2012 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize Winner

Pinson Mounds: Middle Woodland Ceremonialism in the Midsouth is a comprehensive overview and reinterpretation of the largest Middle Woodland mound complex in the Southeast. Located in west Tennessee about ten miles south of Jackson, the Pinson Mounds complex includes at least thirteen mounds, a geometric earthen embankment, and contemporary short-term occupation areas within an area of about four hundred acres. A unique feature of Pinson Mounds is the presence of five large, rectangular platform mounds from eight to seventy-two feet in height. Around A.D. 100, Pinson Mounds was a pilgrimage center that drew visitors from well beyond the local population and accommodated many distinct cultural groups and people of varied social stations. Stylistically nonlocal ceramics have been found in virtually every excavated locality, all together representing a large portion of the Southeast. Along with an overview of this important and unique mound complex, Pinson Mounds also provides a reassessment of roughly contemporary centers in the greater Midsouth and Lower Mississippi Valley and challenges past interpretations of the Hopewell phenomenon in the region.

This book grew out of an exhibition about Dellinger’s life and work that was curated by Bob Mainfort at the Old State House Museum in Little Rock. The book includes a detailed biography of Dellinger, as well as a discussion of his work, an overview of major collecting efforts in Arkansas by out-of-state institutions, and a history of the University of Arkansas Museum. Lavishly illustrated with over two hundred images of artifacts, this book will now permit archaeologists to see some of the pieces Dellinger’s lifetime of work saved and preserved.

Arkansas has long been recognized as a state with a rich archaeological heritage that is unsurpassed in North America. The Toltec Mounds were made famous by the Smithsonian's research at the turn of the century. The Sloan site, dated to 8500 B.C., is the oldest documented burial ground in the New World. The alluvial plain of the central Mississippi River valley supported perhaps the greatest prehistoric urban population. And the Parkin site has yielded important information about the de Soto incursion into the continent. This festschrift recognizes the contributions made in researching this varied heritage by Dan and Phyllis Morse from the inception of the Arkansas Archeological Survey in 1967 to their retirement in 1997. The essays were prepared by thirteen of their colleagues, recognized experts in archaeology and related fields, and represent state-of-the-art knowledge about Arkansas's archaeology. The topics range broadly: from prehistoric environments and regional syntheses to specialized studies of specific culture periods and historical archaeology. Paul and Hazel Delcourt and Roger Saucier provide a chapter that will serve as a standard reference for many years on Holocene environments; Chris Gillam's contribution demonstrates the utility of Geographic Information Systems in broad-scale pattern analysis; Robert Mainfort uses large collections of ceramics to show that traditional methods for grouping Late Mississippian sites are insufficient; Michael Hoffman introduces a new line of evidence from old newspaper accounts; and Frank Schambach, in reinterpreting the spectacular Spiro site in eastern Oklahoma, gives us a powerful, classic example of archaeological and ethnohistoric interpretation. This volume will, of course, be of great interest to professional archaeologists and anthropologists, but the essays are also accessible to students, amateur archaeologists, historians, and enthusiastic general readers. As the new millennium dawns, this book celebrates the legacy of two very distinguished careers in archaeology and heralds the proliferation of innovative new approaches and techniques for the continuing study of Arkansas's prehistoric peoples.

During the first eight scorching days of August in 1932, U.S. Senator Huey P. Long of Louisiana campaigned in Arkansas for the election of Hattie Caraway to the U.S. Senate. Caraway easily defeated six well-known opponents in a race she was not expected to win and became the first woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate. This volume is a textbook of politics and a sweeping picture of the Great Depression, as if those perilous times had been compressed into a week and a day. It is a fascinating look at two extremely different people caught briefly in a common purpose.

When John McDonnell began his coaching career at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville--choosing it over Norman, Oklahoma, because Fayetteville reminded him of his native Ireland--he could hardly have imagined that he would become the most successful coach in the history of American collegiate athletics. But, in thirty-six years at the university, he amassed a staggering résumé of accomplishments, including forty national championships (eleven cross country, nineteen indoor track, and ten outdoor track), the most by any coach in any sport in NCAA history. His teams at Arkansas won the triple crown (a championship in cross country, indoor track, and outdoor track in a single school year) a record five times. The Razorbacks also won eighty-three conference championships (thirty-eight in the Southwest Conference and forty-six in the Southeastern Conference), including thirty-four consecutive conference championships in cross country from 1974 to 2008. McDonnell coached 185 All-Americans, fifty-four individual national champions, and twenty-three Olympians. And from 1984 to 1995, his Razorback teams won twelve consecutive NCAA Indoor Track Championships, the longest streak of national titles by any school in any sport in NCAA history. This biography tells the story of the McDonnell's life and legacy, from his childhood growing up on a farm in 1940s County Mayo, Ireland, to his own running career, to the beginnings of his life as a coach, to all the great athletes he mentored along the way.

In 1884, when Albert O. Marshall published Army Life, a memoir of his service as a private in the Thirty-Third Illinois Regiment, twenty years had passed since his 1864 discharge. Marshall left the journal untouched at publication, and today it is a journal that is rare in what it is not. This memoir is not a complete story of the Thirty-Third (known as the “Normal Regiment” because many of its soldiers were from Illinois State Normal University), nor is it a complete roster of regiment members, nor a list of killed and wounded. Army Life is not, even, a purely military account written from an officer’s point of view. It is the story of a twenty-year-old private whose engaging writing belies his age but also allows his youth to shine through. Marshall tells of the battles he fought and the games he played, of his friends, fellow soldiers, and officers, and of the regiment’s activities in Missouri and Arkansas, at Vicksburg, and in Louisiana and on the Texas Gulf Coast. Enhanced with careful editing and thorough annotations, this journal Marshall carried faithfully to every mustering out is a rich and important Civil War memoir.

