Books published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press

This multidisciplinary volume follows on the success of Choctaw-Apache Foodways and includes several selections, including history, anthropology, folklore, poems, creative essays, and visual art from both academics and members of the tribe.

In his introductory essay to Landscapes with Figures, Robert Root writes, "The nonfiction of place includes literary works in which setting has such a presence in its impact upon characters or events or atmosphere that specific place is inextricable." Many of the essays in Chrysopoeia express the sense of place. As the list of countries and regions traveled to in the writing of these essays demonstrates, being in those spaces is an important part of the narrative and meaning-making. The essays in Chrysopoeia weave time and location to explore the tensions and opportunities of family and place. Readers will learn about calendar-keeping, a lost madonna, prayer trees, sculpture gardens, and enchanted cuisine. Readers will travel to Istanbul's Grand Bazaar, Ireland's Cliff of Moher, Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park, and the American Midwest. And yet each piece is its own crucible of transformation where the narrator thinks through language and place to make meaning from changing relationships: miscarriage, birth, death, union, divorce.

Dreaming of Endangered Species explores issues of health and illness, disability and cure, and human frailty and vulnerability in an age of global unease and uncertainty. It maps a tension between the infinite and finite, between the concrete and ethereal. In some ways, it is a celebration of the mundane, by which I mean the world of everyday objects, of plants and animals, scents, textures, movements, water, and phases of the moon. But interwoven with this testament to ineffable beauty, this celebratory mode, are reflections on my cancer, for example, my autistic strivings, my gender queer identity, and the plight of the natural world. A recurrent thread that runs through the manuscript is the idea of dreaming, which offers a kind of poetic membrane, a connective tissue that softens some of the weighty concerns and allows them a more muted resonance than they might otherwise have.

June 1928. Houston, Texas is poised to host the National Democratic Convention when a lynching occurs six days prior to the political conclave's opening. Fort Worth Star Telegram reporter Phillis Flanagan is on the scene and witnesses Houston's attempts to rid itself of the shame as 25,000 visitors arrive for their four-day visit. Will Rogers, H. L. Mencken, Damon Runyan, Louella Parsons, and Will Durant are among the 500 journalists who have plenty to say about national politics and Houston residents, as well as the city's intolerable weather. During the Convention, Phillis gets an inside look at women's struggle to enter politics and Houston's cover up of the shameful crime, as she painfully learns that some news stories can never be written.

In Edge of the Wind, a 25 year-old black man is off his meds and has begun hearing voices. For months, he has done nothing but read and write poetry. One day, he is convinced writing poetry is his calling. James Cherry holds nothing back as he tackles mental illness and the importance of relationships in this debut novel.

Greg Kuzma has been a central figure in American poetry since the late 1970s. This new volume, Selected Poems, focuses on the best of his shorter poems. These selections are culled from a number of his books, all of them out of print. Additionally, some of the selections are taken from hard-to-find, limited edition fine-press titles.

J.V. Brummels's newest collection, All the Live-Long Day, continues the legacy of a strong-voiced, strong-armed poetry. As the title suggests in a mocking, self-effacement, these are the poems of a man who has been working, perhaps not on the railroad, but in the classroom, in the fields, with his horses and his cattle.

A collection of plays written by Stephen F. Austin State University Professor Emeritus Bobby Johnson. Before creating the plays, Johnson accumulated five-hundred plus interviews dealing with East Texas. In this collection, his interviews have been used verbatim to preserve a sense of history, though some were edited for dramatic effect.

Erin Elizabeth Smith's Down is immediately a delight. Refreshing in its take on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the reader discovers here the odd world and new experience that Smith draws them 'down' into.

A book of poems about Nebraska. Not cornfields, not cows: cities, highways, long drives and the political conversations simmering.

This new selected poems from noted historian Milton Jordan leads readers into the beautiful Idaho wilderness to Slate Creek where, '...the mountain casts its first shadow'. Jordan's poems infuse life with nature, with 'sluggish gray beginnings' and the 'sound of Linda Ronstadt' on a Saturday full of 'miles of silence'.

