Art at the Crossroads: The Surprising Aesthetics of the Texas Panhandle underscores the striking richness of art stories about the Texas Panhandle-a strange and wondrous place, where old and new, tradition and innovation are constantly in productive tension. East meets West; Midwest meets Southwest; cars and trains and planes have long connected ......
Jade Hidle grew up tweezing her mother's hairs. As the distance between them grew, she began pulling her own. Born in the shadow of mixed-race Vietnamese children deemed "b?i d?i" ("dust of life"), she struggled to find belonging in her family's cultures. Her yearning for acceptance propelled her to search for her identity in ghosts, Hollywood ......
The Lyme Letters is epistolary verse that spells out a memoir. R, a non-binary femme character, narrates their experience of disease and recovery through recurrent letters to doctors, pets, family members, lovers, and a "Master." R, in letter form and repurposed religious texts, also explores the paradoxical experiences of queer ......
Ibe Liebenberg's first book-length collection of poetry, Birds at Night, explores themes of loss, trauma, PTSD, indigeneity, and familial relationships. These brief, intense poems amplify the sensations and silences of interior moments of crisis and catharsis. A haunting meditation on what keeps us up at night, Liebenberg invites the reader to ......
A mother is a myth, a figure, a body. Through a series of essays spanning the political to the personal, Lucky Bodies reckons with motherhood. Marianne Jay Erhardt's striking debut takes inventory of what we demand and withhold from mothers, and what counts as care. Plucking stars from the constellation of stories that have shaped her own ......
James and Annetta White opened the Broken Spoke in 1964, then a mile south of the Austin city limits, under a massive live oak, and beside what would eventually become South Lamar Boulevard. White built the place himself, beginning construction on the day he received his honorable discharge from the US Army. And for more than fifty years, the ......
Uncovering the Slave Auction Houses of Galveston, Texas
The Water Cries represents an ambitious search for the location of the slave auction houses in one of America's most storied cities. The author plumbs historical documentation, sifting historical advertisements and archiving familial connections. The book is a history told by grandmothers and grandfathers. It addresses a history previously told ......
The Lower Rio Grande Valley is an ecologically unique region acclaimed for its biodiversity and great conservation value. The Valley harbors a multitude of wild bee species rarely seen north of Mexico-many found almost exclusively in Texas or along the Texas-Mexico border. Habitat loss, increasing drought, and border politics threaten habitats ......
Deserts cover about one third of the earth's surface and are the largest terrestrial ecosystem in the world. They are the only biome that is actually expanding, largely due to human activities and climate change. In the United States, six unique desert ecosystems stretch across the country: the Great Basin, Mojave, Chihuahuan, Sonoran, Peninsular, ......