The Artificial Southerner tracks the manifestations and ramifications of "Southern identity"—the relationship among a self-conscious, invented regionalism, the real distinctiveness of Southern culture, and the influence of the South in America. In these essays columnist Philip Martin explores the region and those who have both fled and embraced it. He offers lyric portraits of Southerners real, imagined, and absentee: musicians (James Brown, the Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash), writers (Richard Ford, Eudora Welty), politicians (Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter). He also considers such topics as the architecture of E. Fay Jones, the biracial nature of country music, and the idea of "white trash." "Every American has a South within," he says, "a conquered territory, an old wound . . . a scar." His work meditates on the rock and roll, the literature, the life, and the love which proceed from that inner, self-created South.

Through these varied essays on politics, ethics, music, race, and culture Philip Martin admits “a minor obsession” with what he calls “the American Frolic”—the essential lack of seriousness with which many of us approach the questions inherent in living in a free society. He observes that Americans have been conditioned to react, not to consider; that while we are very good at ripostes and snappy comebacks, at cracking wise and looking smart, we often fail to authentically engage the issues with which we pretend to be most concerned. We inadvertently talk past one another, he says, resorting to cant and partisan boilerplate.

In the essays presented in The Shortstop’s Son, Philip Martin rigorously resists easy labels and rote ideological truths. He pursues more subtle meanings with a commonsense lucidity and a fundamental compassion for humanity. Whether writing about the mythos built upon Bonnie and Clyde’s bullet-ridden Ford or the ignoble death and burial of blues legend Blind Lemon Jefferson, Martin strikes the chord that both moves and informs.

Martin is our critic at large. Deeply engaged in the world of thought and experience, he applies his nimble mind and very human heart to those things which should concern us most. He allows us, through his “obsession” and the clarity of his prose, to experience a new vision, one based in our desire for rich life.

With clarity and precise detail, Dan Masterson creates a narrative of how we live, love, and die. In blank verse and rhymed stanzas, in free verse and taut lyrics, he delivers the story of a woman trap ped in an avalanche, a husband daring himself to death in an ocean swim, or a son arranging the final affairs of his parents. There is always an edge to Masterson’s characters—they are everyday people, but we meet them on the one day when the stakes are highest.

He holds a reverence for the particulars of a place, for gardens and homes, for dresser drawers and work benches, for cabins in the Adirondacks, ponds, tree houses, and ornamental stones. The leavings of loved ones—strong boxes, pajamas, rosaries—are passed on as relics that both heal and trouble. In Masterson’s world, characters learn how to lose, how to change, and even how to survive their most painful memories.

Selected from thirty years of work, and including an eclectic selection of new poems, this book unfurls Masterson’s full canvas of abilities: his penchant for startling descriptions, his keen insight into our nobility and fallibility, and his skill at making us live his poems.

Over sixty years ago, political scientist V.O. Key Jr. published his seminal work, Southern Politics in State and Nation. Key's book redefined the field of southern politics and remains one of the most cited and influential works in twentieth-century political science and southern history. In Unlocking V.O. Key Jr., prominent southern scholars in history, political science, and southern and American studies reconsider Key's analysis, debating his omissions as well as highlighting the timeless elements of his work. Charles Reagan Wilson, Kari Frederickson, and Pearl K. Ford argue that Key's exclusion of religion, violence, and African American political participation altered the field of southern politics. Keith Gaddie and Justin Wert draw attention to Key's methodological innovations, while Margaret Reid questions Key's limited and gendered vision of the southern electorate. Harold Stanley discusses the complexity of teaching Key in the twenty-first century. Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston argue for the role that class and the economy played in the realignment of the South with the Republican Party, while Dan T. Carter points to race as the driving factor in this major shift. Susan MacManus tracks immigration trends in the region to explain contemporary southern political behavior. Supported with a foreword by Byron E. Shafer that provides an overview of Key's major contributions as a political scientist, and concluding with Wayne Parent's discussion of Key and the contemporary student, Unlocking V.O. Key Jr. is a must-read companion to the classic Southern Politics in State and Nation.

Exile—with its sense of suspended or impending motion, of change, loss, acceptance—gives James J. McAuley’s poems their need to be, their means of surviving the exigencies of the displaced spirit. Ancestors on both sides of his family were bards in Celtic Ireland. Although a naturalized United States citizen, McAuley has maintained his connections with his native land: the Irish times listed him among one hundred “significant Irish writers.” Although the poet writes of the familial and the domestic, he is writing at the same time of journeys out and back, of losses and recoveries. McAuley is as much at ease with the solemnity of elegy as with the invective of political satire or the sensual metaphysics of the love-poem.

At the center of James McAuley’s new collection—the work of over a decade since his previous book, Coming & Going, New & Selected—is the sequence, “God’s Pattern,” meditations on the Stations of the Cross, an old devotional form of pilgrimage or “pattern” still practiced in rural parishes of the poet’s native country, Ireland. Theme and treatment vary throughout the collection, from somber reflection on the fate of a drunk in a cheap hotel room, “Cantata for the Feast of St. Anonymous,” to the scathing Celtic-style satire, “The Gingriad.” McAuley is well regarded for his experiments with traditional forms and rhythms: examples included are blank-verse narratives and elegies, a Haiku sequence, sonnets, a variation on the topographical poetry of the seventeenth century, even a carmen figurata.

Meditations, With Distractions has the qualities that all good poetry should possess: depth, erudition, accessibility, a joy in the practice of language. Combine these qualities with McAuley’s humanity and humor, and the result is a collection that readers will come to enjoy and appreciate more and more with each successive reading.

