Titles

NOLA Is A myth. A reality. A port. A place.  An opening. A dead end. A womb. A grave. Audubon Zoo and Monkey Hill uptown. Mardi Gras Fountain with the colored lights downtown.   Above ground crypts at St. Louis Cemeteries 1, 2, and 3. Football fields. Parade grounds. Picnic areas. Citywide. Lake front. River front.  Fishing hole. Bayou swamp.  Raw oysters. Fried chicken.  Front-liners. Second-liners.  Storefront churches. A sacred cathedral. Superdome. Shotgun...

This collection is a meditation on the relationship between the life of faith and the affairs of the world—a world that appears more fragmented even with the promise of technology to bridge communities. The poems remind us of our role as agents of change and that, when we take responsibility for this role, we are practicing an effective form of spirituality. Infused with music and a deep sense of hope, I Am No Battlefield but a Forest of Trees Growing expresses longing for a...

Social Justice Poetry Spoken-word poet Valerie Mason-John unsettles readers with potent images of ongoing trauma from slavery and colonization. Her narratives range from the beginnings of the African Diaspora to the story of a stowaway on the Windrush, from racism and sexism in Trump's America to the wide impact of the Me Too movement. Stories of entrapment, sexual assault, addictive behaviours, and rave culture are told and contrasted to the...

Out of the hundreds of published slave narratives, only a handful exist specific to South Carolina, and most of these are not readily available to modern readers. This collection restores to print seven slave narratives documenting the lived realities of slavery as it existed across the Palmetto State's upcountry, midlands, and lowcountry, from plantation culture to urban servitude. First published between the late eighteenth century and the dawn of the...

John Andrew Rice's autobiography, first published to critical acclaim in 1942, is a remarkable tour through late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America. When the book was suppressed by the publisher soon after its appearance because of legal threats by a college president described in the book, the nation lost a rich first-person historical account of race and class relations during a critical period—not only during...

For twenty years, starting in 1999, Jarvis DeBerry's New Orleans Times-Picayune column was the place where the city got its most honest look at itself: the good, the bad, the wonderful, and yes, also the weird. And the city took note. DeBerry's columns inspired letters to the editor, water cooler conversations, city council considerations, and barbershop pontification. I Feel To Believe collects his best columns, documenting two decades of constancy and upheaval, loss, racial injustice, and class...

"When we made our call for submissions for an anthology of poems in defense of human rights, the allegations of torture were foremost in our minds. We knew people were outraged, saddened, profoundly moved and ashamed. But we also wanted to reach people who had suffered violations of their own rights from circumstances across the globe, or whose families had, or for whom preventing or healing these violations had become a life's...

The first book-length history of an essential American music festival The first-ever book exclusively devoted to the history of the Newport Folk Festival, I Got a Song documents the trajectory of an American musical institution that began more than a half-century ago and continues to influence our understanding of folk music today. Rick Massimo's research is complemented by extensive interviews with the people who were there and who made it all happen: the festival's producers, some...

I have a Name is a vital engagement with life and an unflinching stare at death, concluding that love transcendent is a reality, Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award (1997) The wondrous subtlety of David Ignatow's art is brought to bear on the timeless themes of love and death. Intimate remembrances evince a rich life: Hebrew lessons, war, first love, friendships with Stanley Kunitz and others, his wife's death. One poem comments on another, often with wit and irony; no statement is ever final. In this way,...

Called the "Christ of New Orleans" by Andrei Codrescu, Everette Maddox was a New Orleans legend, a poet whose mythos made it hard to know who he really was. Broke and often homeless, but with a distinctive taste for style and glamour, Maddox was a character well suited for the contradictions of New Orleans life. As Ralph Adamo remarks in his introduction, "We each have out own Everette, and then we have the poems." In this collection, editor...

This unique bilingual anthology of poetry gathers the work of well-known and new contemporary poets from Italy, England, the U.S., New Zealand, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere, all paying tribute to the legacy of Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge. Inspired by a momentous cross-cultural poetry reading by most of these poets on July 2, 2009, at the Sala Capizucchi in the epicenter of Rome—the same theatre where Olga Rudge had...

"Sometimes I surprise myself. I am always looking for some mysterious in-between place where ideas and images come together to show me a new, exciting path to follow." -- Elizabeth Sandvig Much of Elizabeth Sandvig's work has dealt with the transitory and fragile qualities of nature. Using materials that include cast polyester resin, aluminum and polyester screen, nylon thread, and silicon gels, she has emphasized a sense of layered transparency, creating a...

Louisville native John Jacob Niles (1892–1980) is considered to be one of our nation's most influential musicians. As a composer and balladeer, Niles drew inspiration from the deep well of traditional Appalachian and African American folk songs. At the age of sixteen Niles wrote one of his most enduring tunes, "Go 'Way from My Window," basing it on a song fragment from a black farm worker. This iconic song has been performed by folk artists ever since and may even...

Elizabeth Simpson Inchbald (1753–1821) was one of the leading literary figures of the late eighteenth century—an actress, a successful playwright and editor of several collections of plays, a popular novelist, and a drama critic. Considered a beautiful, independent woman, Inchbald was much involved in the theatrical, literary, and publishing life of London. Elizabeth Simpson ran away from home at age eighteen to seek fame as an actress in London and quickly married Joseph Inchbald,...

In more than seventy poems gathered in I'm Half of Your Heart: Selected Poems, 1967–2017, we encounter a poet who is as politically outspoken as he is lyrically private. Fascinated by the quotidian bric-a-brac, keenly attuned to the plight of the less fortunate among us, and immersed in timeless philosophical, historical, and aesthetic peregrinations, Kornhauser remains our contemporary by speaking loud and clear about what it is that makes...

Henry Friedman was robbed of his adolescence by the monstrous evil that annihilated millions of European Jews and changed forever the lives of those who survived. When the Nazis overran their home town near the Polish-Ukrainian border, the Friedman family was saved by Ukrainian Christians who had worked at their farm. Henry, his mother, his younger brother, and a young schoolteacher—who had been hired by his father when Jews were forbidden to attend school—were hidden in a loft over the...

I. L. Peretz (1852–1915), the father of modern Yiddish literature, was a master storyteller and social critic who advocated a radical shift from religious observance to secular Jewish culture. Wisse explores Peretz’s writings in relation to his ideology, which sought to create a strong Jewish identity separate from the trappings of religion.

The last of four novels that preceded Machado de Assis's famous trilogy of realistic masterpieces, Iaiá Garcia belongs to what critics have called the Brazilian author's "romantic" phase. But it is far more than that implies. Like his other early works, Iaiá Garcia foreshadows the themes and characters of Assis's most masterful novels. Iaiá Garcia intertwines the lives of three characters in a subtly and wryly developing relationship. While the youthful Iaiá is growing into womanhood, a...

In this volume, The Fathers of the Church returns to the Christian Latin writers of the Iberian Peninsula, hitherto represented only by Orosius (Vol. 50) and Prudentius (Vols. 43, 52). What is now Portugal embraces Braga, the see-city of Martin, Pannonian-born missionary. While abbot of nearby Dumium, Martin had a pupil Paschasius, whose Questions and Answers of the Greek Fathers has never before been...

In this second volume of translations from the Iberian Fathers appear the works of two seventh-century writers. From the first of these, bishop Braulio of Saragossa, a figure in Visigothic literature second only to St. Isidore of Seville, comes an extensive collection of letters. These are variously addressed to Isidore himself, to other ecclesiastics, to Pope Honorius, and to King...