Books

The book examines the complex and sophisticated efforts of American Indian writers and orators to constructively engage an often hostile and resistant white audience through language and other symbol systems.

Mayan rebels killed an American plantation manager in 1875, but no one has ever unravelled why this murder took place. Paul Sullivan’s fascinating and skillful telling of this story reads like a mystery novel.

Examines American attitudes on issues of national and international security. Based on over 13,000 in-depth interviews conducted over a ten-year period. Provides surprising insights into public opinion on nuclear deterrence, terrorism, and other security issues.

Robin Becker explores the conditions under which we experience and resist pleasure: in beauty salon, summer camp, beach, backyard or museum; New York, or New Mexico. These poems offer sharp pleasures as they argue, elegize, mourn, praise, and sing.

Examines Alberto Fujimori’s corrupt presidency, and the thin line between democracy and dictatorship, demonstrating how closely they can resemble one another. Analyzes how public institutions can empower dictators and also bring them down.

Winner of the 2005 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry.

Winner of the 2009 Chad Walsh Prize

Hodgen’s third book of poetry. The poems roam through history, religion, man-made disasters, baseball, pop culture, and Wal-Marts, with remarkable completeness, maturity, and dexterity.

Winner of the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.

Winner of the 2008 Whiting Writer’s Award.

Winner of the 2007 Poetry Book of the Year Award from ForeWord Magazine.

The poems are heartrending and incisive. Through the poet’s eloquent craft, painful histories and images (such as the Holocaust) are beautifully and luminously preserved.

Winner of the 2006 Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

The stories explore America’s obsession with news and entertainment culture. In the title story, a theme park has attractions where visitors relive actual news events such as “OJ’s Bronco: The Ride”, and “Seige at Waco”.

Examines a half-century epoch when planners, public officials, and civic leaders engaged in a dialogue about the meaning of planning and its application for improving life in Pittsburgh. Defines Pittsburgh’s key role in the national urban planning movement.

Winner of the 2008 First Place/Book Prizefrom the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies

Examines the intersection of environmental politics, globalization, and national identity in post-Soviet Latvia. Views the country’s responses to European assistance and political pressure in nature management, biodiversity conservation, and rural development.

Examines the natural and economic resource competition between Phoenix and Tucson and the other factors contributing to the divergent growth of the two cities.

Examines the conflicts that have developed over the preservation of forests in America, and how government agencies and advocacy groups have influenced the management of forests and their resources for more than a century.

Scholars of rhetoric, composition, and communications analyze how discourse is used to construct working-class identities. The essays connect working-class identity to issues of race, gender, and sexuality, among others.

Winner of the 2008 Bobbit National Poetry Prize

“Few others in contemporary poetry are so brilliantly able to combine wit and weight, to charge the language so it virtually glows in the dark. Hicok’s poems just plain rock. They rock because they are gorgeous. They rock because they are sad and turn on the radio. They dance our ‘clumsy living’ with our shadows and our isolations to a music that always, always remembers the original delight in which ‘the feel of things, if [we] cherish, helps [us] live / more like a minute than a clock.'”—Beckian Fritz Goldberg

Fata Morgana mingles personal experience, history, mythology, politics, and natural science to explore the relationships of conception and perception, the self finding its way through a physical and social world not of its own making, but changing the world by its presence.