It’s one thing to understand that over twenty-thousand Confederate and Union soldiers died at the Battle of Murfreesboro. It’s quite another to study an ambrotype portrait of twenty-year-old private Frank B. Crosthwait, dressed in his Sunday best, looking somberly at the camera. In a tragically short time, he’ll be found on the battlefield, mortally wounded, still clutching the knotted pieces of handkerchief he used in a hopeless attempt to stop the bleeding from his injuries. Private Crosthwait’s image is one of more than 250 portraits—many never before published—to be found in the much anticipated Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Tennessee in the Civil War. The eighth in the distinguished Portraits of Conflict series, this volume joins the personal and the public to provide a uniquely rich portrayal of Tennesseans—in uniforms both blue and gray—who fought and lost their lives in the Civil War. Here is the story of a widow working as a Union spy to support herself and her children. Of a father emerging from his house to find his Confederate soldier son dying at his feet. Of a nine-year-old boy who attached himself to a Union regiment after his mother died. Their stories and faces, joined with personal remembrances from recovered letters and diaries and ample historical information on secession, famous battles, surrender, and Reconstruction, make this new Portraits of Conflict a Civil War treasure.

The Improbable Life of the Arkansas Democrat is based on more than one hundred interviews with employees of the Democrat, including editors, reporters, feature writers, cartoonists, circulation managers, business managers, salespeople, typesetters and others, from the 1930s through the early 1990s, when the Democrat took over the more prominent Arkansas Gazette after an aggressive newspaper war.

This new addition to Arkansas journalism history provides vivid details about what it was like to work at the Democrat. August Engel, who led the paper with focused devotion for forty-two years, was famous for his thrift, creating austere conditions that included no air conditioning in the newsroom and sub-par wages. In spite of these drawbacks, the paper was still home to many dedicated journalism professionals endeavoring to do good work.

Readers who remember the ultimate acrimony between the two papers may be surprised to learn that for many years the Democrat and the Gazette owners operated under a tacit agreement of civility. The papers didn’t raid each other’s staff, for example, and when a fire broke out in the Gazette pressroom, Democrat management offered to loan the use of its press. Staffers recall that when the Gazette struggled with an advertising boycott and reduced circulation during the Little Rock Central High crisis because of its perceived progressive editorial stance, which infuriated many Arkansans, the Democrat did less than it might have to capitalize. The eventual newspaper war that combined the two rivals saw the end of any semblance of civility when the Democrat hired an aggressive and infamous managing editor named John Robert Starr.

Through these firsthand stories of those who lived it, The Improbable Life of the Arkansas Democrat tells the story of how the second-place paper overtook the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi, forever changing not only Arkansas journalism but also Arkansas history.

May Kennedy McCord, lovingly nicknamed “First Lady of the Ozarks” and “Queen of the Hillbillies,” spent half a century sharing the history, songs, and stories of her native Ozarks through newspaper columns, radio programs, and music festivals. Though her work made her one of the twentieth century’s preeminent folklorists, McCord was first and foremost an entertainer—at one time nearly as renowned as the hills she loved.

Despite the encouragement of her contemporaries, McCord never published a collection of her work. In 1956, Vance Randolph wrote to her, “If you didn’t have such a mental block against writing books, I could show you how to make a book out of extracts from your columns. It would be very little work, and sell like hotcakes. . . . I could write a solemn little introduction, telling the citizens what a fine gal you are! The hell of it is, most of the readers know all about you.” In Queen of the Hillbillies, editors Patti McCord and Kristene Sutliff at last bring together the best of McCord’s published and previously unpublished writings to share her knowledge, humor, and inimitable spirit with a new generation of readers.

The world of national and international scholarships is more competitive than ever. Top students from across the county vie for a limited number of awards that provide the funding needed to participate in elite programs that can help launch the careers of those who receive the recognition. Scholarship foundation leaders have an insider’s view of the selection process, and experienced advisors prepare students to navigate applications and interviews. Both perspectives are represented here in this new collection emphasizing the importance of engaging a diverse group of students, institutions, and programs in the process as well as expanding the educational experience for students as they apply so that everyone benefits, no matter what the outcome.

Each year thousands of students apply for competitive national and international scholarships such as the Rhodes, Marshall, Gates Cambridge, and Fulbright. The competition for these awards is intense, and students look to scholarship advisors for support. Many universities have created an office or designated part of an office to assist these students, which has provided greater access for students who may not have applied previously or successfully. It has also increased the competition. The twelve essays in this collection from the 2003 National Association of Fellowships Advisors Conference held at the University of Denver. Essays by the heads of the Rhodes, Marshall, Gates, and Truman Scholarship foundations provide a sense of the philosophy and direction of their programs. The essays provide information on new initiatives, insights into the history and significance of the programs, and insider tips for application and interview preparation. Other essays focus on the advising and application process from successful advisors at various universities, how the U.K. higher educational system differs from that in the United States, and the key issue of ethics in the application process. All the essays demonstrate that the scholarship application experience itself is a valuable one that is more about learning and service than it is about winning.

Here are eleven essays addressing various aspects of the application process: building an office, engaging students in research, connecting them to internships and other special opportunities, embracing diversity, defining leadership, involving faculty, and preparing for an interview. There are also realistic assessments of the odds of winning a scholarship. Three of the essays are by directors or presidents of the Ron Brown Scholar Program, the Senator George J. Mitchell Scholarship Research Institute, and the Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation. The essays are a result of the National Association of Fellowships Advisors conference, NAFA in Washington: Scholarships in a National Context, held in Washington, D.C., in July of 2007. The collection is a valuable resource for faculty, advisors, and administrators who want to provide opportunities for student engagement and to use the process to help shape tomorrow’s leaders. The book also includes two appendices: “NAFA Foundation and Institutional Membership” and “Competitive Scholarships, Opportunities, Internships, and Programs at a Glance.”

Guidance for students applying for national scholarships Nationally competitive scholarship programs attract thousands of applicants every year for a relatively small number of awards. Providing informed and dedicated support to applicants is the critical and fundamental goal of the National Association of Fellowships Advisors (NAFA). The thirteen essays in this volume are a direct result of the 2005 NAFA conference held in Louisville. Contributors include both scholarship advisors and representatives of the Truman and Marshall foundations as well as the former executive director of the US-UK Fulbright Commission. These essays provide practical information ranging from helping faculty write persuasive letters of recommendation to serving international students effectively to negotiating the British and Irish high-educational systems. In addition to providing the students with useful tips, these essays also reflect on the broader impact of the application process. They address the successes of students who do not win as well as the public-service involvement of those who do as they give back to their campus, local, and global communities.

