Independent Publisher’s Book Awards, Silver Medal, Short Story Fiction
James E. Cathey's Hêliand: Text and Commentary is a simply unique, wonderfully encompassing, and helpful text, and nothing quite like it exists anywhere in the world. The commentary portion of the book consists of an interweaving of interpretation and philological consideration. This work presents the reader with explanatory commentary that encompasses both the scientific and the poetic and treats them both with equal felicity. The volume also contains something that is exceptionally valuable and cannot be found in English: a compact and serviceable grammar of Old Saxon and an appended glossary that defines all of the vocabulary found in this edited version of the Hêliand.
A heartrending and engrossing memoir that challenges narratives of racial progress and postracial America.
“Every so often, a book comes along that changes the way we see, speak, and think about the world. Shattered is one of those books.” —Frank B. Wilderson III, author of Afropessimism and Incognegro
From a distance, Matthieu Chapman’s life and accomplishments serve as an example of racial progress in America: the first in his family to go to college, he earns two master’s degrees and a doctorate and then becomes a professor of theater. Despite his personal and academic success, however, the specter of antiblackness continues to haunt his every moment and interaction.
Told through fragments, facets, shards, slivers, splinters, and absences, Shattered places Chapman’s own story in dialogue with US history and structural analysis of race to relay the experience of being very alive in a demonstrably antiblack society—laying bare the impact of the American way on black bodies, black psyches, and black lives. From the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the offices of higher education, from a Loyal White Knights flyer on his windshield to a play with black students written by a black playwright, Chapman’s life story embodies the resistance that occurs, the shattering, collapsing, and reconfiguring of being that happens in the collisions between conceptions of blackness. Shattered is a heartrending and thought-provoking challenge to narratives of racial progress and postracial America—an important reminder that systemic antiblack racism affects every black person regardless of what they achieve in spite of it.
Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932) was an African American writer, essayist, Civil Rights activist, legal-stenography businessman, and lawyer whose novels and short stories explore race, racism, and the problematic contours of African Americans’ social and cultural identities in post-Civil War South. He was the first African American to be published by a major American publishing house and served as a beacon-point for future African American writers.
The Colonel’s Dream, written in 1905, is a compelling tale of the post-Civil War South’s degeneration into a region awash with virulent racist practices against African Americans: segregation, lynchings, disenfranchisement, convict-labor exploitation, and endemic violent repression. The events in this novel are powerfully depicted from the point of view of a philanthropic but unreliable southern white colonel. Upon his return to the South, the colonel learns to abhor this southern world, as a tale of vicious racism unfolds. Throughout this narrative, Chesnutt confronts the deteriorating position of African Americans in an increasingly hostile South. Upon its publication The Colonel’s Dream was considered too controversial and unpalatable because of its bitter criticisms of southern white prejudice and northern indifference, and so this groundbreaking story failed to gain public attention and acclaim.
This is the first scholarly edition of The Colonel’s Dream. It includes an introduction and notes by R. J. Ellis and works to reestablish this great novel’s reputation.
Students are reading on screens more than ever—how can we teach them to be better digital readers?
Smartphones, laptops, tablets: college students are reading on-screen all the time, and digital devices shape students’ understanding of and experiences with reading. In higher education, however, teachers rarely consider how digital reading experiences may have an impact on learning abilities, unless they’re lamenting students’ attention spans or the distractions available to students when they’re learning online.
Skim, Dive, Surface offers a corrective to these conversations—an invitation to focus not on losses to student learning but on the spectrum of affordances available within digital learning environments. It is designed to help college instructors across the curriculum teach digital reading in their classes, whether they teach face-to-face, fully online, or somewhere in between. Placing research from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, learning science, and composition in dialogue with insight from the scholarship of teaching and learning, Jenae Cohn shows how teachers can better frame, scaffold, and implement effective digital reading assignments. She positions digital reading as part of a cluster of literacies that students should develop in order to communicate effectively in a digital environment.
How well do we really know Pearl S. Buck? Many think of Buck solely as the Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Good Earth, the novel that explained China to Americans in the 1930s. But Buck was more than a novelist and interpreter of China. As the essays in Beyond The Good Earth show, she possessed other passions and projects, some of which are just now coming into focus.
