front cover of The Kentucky Trace
The Kentucky Trace
A Novel of the American Revolution
Harriette Simpson Arnow
Michigan State University Press, 2012

A gripping portrait of life in the hard-bitten wilderness of Revolutionary Kentucky, Harriette Simpson Arnow’s The Kentucky Trace follows surveyor William David Leslie Collins as he struggles to survive. Collins finds his fellow settlers to be almost as inscrutable as the weather—at times, they are allies, and at others, they are adversaries. Collins battles nature, bad luck, and the quickly shifting political tides to make his way in a changing world. Showcasing Arnow’s ear for dialogue and offering a wealth of historical detail, The Kentucky Trace is a masterful work of fiction by a preeminent Appalachian writer.

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Kenya's Engagement with China
Discourse, Power, and Agency
Anita Plummer
Michigan State University Press, 2022
In recent decades, Kenya has witnessed profound changes in its economic, cultural, and environmental landscapes resulting from its interactions with China. University students are competing for scholarships to study in China, coastal artisanal fishers are increasingly worried about Chinese-owned trawlers depleting fish stocks, fishers on Lake Victoria are grappling with the impact of frozen tilapia from China, and unemployed youth are seeking a fair shot at working on one of Kenya’s multimillion-dollar Chinese-funded infrastructure projects. Anita Plummer’s Kenya’s Engagement with China investigates the tension between official Kenyan and Chinese state narratives and individual Kenyans’ reactions to China’s presence to provide insight into how everyday Kenyans exercise their political agency. The competing discourses Plummer uncovers in person, in the news, and online reveal how Kenyans use China to question local power structures, demand policy change, and articulate different visions for their country’s future. This critical text represents the next step in research on Sino-African relations.
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Kenya's Running Women
A History
Michelle M Sikes
Michigan State University Press, 2023
Since Pauline Konga’s breakthrough performance at the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta, the world has become accustomed to seeing Kenyan women medal at major championships, sweep marathons, and set world records. Yet little is known about the pioneer generation of women who paved the way for Kenya’s reputation as an international powerhouse in women’s track and field. In Kenya’s Running Women: A History, historian and former professional runner Michelle M. Sikes details the triumphs and many challenges these women faced, from the advent of Kenya’s athletics program in the colonial era through the professionalization of running in the 1980s and 1990s. Sikes reveals how over time running became a vehicle for Kenyan women to expand the boundaries of acceptable female behavior. Kenya’s Running Women demonstrates the necessity of including women in histories of African sport, and of incorporating sport into studies of African gender and nation-building.
 
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Kept Secret
The Half-Truth in Nonfiction
Jen Hirt
Michigan State University Press, 2017
Creative nonfiction writers wrestle constantly with the boundaries of creative license—what to reveal, when to reveal it, and how best to do it. While the truth may inspire us to make confident assertions, secrets, lies, and half-truths inspire us to delve further into our own writing to discover the heart of the story. The pieces in this collection feature essayists who do this type of detective work. Each essay contains a secret, lie, or half-truth—some of these are revealed by the author, but others remain buried. Ranging from the deep family secret to the little white lie, from the shocking to the humorous, and from the straightforward revelation to the slanted half-truth, these essays ask us to appreciate the magnitude of keeping a secret. They also ask us to consider the obstacles writers must overcome if they want to write about secrets in their own lives and the lives of others. In short interviews following each essay the contributors discuss craft, ethics, creativity, and how they eventually decided to reveal—or not reveal—a secret.
 
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Kin
Crystal Williams
Michigan State University Press, 2000

In her first book-length collection of poetry, Crystal Williams utilizes memory and music as she lyrically weaves her way through American culture, pointing to the ways in which alienation, loss, and sensed "otherness" are corollaries of recent phenomena. Williams writes about being adopted by an interracial couple, a jazz pianist/Ford Foundry worker and a school psychologist, and how that has affected her development as an African American woman. She tries to work out the answers to many difficult questions: in what way do African American artists define themselves? What do they owe the culture and what does it owe them? To what extent does our combined national memory inform our individual selves? These poems are steeped in the black literary tradition. They are brimming over with the oral tradition that Williams perfected while spending years on the poetry "slam" circuit. This, combined with her musical upbringing, give the collection not only a sense of urgency, but also a rhythm, a breath all its own. Kin tackles not only racial issues, but also the troubling realities of violent acts that can occur, especially in our inner cities. But more importantly, the landscape that Williams creates offers readers an alternative to the racial/political dichotomy in which we all live. Overall, the book resonates with a message of reconciliation that will leave the reader uplifted.

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Kings of Disaster
Dualism, Centralism and the Scapegoat King in Southeastern Sudan
Simon Simonse
Michigan State University Press, 2018
The long-awaited, revised, and illustrated edition of Simon Simonse’s study of the Rainmakers of the Nilotic Sudan marks a breakthrough in anthropological thinking on African political systems. Taking his inspiration from René Girard’s theory of consensual scapegoating, the author shows that the longstanding distinction of states and stateless societies as two fundamentally different political types does not hold. Centralized and segmentary systems only differ in the relative emphasis put on the victimary role of the king as compared with that of enemy. Kings of Disaster proposes an elegant and powerful solution to the vexed problem of regicide.
 
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The Knight and His Shadow
Boubacar Boris Diop
Michigan State University Press, 2015
A brilliant tour de force, The Knight and His Shadow tells the tale of Lat-Sukabé’s quest to find his former lover, Khadidja, who writes him to “come before it’s too late.” As Lat-Sukabé recounts his past with Khadidja, reality shapeshifts and takes on a dreamlike quality. He describes how Khadidja is hired by a wealthy stranger to sit before an open door and tell stories into an uncertain darkness, unable to see the person to whom she speaks. Like Lat-Sukabé and Khadidja, the reader feels farther from home with every page, as the world turns and morphs. With those shifts, the symbolic order, the basis of meaning and sanity, begins to tremble. Postmodernist sensibilities meet postcolonial concerns in this lyrical novel from a master of Senegalese literature.
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Kujibizana
Questions of Language and Power in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Poetry in Kishwahili
Ann Biersteker
Michigan State University Press, 1996

The author argues that reading poetry in Kiswahili provides important insights into questions of language and power, as well as into discussions of socialist practice in East Africa and East African resistance to colonialism and neo-colonialism. Includes the text of numerous poems and footnotes.

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