Applying for nationally competitive scholarships can be a daunting process for students. Thousands apply each year for scholarships with familiar names like the Rhodes, Marshall, Gates Cambridge, Schwarzman, Fulbright, Truman, Goldwater, Udall, and Madison, or for one of many STEM opportunities like National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships or National Defense Science and  Engineering Fellowship.  

For many, the applications present an unfamiliar territory, so students seek out informed advisors who can help them navigate the terrain. This volume of essays is a great way for anyone advising students through an application to become an expert. Roads Less Traveled and Other Perspectives on Nationally Competitive Scholarships provides critical information from scholarship foundations about the best ways to guide students—from considering a career path, to completing the application, to preparing for an interview. Experienced advisors also share helpful tips on practical topics like writing letters of endorsement or assisting those who want to study abroad, and they provide programmatic advice on how to broaden the pool of applicants, address those with financial needs, and make all who apply feel the process has value beyond winning. Roads Less Traveled and Other Perspectives on Nationally Competitive Scholarships is a must for anyone advising students on scholarships.

 

Advisors face quite a challenge as they sort through the daunting and ever-changing world of nationally competitive undergraduate and graduate fellowships in order to assist talented students searching for funding for exceptional academic opportunities.

This collection of essays helps advisors by providing information about major changes in the fellowship and scholarship landscape. Included is guidance on the new Schwarzman scholarship for study in China, the recently added video interview for the Mitchell scholarship, and the new rules for the Rhodes personal statement (an advisor’s take). Additionally, seasoned advisors share practical advice, ranging from workshops that engage students and faculty to helpful technological tools to personal statements and office assessments. Keeping the focus on the scholar in the scholarship process is a central theme. All before Them is an important addition to any faculty mentor’s or scholarship advisor’s toolkit.

Thousands of college students across the country apply each year for nationally and internationally competitive scholarships and grants. Different awards target different interests, career goals, and student qualifications. Advising students on how to choose the right award that will help launch them on their career path requires a nuanced understanding of scholarship opportunities. Bridging the Gap: Perspectives on Nationally Competitive Scholarships provides key information from scholarship foundations and seasoned advice from campus advisors critically important for the faculty and staff who support students applying for these awards. This book will be a great resource for anyone advising students.

Finalist, 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins

“A graceful synthesis of poetry and science.”

—Billy Collins

Laura McCullough finds passage through the darkest times as she loses, in short order, her mother and her marriage. Through her near unbearable grief, she creates poems that slip between science and nature as she grasps at coordinates in a world spun out of its orbit. From the God Particle to toroidal vortexes, from the slippery linguistics of translation to the translation of the body, McCullough brings readers to the mystery of surrender, and the paradox that what we bear can make us more beautiful, that there is a gift in grief.

In the Home of the Famous Dead will appeal to newcomers as well as to avid followers of Jo McDougall’s long career and complex work, providing valuable insights to the development of a poet’s signature, inimitable style. This collection presents work known for its sparse, compact language; surprising metaphor; humor; irony; idiomatic speech; and a stoic, sadly earned wisdom concerning death and loss. In McDougall’s world, folks making do with what they have take the stage to speak of, in the words of one critic, “the tangled mysteries of their faltering lives.” Her work has been described as having “excruciating honesty” (Gerald Stern), giving voice to the “ineffable emotions of plain people” (Judith Kitchen). Miller Williams notes that the work has “cleanness and clarity . . . in all the funk and smell of humanity.” This is the poetry of midwestern plains and southern botttomlands, of waitresses and professors, farmers and bankers, the disadvantaged and privileged alike. Often beginning in the personal and expanding to the universal, this poet takes note of the phenomenological world with a mixture of joy, despair, and awe, providing a haunting look at the cosmic irony of our existence. McDougall’s style is indescribable, yet wholly accessible. As Kelly Cherry notes, “Call it magic, call it art; either way [Jo McDougall’s work] is something like a miracle.”

In the Home of the Famous Dead will appeal to newcomers as well as to avid followers of Jo McDougall’s long career and complex work, providing valuable insights to the development of a poet’s signature, inimitable style. This collection presents work known for its sparse, compact language; surprising metaphor; humor; irony; idiomatic speech; and a stoic, sadly earned wisdom concerning death and loss. In McDougall’s world, folks making do with what they have take the stage to speak of, in the words of one critic, “the tangled mysteries of their faltering lives.” Her work has been described as having “excruciating honesty” (Gerald Stern), giving voice to the “ineffable emotions of plain people” (Judith Kitchen). Miller Williams notes that the work has “cleanness and clarity . . . in all the funk and smell of humanity.” This is the poetry of midwestern plains and southern botttomlands, of waitresses and professors, farmers and bankers, the disadvantaged and privileged alike. Often beginning in the personal and expanding to the universal, this poet takes note of the phenomenological world with a mixture of joy, despair, and awe, providing a haunting look at the cosmic irony of our existence. McDougall’s style is indescribable, yet wholly accessible. As Kelly Cherry notes, “Call it magic, call it art; either way [Jo McDougall’s work] is something like a miracle.”