Who knew, for example, that Buck imagined and helped define multiculturalism long before it became a widely known concept? Or that she founded an adoption agency to locate homes for biracial children from Asia? Indeed, few are aware that she advocated successfully for a genocide convention after World War II and was ahead of her time in envisioning a place for human rights in American foreign policy. Buck’s literary works, often dismissed as simple portrayals of Chinese life, carried a surprising degree of innovation as she experimented with the styles and strategies of modernist artists.
In Beyond The Good Earth, scholars and writers from the United States and China explore these and other often overlooked topics from the life of Pearl S. Buck, positioning her career in the context of recent scholarship on transnational humanitarian activism, women’s rights activism, and civil rights activism.
In this revised and expanded edition of Hollows, Peepers, and Highlanders, author George Constantz, a biologist and naturalist, writes about the beauty and nature of the Appalachian landscape. While the information is scientific in nature, Constantz's accessible descriptions of the adaptation of various organisms to their environment enable the reader to enjoy learning about the Appalachian ecosystem. The book is divided into three sections: "Stage and Theater," "The Players," and "Seasonal Act." Each section sets the scene and describes the events occurring in nature. "Stage and Theatre" is comprised of chapters that describe the origins of the Appalachia region. "The Players" is an interesting and in-depth look into the ecology of animals, such as the mating rituals of different species, and the evolutionary explanation for the adaptation of Appalachian wildlife. The last section, "Seasonal Act," makes note of the changes in Appalachian weather each season and its effect on the inhabitants.
No person involved in so much history received so little attention as the late Robert C. Byrd, the longest-serving U.S. senator. In The Last Great Senator, David A. Corbin examines Byrd’s complex and fascinating relationships with eleven presidents of the United States, from Eisenhower to Obama. Furthermore, Byrd had an impact on nearly every significant event of the last half century, including the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, Kennedy’s New Frontier, the Watergate scandal, the Reagan Revolution, the impeachment of President Clinton, and the Iraq War. Holding several Senate records, Byrd also cast more votes than any other U.S. senator.
In his sweeping portrait of this eloquent and persuasive man’s epic life and career, Corbin describes Senator Byrd’s humble background in the coalfields of southern West Virginia (including his brief membership in the Ku Klux Klan). He covers Byrd’s encounters and personal relationship with each president and his effect on events during their administrations. Additionally, the book discusses Byrd’s interactions with other notable senators, including Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Russell, Mike Mansfield, and especially Robert and Edward Kennedy. Going beyond the boundaries of West Virginia and Capitol Hill, The Last Great Senator presents Byrd in a larger historical context, where he rose to the height of power in America.
Between 1880 and 1922, the coal fields of southern West Virginia witnessed two bloody and protracted strikes, the formation of two competing unions, and the largest armed conflict in American labor history—a week-long battle between 20,000 coal miners and 5,000 state police, deputy sheriffs, and mine guards. These events resulted in an untold number of deaths, indictments of over 550 coal miners for insurrection and treason, and four declarations of martial law. Corbin argues that these violent events were collective and militant acts of aggression interconnected and conditioned by decades of oppression. His study goes a long way toward breaking down the old stereotypes of Appalachian and coal mining culture. This second edition contains a new preface and afterword by author David A. Corbin.
A once-booming West Virginia rail town no longer has a working train. The residents left behind in this tiny hamlet look to the mountains that surround them on all sides: The outside world encroaches, and the buildings of the gilded past seem to crumble more every day.
These are the stories of outsiders—the down and out. What happens to the young boy whose burgeoning sexuality pushes him to the edge of the forest to explore what might be love with another boy? What happens when one lost soul finally makes it to New York City, yet the reminders of his past life are omnipresent? What happens when an old woman struggles to find a purpose and reinvent herself after decades of living in the shadow of her platonic life partner? What happens to those who dare to live their lives outside of the strict confines of the town’s traditional and regimented ways?
The characters in The Rope Swing—gay and straight alike—yearn for that which seems so close but impossibly far, the world over the jagged peaks of the mountains.
