Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets All that Refuses to Die is a poetry collection that interrogates the present conditions of Africans through a historical lens. Michael Imossan moves into historical spaces such as museums and sites of enslavement, touching artifacts that hold meaning, and asking, Where was Africa? Where ......
At the end of the nineteenth century, William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal glorified cubanas as "the most feminine and simple women in the world." Ever since, the stereotype of Cuban femininity as chaste and dutiful has informed Cubans' racial, social, and ethnic identity in the dominant American imagination, and this gendered and ......
With radical candor and sardonic wit, Randolph Lewis offers an autopsy of the recent past, looking for glimmers of hope and redemption among the detritus strewn about by neo-Gilded Age billionaires, Big Tech, and political extremes during the first Trump administration and the pandemic era. American life took a weird turn in June 2015, when an ......
I Have a Home, There Is a We, whose original Swahili edition was in 2015 the first book of poetry to win the Safal-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature, brings the acclaimed verse of prolific Zanzibari poet, journalist, and cultural changemaker Mohammed Khelef Ghassani to English-language readers for the first time. The book explores the ......
In Ravelings, Lisa Knopp takes up an older, opposing meaning of the verb "ravel"--"to entangle"--as she explores the deaths and departures of loved ones and the rituals by which we mourn and honor them, while contemplating her relationships with writing, spirituality, sense of home, aging, desire, and the relationship between body and mind. ......
In And You Will Call It Fate, Timothy J. Hillegonds explores an eight-year relationship with Sean Dempsey, a charismatic yet volatile former NFL player turned entrepreneur who profoundly reshaped the trajectory of Hillegonds's life. Set against the backdrop of Chicago's financial district, the memoir follows Hillegonds--a high school dropout, ......
The Heart Folds Early is a story of transformation through tragedy, and an examination of the way in which great loss can make us simultaneously fearful and intrepid. Emerging from a childhood that included both devastating sexual abuse and the sustaining joy of being deeply (if imperfectly) loved, Jill Christman's sights were set on building and ......
Winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in Fiction Slow Guillotine follows three broke weirdos whose collective desire to make and think about art is constantly interrupted by their art-industry-adjacent minimum-wage jobs. Throughout the novel, the three friends' day jobs in a failing independent bookstore, a sterile gallery in downtown Manhattan, ......
The death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in 2020 reignited a passionate nationwide debate over Confederate memorials and flags as symbols of white supremacy in our public landscape. Controversies about Confederate monuments, however, have overshadowed more consequential battles over Civil War memory taking place in ......