Jo McDougall brings a poet's sensibility to memoir. Recounting five generations of Delta rice farmers, through family archives and oral histories, she traces how the clan made their way into the fabric of America, beginning with her Belgian-immigrant grandfather, a pioneer rice farmer on the Arkansas Delta at the turn of the twentieth century. As John Grisham has for a 1950s Arkansas cotton farm, McDougall illuminates an Arkansas rice farm in the 1930s and 1940s. The Garot family's acreage near DeWitt and the town itself provide the stage for McDougall's wry, compelling, and layered account of the day-to-day of rice growing on the farm that her father inherited. In that setting she discovers a rich "universe of words" in the Great Depression, comes of age during World War II, and finds her way alongside "that whole quirky, compelling cast of characters" that comprised her kin. In this conflicted, ironic, southern-but-universal account of betrayal, heartbreak, loss, and joy, "the vagaries and the grace" of the land join forces with the power of money as family bonds are both forged and dissolved. Deeply felt, unsentimental, and often humorous,Daddy's Money presents McDougall's life and the lives of her relatives in the way that all our lives are eventually framed-as stories. "When all else is lost," the author maintains, "the stories remain."

2014 finalist, Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize

Tracing the origins and history of Missouri Confederate units that served during the Civil War is nearly as difficult as comprehending the diverse politics that produced them. Deeply torn by the issues that caused the conflict, some Missourians chose sides enthusiastically, others reluctantly, while a number had to choose out of sheer necessity, for fence straddling held no sway in the state after the fighting began. The several thousand that sided with the Confederacy formed a variety of military organizations, some earning reputations for hard fighting exceeded by few other states, North or South. Unfortunately, the records of Missouri's Confederate units have not been adequately preserved—officially or otherwise—until now. James E. McGhee is a highly respected and widely published authority on the Civil War in Missouri; the scope of this book is startling, the depth of detail gratifying, its reliability undeniable, and the unit narratives highly readable. McGhee presents accounts of the sixty-nine artillery, cavalry, and infantry units in the state, as well as their precedent units and those that failed to complete their organization. Relying heavily on primary sources, such as rosters, official reports, order books, letters, diaries, and memoirs, he weaves diverse materials into concise narratives of each of Missouri's Confederate organizations. He lists the field-grade officers for battalions and regiments, companies and company commanders, and places of origin for each company when known. In addition to listing all the commanding officers in each unit, he includes a bibliography germane to the unit, while a supplemental bibliography provides the other sources used in preparing this unique and comprehensive resource.

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.

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

The poems in See You Soon explore the limits of metaphor and language as their voices speak from the beauty and strangeness of daily experience, testing how we make sense of ourselves to ourselves and to one another. There is love in these poems, there is failure and absurdity. The characters, in their various situations and guises, find themselves outside of time, space, and identity—at sunset, in an airport, outside a hookah lounge, as a birthday party clown, after a flood. Its message is the invitation of the title. See You Soon is a statement of the complexity of our mutual direction in time, of camaraderie along the way.

Winner of the 2006 Booker Worthen Literary Prize and the 2004 Ragsdale Award.

Sidney Sanders McMath was a pivotal figure not only in Arkansas history but in the history of the Democratic Party and of American law. Still vibrant and engaged in his nineties, he sets out his story in full for the first time: how he rose and fell in public office, and rose again as a lawyer seeking justice for ordinary people.

McMath divides his story into four parts. In the first, he describes how his early life in rural Arkansas sparked his commitment to people. The second section describes his service to democracy in the military, including his commission in the U.S. Marines, a battlefield promotion in the Pacific and other honors, and his subsequent advancement to the rank of major general.

The revealing third section details McMath’s extraordinary life in politics, starting with his explosive debut in 1945, when he and other recent veterans dethroned one of Arkansas’s most powerful and corrupt political machines. Later, as a two-term governor, he fulfilled this promise of reform and modernization: he brought the first roads and electricity to rural areas, fought the poll tax, and built the state’s first medical center. He also helped change the party’s rules so that black citizens could vote in primaries. McMath describes how he worked with President Truman to keep the segregationist Dixiecrats from taking over the Democratic Party—and the presidency.

But here his story takes a dramatic turn: political opponents alleged bribery in his highway program, and although no indictments were handed down, McMath’s political career ended. Arguing his case for the first time in fifty years, he sets the facts straight.

McMath turned to the practice of law to fight for the people he had represented as governor. In the concluding section of the book he describes some of his most important cases, examples of how he put his life’s experience, knowledge, and integrity in the service of those who had few resources. These stories show exactly why he has been honored with membership in such exclusive groups as the Inner Circle of Advocates as well as the presidency of the International Academy of Trial Lawyers.

Promises Kept shows us the excitement and the hard choices of real democracy, offering compelling human stories, new information on past conflicts, and the crucial perspective of a man at the center of history.

In this deeply researched and well-written study, Donald P. McNeilly examines how moderately wealthy planters and sons of planters immigrated into the virtually empty lands of Arkansas, seeking their fortune and to establish themselves as the leaders of a new planter aristocracy west of the Mississippi River. These men, sometimes alone, sometimes with family, and usually with slaves, sought the best land possible, cleared it, planted their crops, and erected crude houses and other buildings. Life was difficult for these would-be leaders of society and their families, and especially hard for the slaves who toiled to create fields in which they labored to produce a crop. McNeilly argues that by the time of Arkansas's statehood in 1836, planters and large farmers had secured a hold over their frontier home, and that between 1840 and the Civil War, planters solidified their hold on politics, economics, and society in Arkansas. The author takes a topical approach to the subject, with chapters on migration, slavery, non-planter whites, politics, and the secession crisis of 1860–1861. McNeilly offers a first-rate analysis of the creation of a white, cotton-based society in Arkansas, shedding light not only on the southern frontier, but also on the established Old South before the Civil War.

In this critical study, Terri Mester makes solid biographic, thematic, technical, and figurative cases that W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and William Carlos Williams turned to dance and dancers—actual and mythic—to reinvigorate their literary practices.

