UA Press Spring Catalog Celebrates Poetry, Diversity

FAYETTEVILLE — Diverse cultures, diverse education, diverse landscapes, diverse ways of expression — the University of Arkansas Press celebrates all of these in the spring 2008 catalog.

Poetry takes readers to another culture in Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry, edited by Hayan Charara. Here 39 poets offer up 160 poems that touch on culture, politics, loss, art or language itself. Included in the anthology are Naomi Shihab Nye, Samuel Hazo, D.H. Melhem, Lawrence Joseph, Khaled Mattawa, Matthew Shenoda, Kazim Ali, Nuar Alsadir, Fady Joudah, Lisa Suhair Majaj and Mohja Khaf, a creative writing professor at the University of Arkansas. Charara has written an introduction about the state of Arab American poetry today and short biographies of the poets.

Inclined to Speak is the third successive anthology to showcase contemporary Arab-American authors. Two previous books, Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction, and Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, have attracted international attention.

Another successful sequence continues in spring 2008, with two volumes of poetry from the Arkansas Poetry Series, edited by Enid Shomer. The poetry series publishes works by emerging and mid-career poets.

Now You’re the Enemy: Poems by James Allen Hall, was a finalist for the Walt Whitman Book Award and a semifinalist for the Crab Orchard/Open Competition Book Award. “Hall’s poems are physically charged, nervy, both measured and fevered, compassionate and outrageous, and alive to the very core,” writes poet and author Mark Doty. Hall writes about family: “I was mothered into art,” he writes. An assistant professor of English at Bethany College in West Virginia, Hall is also the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize.

The second volume, Rift: Poems by Barbara Helfgott Hyett, features the ring, Apollo and Daphne, the flesh and “dura mater,” or “tough mother,” the name for the outermost layer of the meninges surrounding the brain and spinal cord. “Helfgott Hyett’s poems about love, infidelity and the body in all its guises are tough, tender, and juicy,” writes poet Maxime Kumin. Hyett is a cofounder of the Writer’s Room in Boston and is currently the director of POEMWORKS: The Workshop for Publishing Poets.

From this diverse and current perspective, the catalog turns to current perspectives on historic events, including the Little Rock crisis. The crisis came to the attention of the nation when Gov. Orval Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine black children from integrating Arkansas’ Little Rock Central High School in accordance with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. After a standoff, President Eisenhower called in the 101^st Airborne and slowly but forcibly began to integrate the school.

Building on a collection of work that commemorates the 50^th anniversary of this event, two books examine key elements of the events that unfolded during the fall of 1957. Turn Away Thy Son by Elizabeth Jacoway, now in paperback, tells the story of what happened from the points of view of 16 of the key participants, bringing to life the nine students, their tormentors, the school administration, the governor and the press. This has become the standard book on the Little Rock school crisis.

An Epitaph for Little Rock: A Fiftieth Anniversary Retrospective on the Central High Crisis, edited by John A. Kirk, with a foreword by National Public Radio correspondent Juan Williams, features nine essays from the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, published by the University of Arkansas. Written from the 1960s to the present, these essays represent some of the finest scholarship on the crisis. Topics explored include the state, regional, national and international dimensions of the crisis, as well as local white and black responses to events, gender issues, politics and law. The Southern historians included in the book are Numan V. Bartley, Neil R. McMillen, Tonay A. Freyer, Roy Reed, David L. Chappell, Lorraine Gates Schulyer, John A. Kirk, Azza Salama Layton and Ben F. Johnson III.

Another book that looks at school integration from a national perspective is With All Deliberate Speed: Implementing Brown v. Board of Education, edited by Brian J. Daugherity and Charles C. Bolton. In this book, 12 essays provide a broad assessment of how well the decision that declared an end to segregated schools in the United States was implemented. Some of the common themes in these efforts were the importance of black activism, especially the crucial role played by the NAACP; entrenched white opposition to school integration, which wasn’t just a Southern state issue; and the role of the federal government, a sometimes inconstant and sometimes reluctant source of support for implementing Brown.

The next book takes the reader further back in time to 1861 in Missouri. In the Guide to Missouri Confederate Units, author James E. McGhee presents accounts of the 69 artillery, cavalry and infantry units in Missouri, as well as their precedent units and those that failed to complete their organization. This book is the latest entry in the longstanding University of Arkansas series, “The Civil War in the West.”

From Missouri the reader returns to the Arkansas Delta, where an author traces the history of her family farm. During Wind and Rain: The Jones Family Farm in the Arkansas Delta, 1848-2006 tells the story of five generations of the farm family of author Margaret Jones Bolsterli. Jones draws on research, historical perspective and family lore to create a saga that moves from the land’s acquisition in 1848 though the Civil War and Reconstruction, the 1927 Flood, the Great Depression and the drought of 1930 to the modern considerations of mechanization, fertilizer, pesticides and irrigation. This is the third book in a four-volume series. Jones is a professor emerita of English at the University of Arkansas.

The next book takes us from adventures on a farm to Adventures in the Wild: Tales from Biologists of the Natural State, edited by Joy Trauth and Aldemaro Romero. The true tales in this collection will take readers from the chicken houses of Arkansas to the caves of Venezuela and Mexico to the coast of Alaska. The 15 adventures range from amusing to life threatening. Readers will meet the roommate with a rash that won’t go away, a friendly bull, some blind cave fish, killer whales, drug smugglers and hairy roots that are used to produce medicines. Through all the entertainment and distraction, the biologists get their feet wet and their hands dirty in the pursuit of knowledge.

Please visit http://www.uapress.com for more information on the 2008 catalog.