Dannye Romine Powell writes of marriage, parenthood, and temptation-of love in its many forms. Her lyrical, imagistic poems bring into sudden focus the subtle shifts of understanding and emotion within intimacy. In her reworking of the primal story of Eve and Adam and throughout all the poems, she elucidates how everyday life can sustain a family or sunder it. With clarity and care, she illuminates the world.

Written by the first black faculty member employed at the University and his wife, a longtime research assistant, this book chronicles the setbacks and triumphs in their attempts to bring true integration to the University of Arkansas.

Under segregation and in its aftermath, black teachers and principals created havens of dignity and uplift for their students and communities. In Arkansas, where even education for white children has always been underfunded, the work of these administrators has been particularly heroic. This book, researched and prepared by the Research Committee of the Retired Educators of Little Rock and Other Public Schools, outlines the challenges to generations of black administrators in the state, and it maps their achievements. It also offers the first reference guide to the personnel who have educated generations of black children through the most extreme of circumstances.

The poems in The Empty Loom weave together a figure--lover, wife, mother, muse--which takes shape before us, fully present in what Samuel Beckett calls "the time of the body." Set firmly within the resonance of the natural world and glimpsed in paintings, fabrics, snatches of song, the poems revolve around her, fulfilling their "injunction to savor / The folds of light which fall / On the perishable world." Now joyful, now elegiac in tone, Gibb's love and its loss are rendered in the quiet elegance of image and line characteristic of his poems, their focus shifting like the sun as it tracks its passage across a room, a life.

he popular Encyclopedia of the Blues, first published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1992 and reprinted six times, has become an indispensable reference source for all involved with or intrigued by the music. The work alphabetizes hundreds of biographical entries, presenting detailed examinations of the performers and of the instruments, trends, recordings, and producers who have created and popularized this truly American art form.

The world of William Trowbridge is one preoccupied with loss, with the fall from some possibility of grace that all who are born must bear. In the title poem of Trowbridge’s first full-length collection the poet calls our attention to movies, to Shane in particular. He asks us to identify, not with Shane, the lonely knight on a nameless quest, but with the much more lonely, and real, Jack Palance, the Prince of Darkness.

Trowbridge favors the villain, the outcast, the imperfect, the sinner, the alienated: King Kong, the Frog Prince, Frankenstein’s monster.

This collection of essays mines the Arkansas Historical Quarterly from the 1960s to the present to form a body of work that represents some of the finest scholarship on the crisis, from distinguished southern historians Numan V. Bartley, Neil R. McMillen, Tony A. Freyer, Roy Reed, David L. Chappell, Lorraine Gates Schuyler, John A. Kirk, Azza Salama Layton, and Ben F. Johnson III. A comprehensive array of topics are explored, including 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. Introduced with an informative historiographical essay from John A. Kirk, An Epitaph for Little Rock is essential reading on this defining moment in America's civil rights struggle.

Winner, 2021 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

Michael McGriff’s Eternal Sentences bears witness to the world of gravel roads, working-class families, and geographic isolation in poems that illuminate both common occurrence and the territories of the surreal. Here, in rendering every line as a single sentence, McGriff depicts a world seen through fragments, quick leaps, and wild associations. Haunted as much by place and people as by the possibilities of image-making itself, Eternal Sentences is a song for the hidden depots of rural America.

William Gilmore Simms’s (1806–1870) body of work, which provides a sweeping fictional portrait of the colonial and antebellum South in all its regional diversity, complete with its literary and intellectual issues, is probably more comprehensive than that of any other nineteenth-century southern author. By the mid–1840s his novels were so famous that Edgar Allan Poe wrote that Simms was “the best novelist which this country has, on the whole, produced.” Simms wrote eight novels that were set in his home state of South Carolina during the Revolutionary War, and Eutaw, the sixth, was published in 1856, the same year Simms had a disastrous lecture tour in the North, in which he voiced strong pro–South Carolina and pro-Southern views.

Eutaw was a sequel to his very successful 1855 novel, The Forayers, and thus completed the most comprehensive saga of the war in our literary history. It focuses on the battle of Eutaw Springs in 1781, which ended British domination of South Carolina. Prominent in this significant battle were Nathanael Greene, Light-Horse Harry Lee, and Francis Marion, about whom Simms would later write a biography. As with other volumes in the Arkansas Edition of Simms’s work, this volume includes a critical introduction by the editor and a Simms chronology, as well as appendices dealing with textual matters.