This important collection of poems, which spans a career of nearly fifty years, demonstrates Robert Mezey's development as a notable stylist, thinker, and poet. Moving from adaptations of Latin and Spanish poems to prayers and lamentations, from elegies and plaints of lost love to flights of comic and ribald fancy, his poetry reaches to the extremes of human experience. The death of friends and family, one's self-betrayals and self-infatuations, the comical confusion of a worried mother, the art of a doomed Jewish child in a Nazi concentration camp—all these human dramas play out bravely against the backdrop of the beautiful, indifferent path. Mezey can portray aging and death or sing of love and nature with an accuracy of perception and an intensity of feeling heightened by formal clarity and restraint. With his razor-sharp eye for the singular detail, he describes missed opportunities and moments of human weakness and loss in gestures so real the reader will ache. In capturing the pain of religious doubt, the pangs of tenderness and elation, and the vagaries of fate so honestly, Mezey has wrought a high finish to each poem so that, in the words of Donald Justice, they become "absolute classics of calm and beauty."

Winner, 2020 J.G. Ragsdale Book Award from the Arkansas Historical Association

“I reckon stranger you have not been used much to traveling in the woods,” a hunter remarked to Henry Rowe Schoolcraft as he trekked through the Ozark backcountry in late 1818. The ensuing exchange is one of many compelling encounters between Arkansas travelers and settlers depicted in Arkansas Travelers: Geographies of Exploration and Perception, 1804–1834. This book is the first to integrate the stories of four travelers who explored Arkansas during the transformative period between the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and statehood in 1836: William Dunbar, Thomas Nuttall, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, and George William Featherstonhaugh.

In addition to gathering their tales of treacherous rivers, drunken scoundrels, and repulsive food, historian and geographer Andrew J. Milson explores the impact such travel narratives have had on geographical understandings of Arkansas places. Using the language in each traveler’s narrative, Milson suggests, and the book includes, new maps that trace these perceptions, illustrating not just the lands traversed, but the way travelers experienced and perceived place. By taking a geographical approach to the history of these spaces, Arkansas Travelers offers a deeper understanding—a deeper map—of Arkansas.

Contents:
Eliminating Ethics: Wittgenstein, Ethics, and the Limits of Sense – Edmund Dain
Addressing Russell Resolutely? – Cora Diamond
Missing a Step Up the Ladder – Eli Friedlander
Wittgenstein and “Tonk”: Inference and Representation in the Tractatus (and Beyond) – Martin Gustafsson
Resolute Reading – Kelly Dean Jolley
The Method of Language-Games as a Method of Logic – Oskari Kuusela
Austerity, Psychology, and the Intelligibility of Nonsense – Denis McManus
Showing, the Medium Voice, and the Unity of the Tractatus – Jean-Philippe Narboux
Analysis, Independence, Simplicity, and the General Sentence-Form – Thomas Ricketts
In What Way Does Logic Involve Necessity? – Sanford Shieh
Solipsism and the Limits of Sense in the Tractatus – Jônadas Techio

Finalist, 2022 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

From cities and cross-country bus rides to swamps and fern forests, Michael Mlekoday’s All Earthly Bodies celebrates the ungentrifiable, ungovernable wildness of life. This is anarchist ecology, nonbinary environmentalism, an earthbound theology against empire in all its forms. These poems ask how our lives and language, our prayers and politics, might evolve if we really listened to the world and its more-than-human songs.

“Sometimes I wish I could / peel myself from myself / without discarding the shell,” Mlekoday writes. Through a kind of lyric dreamwork, Mlekoday sounds the depths—of ancestry and identity, race and gender, earth and self—to track the unbecoming and re-membering of the body.

War on Error brings together the stories of twelve young people, all vastly different but all American, and all Muslim. Their approaches to religion couldn’t be more diverse: from a rapper of Korean and Egyptian descent to a bisexual Sudanese American to a converted white woman from Colorado living in Cairo and wearing the hijab. These individuals, whether they were born to the religion or came to it on their own, have made their own decisions about how observant they’ll be, whether or not to fast, how often to pray, and what to wear. Though each story is unique, each is also seen through the searching eyes of Melody Moezzi, herself an American Muslim of Iranian descent. She finds that the people she interviews are horrified that, in a post-9/11 world, they have seen their religion come to be represented, in the minds of many Americans, by terrorism. These thoughtful and articulate individuals represent the truth about the faith and its adherents who are drawn to the logic, compassion, and tolerance they find in Muslim teachings. Moezzi, ever comfortable with contradiction and nuance, is a likable narrator whose underlying assumption that “faith is greater than dogma” is strengthened as she learns more about her religion and faces her own biases and blind spots. This fresh new voice, combined with the perceptions and experiences of her fellow American Muslims, make for a read that is both illuminating and enjoyable.

This study is the first published in the Histories of Arkansas, a new series that will build a complete chronological history of the state from the colonial period through modern times. Under the general editorship of noted historian Elliott West, this series will include various thematic histories as well as the chronologically arranged core volumes.

In Arkansas and the New South, 1874–1929 Carl Moneyhon examines the struggle of Arkansas’s people to enter the economic and social mainstreams of the nation in the years from the end of Reconstruction to the beginning of the Great Depression. Economic changes brought about by development of the timber industry, exploitation of the rich coal fields in the western part of the state, discovery of petroleum, and building of manufacturing industries transformed social institutions and fostered a demographic shift from rural to urban settings.

Arkansans were notably successful in bringing the New South to their state, relying on individual enterprise and activist government as they integrated more fully into the national economy and society. But by 1929 persistent problems in the still dominant agricultural sector, the onset of the depression, and heightening social tensions arrested progress and dealt the state a major economic setback that would only be overcome in the years following World War II.

Expanding upon scholarly articles that merely touch on this era in Arkansas history and delving into pertinent primary sources, Moneyhon offers not only an overall look at the state but also an explanation for the singular path it took during these momentous years.

