“When Luisa Igloria cites Epictetus—‘as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place’—she introduces the crowded and contradictory world her poems portray: a realm of transience, yes, where the vulnerable come to harm and everything disappears, but also a scene of tremendous, unpredictable bounty, the gloriously hued density this poet loves to detail. ‘I was raised / to believe not only the beautiful can live on / Parnassus,’ she tells us, and she makes it true, by including in the cyclonic swirl of her poems practically everything: a gorgeous, troubling over-brimming universe."
—Mark Doty, judge for the 2014 Swenson Award

The May Swenson Poetry Award, an annual competition named for May Swenson, honors her as one of America's most provocative and vital writers. During her long career, Swenson was loved and praised by writers from virtually every school of American poetry. She left a legacy of fifty years of writing when she died in 1989. She is buried in Logan, Utah, her hometown.

Writing at the State U presents a comprehensive, empirical examination of writing programs at 106 universities. Rather than using open survey calls and self-reporting, Emily Isaacs uses statistical analysis to show the extent to which established principles of writing instruction and administration have been implemented at state comprehensive universities, the ways in which writing at those institutions has differed from writing at other institutions over time, and how state institutions have responded to major scholarly debates concerning first-year composition and writing program administration.

Isaacs’s findings are surprising: state university writing programs give lip service to important principles of writing research, but many still emphasize grammar instruction and a skills-based approach, classes continue to be outsized, faculty development is optional, and orientation toward basic writing is generally remedial. As such, she considers where a closer match between writing research and writing instruction might help to expose and remedy these difficulties and identifies strategies and areas where faculty or writing program administrators are empowered to enact change.

Unique in its wide scope and methodology, Writing at the State U sheds much-needed light on the true state of the writing discipline at state universities and demonstrates the advantages of more frequent and rigorous quantitative studies of the field.

The Japanese have ambivalent attitudes toward death, deeply rooted in pre-Buddhist traditions. In this scholarly but accessible work, authors Iwasaka and Toelken show that everyday beliefs and customs--particularly death traditions--offer special insight into the living culture of Japan.