experiences of the prisoners who underwent a painful regimen of assimilation, Diane Glancy''s work is part history, part documentation of personal accounts, and a search for imaginative openings into the lives of the prisoners who left few of their own records other than carvings in their cellblocks and the famous ledger books. They learned English, mathematics, geography, civics, and penmanship with the knowledge that acquiring the same education as those in the U.S. government would be their best tool for petitioning for freedom. Glancy reveals stories of survival and an intimate understanding of the Fort Marion prisoners'' predicament.Diane Glancy is an emerita professor of English at Macalester College and is currently a professor at Azusa Pacific University in California. She is the author of numerous novels, including Claiming Breath (Nebraska, 1992), Designs of the Night Sky (Nebraska, 2002), and The Reason for Crows: A Story of Kateri Tekakwitha.

Speaking out of the known world, this powerful selection of Glancy's poems transforms experience through new narratives, mytholigising history and social crisis. Tackling themes of disruption, loss and heritage, these poems invoke a wide range of familial and animal personae and environments: we find ourselves guided to a land filled with hope.

In this innovative novel, a librarian of Cherokee ancestry rekindles and reinvents her Native identity by discovering the rhythm and spark of traditionally told stories in the most unusual places in the modern world.

The dream of a broken field is to bear crops. The dream of a broken history is to create meaning, to find among the fragments a way to tell the story of a life. It is this dream that Diane Glancy pursues here, through essays on writing, faith, family, teaching, and retirement. Blending a poet's vision and a storyteller's voice, the result is a virtuoso work of creative nonfiction.