This groundbreaking study, first published in 1994, draws on a rich variety of primary sources to describe Arkansas society before, during, and after the Civil War. While the Civil War devastated the state, this book shows how those who were powerful before the war reclaimed their dominance during Reconstruction. Most importantly, the white elite's postwar commitment to a cotton economy led them to set up a sharecropping system very much like slavery, in which workers had little control over their own labor. In arguing for both change and continuity, Moneyhon reconciles contemporary accounts of the war's effects while addressing ongoing debates within the historical literature.

Originally published in 1907 and now reprinted for the first time, this is the only account published by a Union guerrilla in the border region of the central Ozarks, where political and civil violence lasted from the Civil War well into the 1880s.

There were probably many people who wanted to shoot Billy Monks. He was a Union patriot and skilled guerrilla fighter to some, but others called him a bushwhacker, a murderer, and a thief. His was a very personal combat: he commanded, rallied, arrested, killed, quarreled with, and sued people he knew. His life provides a striking example of the cliché that the war did not end in 1865, but continued fiercely on several fronts for another decade as partisan factions settled old scores and battled for local political control.

This memoir was Monks’s last salvo at his old foes, by turns self-defense and an uncompromising affirmation of the Radical Union cause in the Ozarks. The editors include a new biographical sketch of the author, fill in gaps in his narrative, identify all the people and places to which he refers, and offer a detailed index. Monks himself illustrated the volume with staged photographs of key events re-created by aged comrades who appear to have been just barely able to hoist the muskets they hold as props.

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.

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.

In 1941, racial tensions are rising in the California community where nineyear-old Sachiko Kimura and her seventeen-year-old brother, Nobu, live. Japan has attacked Pearl Harbor, people are angry, and one night, Sachiko and Nobu witness three teenage boys taunting and beating their father in the park. Sachiko especially remembers Terrence Harris, the boy with dark skin and hazel eyes, and Nobu cannot believe the boys capable of such violence toward his father are actually his friends. What Sachiko and Nobu do not know is that Terrence's family had received a telegram that morning with news that Terrence's father was killed at Pearl Harbor. Desperate to escape his pain, Terrence rushes from his home and runs into two high-school friends who convince him to find a Japanese man and get revenge. They do not know the man they attacked is Sachiko and Nobu's father. In the months that follow, Terrence is convicted of his crime and Sachiko and Nobu are sent to an internment camp in Arkansas, a fictionalized version of the two camps that actually existed in Arkansas during the war. While behind bars and barbed wire, each of the three young people will go through dramatic changes. One will learn acceptance. One will remain imprisoned by resentment, and one will seek a path to forgiveness.

In 1970 Brown v. Board of Education was sixteen years old, and fifteen years had passed since the Brown II mandate that schools integrate "with all deliberate speed." Still, after all this time, it was necessary for the U.S. Supreme Court to order thirty Mississippi school districts--whose speed had been anything but deliberate--to integrate immediately. One of these districts included Yazoo City, the hometown of writer Willie Morris. Installed productively on "safe, sane Manhattan Island," Morris, though compelled to write about this pivotal moment, was reluctant to return to Yazoo and do no less than serve as cultural ambassador between the flawed Mississippi that he loved and a wider world. "I did not want to go back," Morris wrote. "I finally went home because the urge to be there during Yazoo's most critical moment was too elemental to resist, and because I would have been ashamed of myself if I had not." The result, Yazoo, is part reportage, part memoir, part ethnography, part social critique--and one of the richest accounts we have of a community's attempt to come to terms with the realities of seismic social change. As infinitely readable and nuanced as ever, Yazoo is available again, enhanced by an informative foreword by historian Jenifer Jensen Wallach and a warm and personal afterword on Morris's writing life by his widow, JoAnne Prichard Morris.

Winner of the 2016 Lillian Smith Book Award

When Aaron Henry returned home to Mississippi from World War II service in 1946, he was part of wave of black servicemen who challenged the racial status quo. He became a pharmacist through the GI Bill, and as a prominent citizen, he organized a hometown chapter of the NAACP and relatively quickly became leader of the state chapter.

From that launching pad he joined and helped lead an ensemble of activists who fundamentally challenged the system of segregation and the almost total exclusion of African Americans from the political structure. These efforts were most clearly evident in his leadership of the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation, which, after an unsuccessful effort to unseat the lily-white Democratic delegation at the Democratic National Convention in 1964, won recognition from the national party in 1968.

The man who the New York Times described as being “at the forefront of every significant boycott, sit-in, protest march, rally, voter registration drive and court case” eventually became a rare example of a social-movement leader who successfully moved into political office. Aaron Henry of Mississippi covers the life of this remarkable leader, from his humble beginnings in a sharecropping family to his election to the Mississippi house of representatives in 1979, all the while maintaining the social-change ideology that prompted him to improve his native state, and thereby the nation.

Modern tourism in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri and Arkansas is concentrated around the area’s glistening man-made lakes, its fish-filled streams and rivers, and the entertainment mecca of Branson. But recreational excursions into this part of the country began over one hundred years ago as urban Midwesterners, many of them captivated by Harold Bell Wright’s novel The Shepherd of the Hills, sought the outdoors for spiritual and physical regeneration.

Morrow and Myers-Phinney excavate the beginnings of commercial tourism in the region and follow it through six decades as the influx of visitors who became familiar with the Ozarks and its investment opportunities brought capital, new commerce, and additional residents to the hills. Chapters focus on float fishing, game parks, cave exploration, the influence of the railroad, and the men who were instrumental in the region’s transformation. The authors discuss traditional lifestyles rooted in “living off the land,” with stock raising and lumbering providing basic subsistence, and changes wrought by tourism, which affected all classes of people across the White River landscape. They describe the flowering of “Ozarks folklore”—how stories told around gravel-bar fishing camps and retold by newspaper journalists translated the hills’ oral tradition for mass audiences.

While the main theme of this study is the development of tourism, it is also a social history of the interior highlands of the Ozarks. We see how the residents and their way of life were discovered, exploited, and changed by new opportunities and the demands of tourism and increasing trade. As such, this book is a valuable new addition to the University of Arkansas Press’s Ozarks Collection.