Back in print just in time for spring! Originally published in 1948, this is the germinal text on nearly 250 species of spring wildflowers found in West Virginia. Common or English names and scientific or Latin names are given for each species. The descriptions are in two sections: The first description includes the meaning of the name of the flower, uses, habitats, and ranges in West Virginia. Secondly, the plant itself is described in deep detail to help in identification. Each description is accompanied by a facing page detailed line drawing. This book is a must have for those interested in the beauty and science of West Virginia's spring flora. The author, Earl L. Core, also co-wrote the four-volume Flora of West Virginia. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from West Virginia University and his doctorate from Columbia. He was a biology professor at WVU where the 75-acre arboretum managed by the university bears his name. The illustrator, William A. Lunk, received his doctorate at the University of Michigan and went on to become curator of their University Museums.
A manual to identify trees and shrubs in winter when the lack of leaves, fruits, and flowers makes them least identifiable, Woody Plants in Winter has become a classic for naturalists, botanists, gardeners, and hobbyists. Earl L. Core and Nell P. Ammons, both West Virginia University Professors of distinction, originally published this book with The Boxwood Press in 1958. Now in its fifteenth printing, the title has come home to West Virginia University Press.
Mountains Piled upon Mountains features nearly fifty writers from across Appalachia sharing their place-based fiction, literary nonfiction, and poetry. Moving beyond the tradition of transcendental nature writing, much of the work collected here engages current issues facing the region and the planet (such as hydraulic fracturing, water contamination, mountaintop removal, and deforestation), and provides readers with insights on the human-nature relationship in an era of rapid environmental change.
This book includes a mix of new and recent creative work by established and emerging authors. The contributors write about experiences from northern Georgia to upstate New York, invite parallels between a watershed in West Virginia and one in North Carolina, and often emphasize connections between Appalachia and more distant locations. In the pages of Mountains Piled upon Mountains are celebration, mourning, confusion, loneliness, admiration, and other emotions and experiences rooted in place but transcending Appalachia’s boundaries.
Reversing Field invites students, professionals, and enthusiasts of sport—whether law, management and marketing, or the game itself—to explore the legal issues and regulations surrounding collegiate and professional athletics in the United States. This theoretical and methodological interrogation of sports law openly addresses race, labor, gender, and the commercialization of sports, while offering solutions to the disruptions that threaten its very foundation during an era of increased media scrutiny and consumerism. In over thirty chapters, academics, practitioners, and critics vigorously confront and debate matters such as the Arms Race, gender bias, racism, the Rooney Rule, and steroid use, offering new thought and resolution to the vexing legal issues that confront sports in the 21st century.
Winner of The Paterson Prize for Books for Young People
Recommended by USA Today for Black History Month as "a blend of history and suspense."
In this novel for young adults, Josh knows there is something about the tall Victorian House on the Harpers Ferry Hill, the one his father grew up in, that he can’t quite put his finger on. And his impossible father won’t give him any clues. He’s hiding something.
And then there’s the famous John Brown. The one who all the tourists come to hear about. The one whose statue looms over Josh’s house. Why does he seem to haunt Josh and his whole family? When the fancy Richmonds come to town and move right next door, their presence forces Josh to find the answers and stand up to the secrets of the House, to his father—and to John Brown, too.
The historic village of Harpers Ferry comes alive in this young boy’s brave search for answers and a place of his own in this brilliant first novel by John Michael Cummings.
Richard Currey's Lost Highway has attracted a legion of admirers since its initial publication in 1997. The book depicts the epic struggle of an ordinary person living his dreams and following his passion. Lost Highway is the story of Sapper Reeves, a gifted country musician from the small town of Maxwell, West Virginia. Sapper’s story covers the events of more than half a century, from his birth in a poor coal mining town through his travels on the back roads of Appalachia in search of recognition and respect. Along the way, Sapper’s embattled love for his wife and struggle to come to terms with his combat-wounded son form the basis of his artistic and personal redemption.
Early Art and Artists in West Virginia is copiously illustrated with 136 plates accompanying the essays on portraiture and landscape painting, which form the first half of the book. A similar number of smaller illustrations in full color bring life to a biographical directory in the second part of the book, which contains nearly one thousand known painters who worked in West Virginia. Many West Virginians will find their family names in this directory, and some will doubtless locate the information here that they have long sought in order to learn more about a painting in their family's possession. The book is supported by an extensive bibliography on the state's artistic heritage and a full index to both the directory and the essays.
2001 American Graphic Design Awards Winner
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