Chronicles Article III judges, up through the civil rights era and more recently, who presided over the contentious issues of the day. Armed with the power to transform and make changes, this book portrays judges who leaped, untroubled and unhesitatingly, at the issues of the day.

Chronicles the cold, clear February morning, Mary Interlandi drove to the top of the Nashville Sheraton parking garage and leapt to her death, seven stories below. She was 19 years old. The author had know her and her family his entire life. Visiting Hours chronicles their friendship, her sudden death, and the aftermath of suicide.

Explores the human dynamics, gone wrong and right, of family, of loss for women who never 'said they needed their husbands to come back from the dead', of the ghosts that populate the world.

Derek Updegraff's latest collection of fifteen short stories, Pup! Et cetera, continues his exploration of fictional characters whose lives are fascinating and completely unexpected. There is, in this book, a pulse of familiarity in all the strangeness, something to cling to as sirens rage louder and louder.

Takes readers on a nostalgic, coming of age ride about life in Marshall, Texas, during the '50s and '60s. Told through the eyes of a narrator who has now reached his 70s, Puberty Drove the Car relates the sometimes clumsy and often funny march toward adulthood.

Hilda Raz has long been a significant voice for American poetry. She writes of widows dancing and of squirrels fat in late September, of the power of a woman's voice, solitary, 'blessed to be the womb put to use or not.' Raz brings to her poetry an authority wrought of compassion, of awareness and hard-won wisdom.

Takes us into the territory of memory, where 'in a distant city', someone falls down stairs and makes 'a song of it', where siblings speak of family secrets that make breathing different, where selflessness is the mother's gift to her children. These poems are close and personal, affectionate.

Kevin Catalano's collection of stories, Deleted Scenes delights because, as an editor might cut scenes from a film, those cuts assembled into a montage become far more enthralling than the film - the 'deleted scenes' become the bonus.

Steve Davenport's Bruise Songs is aggressive, 21st century blues, a rap for the times, a hymn for the hurts we bear and for which we recover.

In his debut collection, The Fight for Space, Roberto Ontiveros explores the modes of art and obsession with eleven stories that run from fabulist comedy to surrealist noir. Atmospheric and erotic, the stories in The Fight for Space, recall the literary mysteries of James M. Cain by way of Twin Peaks.

Filled with adventurous writing, sharp scrutiny, meticulous and audacious use of language, North of the Platte, South of the Niobrara: A Little Further into the Nebraska Sand Hills winds around its subjects the way the rivers and creeks of the Great Plains twist around humps of prairie grass, ranches and rock outcroppings.

From its beginnings in the spring of 1933 to its close with US entry into World War II, the New Deal significantly impacted the state of Texas. This collection of essays highlights examples of the lasting positive impact of New Deal projects and programs.

The editors of this volume share Peter Everwine's opinion that the art speaks for itself and should be paramount. Even the artist does not know the full meaning of the creation. There has to be a reader, a spectator, a viewer for the act to have full resonance. We leave that resonance to each of you who read the poems.

Brings to light the unfair standards to which Americans hold successful women, and shows Hillary Clinton's political career from its beginning in the 1970s to her run in the presidential campaign. The collection tells this story through the lens of sexism, allowing readers to see the role that gender discrimination played in Hillary Clinton's ultimate loss to President Trump.

Ryan Conley is a marine second lieutenant stationed in Abu Al Khasib, Iraq. Just as he is about to rotate out of the war zone, Ryan is severely wounded and granted a medical discharge, so he can return home to the family ranch in Sweetwater, Texas, to focus his energy on recovery. But life never goes as planned for the young marine, and he is unexpectedly found dead.

A collection of heart-warming and inspiring stories drawn from everyday life. Colourful and endearing, Castle's work keeps us mindful about how important it is to remain grounded in the order of first things: love, belief, faith, and hope. These principles, so firmly rooted in his work, evoke a timelessness that is sure to delight readers while bringing them ongoing encouragement.

Between the years 1942 and 1945, scores of American men and women in the military wrote, submitted, and published poems during the war. They were known as the ""War Poets."" Songs of the Warriors is an attempt to recover, compile, rediscover, re-appreciate, and re-enjoy these national literary treasures.