New in Paper!

Excavated in 1974, the Sloan site in northeast Arkansas is the earliest recognized cemetery in the New World, containing the graves of a small group of Native Americans who died over ten thousand years ago. Although no skeletons were found in the acidic soil, the number, size, and quality of its artifacts attest to the presence of a far more complicated and sophisticated culture than had previously been thought to exist during the Dalton period.

Bringing together the work of thirteen eminent scholars, Dan F. Morse describes and assesses the assemblage of points, adzes, scrapers, abraders, and other stone artifacts as an indicator of the territorial stability of late Pleistocene peoples. The tools show that hunter-gatherer-fisher populations lived in small, semipermanent villages, hunted and butchered white-tailed deer, processed and ate vegetables, and made dugout canoes. And they buried their dead in cemeteries, a practice previously associated only with the rise of horticultural societies. Many of the tools are unused, suggesting ritual interments and a well-developed system of trade with groups in rockier areas.

Including an overview of the Dalton period in the southeastern United States and a discussion of the region’s geologic and vegetal prehistory—and newly supported by extensive high-quality image galleries now available at the website of the Arkansas Archeological Survey (see inside cover)—this comprehensive study of the Sloan artifacts provides a multifaceted assessment of a site rich in information about the technology of a single prehistoric society.

Winner, 2019 Booker Worthen Prize from the Central Arkansas Library System.

A dedicated advocate for social justice long before the term entered everyday usage, Rabbi Ira Sanders began striving against the Jim Crow system soon after he arrived in Little Rock from New York in 1926. Sanders, who led Little Rock’s Temple B’nai Israel for nearly forty years, was a trained social worker as well as a rabbi and his career as a dynamic religious and community leader in Little Rock spanned the traumas of the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust, and the social and racial struggles of the 1950s and 1960s.

Just and Righteous Causes—a full biographical study of this bold social-activist rabbi—examines how Sanders expertly navigated the intersections of race, religion, and gender to advocate for a more just society. It joins a growing body of literature about the lives and histories of Southern rabbis, deftly balancing scholarly and narrative tones to provide a personal look into the complicated position of the Southern rabbi and the Jewish community throughout the political struggles of the twentieth-century South.

Winner, 2018 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

Narcissus Americana sings and scraps and wrestles its way across various landscapes—abandoned quarries, art museums, lavish homes, and tar pits—in a quest to attain a more complex vision of what it means to be upwardly mobile.

These poems question the usefulness of wealth and ownership as markers of success. Taking wine fridges and fake flowers as emblems of capitalism’s failure to assuage human loneliness, the speakers in these poems find joy in shared meals and glasses of wine, and use moments of mutual attention to challenge notions of class in America. Intimacy is on display in “Cruising Altitude,” where the speaker finds a sublime communion between two disparate worldviews during an in-flight conversation with his father:

I ask if his certainty about humanity’s course gives
his life some kind of purpose. He doesn’t sleep well.
I know this. I quote Yeats. He quotes scripture.
Light balances on the wing and casts its yellow spell. . . .

Sharply written, and with an eye for form, these poems engage with heavy inquiry but also know better than to take themselves too seriously, making it possible for, say, dungeons to share space with donuts, as in the poem “Rancho La Brea.”

Mossotti’s timely book invites the reader to traverse America, and see the nation anew, on a journey marked simultaneously by critical scrutiny and deep affection.

In 1979, Ed Stilley was leading a simple life as a farmer and singer of religious hymns in Hogscald Hollow, a tiny Ozark community south of Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Life was filled with hard work and making do for Ed, his wife Eliza, and their five children, who lived in many ways as if the second half of the twentieth century had never happened.

But one day Ed’s life was permanently altered. While plowing his field, he became convinced he was having a heart attack. Ed stopped his work and lay down on the ground. Staring at the sky, he saw himself as a large tortoise struggling to swim across a river. On his back were five small tortoises—his children—clinging to him for survival. And then, as he lay there in the freshly plowed dirt, Ed received a vision from God, telling him that he would be restored to health if he would agree to do one thing: make musical instruments and give them to children.

And so he did. Beginning with a few simple hand tools, Ed worked tirelessly for twenty-five years to create over two hundred instruments, each a crazy quilt of heavy, rough-sawn wood scraps joined with found objects. A rusty door hinge, a steak bone, a stack of dimes, springs, saw blades, pot lids, metal pipes, glass bottles, aerosol cans—Ed used anything he could to build a working guitar, fiddle, or dulcimer. On each instrument Ed inscribed “True Faith, True Light, Have Faith in God.”

True Faith, True Light: The Devotional Art of Ed Stilley documents Ed Stilley’s life and work, giving us a glimpse into a singular life of austere devotion.

The Little Rock Central High School integration crisis did not end in1957 when President Eisenhower sent a portion of the first Airborne Division to protect nine black students. The turmoil was entering its second year in 1958 when Arkansas governor Orval Faubus invoked a hastily passed state law to close the high schools rather than obey the federal court orders that would integrate them.

A group of respectable, middle-class white women, faced with the prospect of no schools as well as the further loss of their city’s good name, turned militant. Led by Adolphine Fletcher Terry, a prominent, “old family” civic leader in her seventies, the wome n quickly put together the Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools (WEC), a highly effective organization that bombarded the city with ads, fliers, and statements challenging Faubus’s action. At peak membership, the WEC mustered two thousand to their cause. Largely inexperienced in politics when they joined the WEC, these women became articulate, confident promoters of public schools and helped others to understand that those schools must be fully integrated.

Forty years later, Sara Murphy, a key member of the WEC, recounts the rarely told sto1y of these courageous women who formed a resistance movement. With passion and sensitivity, she reconstructs the challenges and triumphs of that battle, which issued from the mutual link Southern white women shared with disfranchised African Americans in their common goal for full citizenship.