Despite the suffragist activities of the 1920s and the heightened pressures brought to bear on traditionally “male-only” institutions in American society during the past three decades, many vocations remain sanctuaries of male dominance. One such area is the classical music world; though, as Jan Bell Groh asserts in Evening the Score, inroads into this field have bene made, sometimes at great cost.

At the center of this work is a unique set of newsletters edited and published by Frédérique Petrides, one of America’s first and most influential female conductors. In Petride’s time, most women musicians were forced to ply their trade in all-female orchestras; through the thirty-seven issues of Women in Music published from 1935 to 1940, the achievements of these musicians were championed, and the prejudices, misconceptions, and deliberately discriminatory policies of many of their male counterparts were exposed and condemned.

Evening the Score is an ambitious endeavor that seeks not only to preserve these early documents and explain them within the context of the 1930s music industry but also to garner for Petrides the long-overdue praise to which she is entitled. It is at once a celebration and a source of inspiration.

During this period, five states joined the Union—Kansas, West Virginia, Nevada, Nebraska and Colorado—and the population reached nearly forty million. The westward movement was given a boost by the cornpletion of the first intercontinental railroad, and migration from farms and villages to towns and cities increased, accompanied by a shift from rural occupations and crafts to industrial tasks and trades. Overall, the pursuit of middle-class status became a driving force. As this book illustrates, however, most people, though affected by the major upheavals of history, simply pursued their personal lives. Sutherland chronicles dating and marriage customs, the dangers and discomforts of mining, and life in the gambling dens, saloons, dance halls, and "cathouses" of the period. Through extensive quotations from diaries, letters, and the popular press, the reader glimpses an American middle class just beginning to grope its way toward the modern world.

Back by popular demand and new in paperback, this spirited collection of nearly twenty papers celebrates the 450th anniversary of Hernando de Soto’s epic expedition across the Southeast and West.

Originally presented at two symposia conducted by the University Museum at the University of Arkansas, the collection offers an array of viewpoints and diverse approaches to de Soto scholarship. Archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, museum curators, and folklorists all contribute to this lively debate on the Spanish explorer and his travels.

The book focuses on research that challenges traditional interpretation of de Soto’s entrada and travel route, particularly after the expedition crossed the Mississippi River. David H. Dye hypothesizes a route across the river and the alluvial plain by linking the narrative accounts with geography and archaeological knowledge. Phyllis A. Morse asserts that the Parkin site is the location of the capital of Casqui, one of the polities visited by de Soto. Charles M. Hudson repostulates his version of the expedition route, which in 1988 severely challenged the De Soto Commission theory of 1939. Ann M. Early redraws the trail in the uplands of the Ouachita Mountains And Frank E. Schambach tests the possibility that the expedition wandered through Caddoan territory in east Texas after de Soto’s death.

Several chapters examine the Native Americans whom de Soto and his expedition encountered in their journey; other contributions provide a fresh look at the chronicles of the expedition that have survived. What emerges is a redrawn map of de Soto’s exploration—and a deeper understanding of the impact of European contact on the New World.

Winner, 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins

Randall Jarrell said that when you read a poem “you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own.” In [explicit lyrics], we are visitors to a world that is familiar as if the poems are occurring in our town, on the streets where we live. But the laws have changed, and what is normally important is no longer relevant. What was meaningless is now everything.

As the title indicates, these poems are lyrics—musings on the small decisions required by existence in the modern world. They contain the grand themes of art—life, love, and mortality—but not where you expect. The smallest and most mundane objects become the catalyst for reevaluating our roles in society and the world. This is not poetry as art. This is life as art, from a country where poetry is the only language.

Exploring the Big Woods: A Guide to the Last Great Forest of Eastern Arkansas is both a natural history and a guide to one of the last remnants of Mississippi bottomland forest, an ecosystem that once stretched from southern Illinois to the Gulf Coast.

Crossed by the White River and its tributaries, which periodically flood and release nutrients, the Big Woods is one of the few places in the Mississippi River Valley where this life-giving flood cycle persists. As a result, it is home to an unusual abundance of animals and plants.

Immense cypresses, hickories, sweetgums, oaks, and sycamores; millions of migrating waterfowl; incredible scenery; and the complex relationship between humans and nature are all to be discovered here.

Exploring the Big Woods will introduce readers to the natural features, plants, animals, and hiking and canoeing trails going deep into the forests and swamps of this rare and beautiful natural resource.