Winner, 2019 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

“We are the happy riders on the stream of Padua’s consciousness . . . a smart, sympathetic mind at work.”
—Billy Collins

Drawing on the spirit of New York City in decades past, A Short History of Monsters presents the sins and obsessions of a poet nimble in beat and slam traditions. In his first full-length collection, Jose Padua wrestles with an American dream interrupted by failure, excess, and other nightmares. Often brash and unruly, these poems range from recollections of lost, drunken days to unadorned manifestations of hope. Throughout, the speaker redefines his relationship to pop culture, praising it, skewering it, and mourning it by turns.

The poems that make up A Short History of Monsters tend toward both dark humor and epiphany, diving deeply into their own despair and rising up again with existential absurdity. This is a poetry that gets down into the grit and grime of the real world, digging out a space to experience being alive as miraculous in and of itself.

In Champion Trees of Arkansas, Linda Williams Palmer explores the state’s largest trees of their species, registered with the Arkansas Forestry Commission as “champions.” Through her beautiful colored-pencil drawings, each magnificent tree is interpreted through the lens of season, location, history, and human connection.

Readers will get to know the cherrybark oak, rendered in fall colors, an avatar for the passing of seasons. The sugar maple, with its bare limbs and weather-beaten trunk, stands sentry over the headstones in a confederate cemetery. The 350-year-old white oak was once dubbed the Council Oak by Native Americans, and the post oak, cared for by generations of the same family, has its own story to tell.

Palmer travelled from Delta swamps to Ozark and Ouachita mountain ridges over a seven-year period to see and document the champions and to talk with property owners and others willing to share the stories of how these trees are beloved and protected by the community, and often entwined with its history. Champion Trees of Arkansas is sure to inspire art and nature lovers everywhere.

Readings in Arkansas Politics and Government brings together in one volume some of the best available scholarly research, both new and not so new, on a wide range of topics and issues of interest to students of politics and government in the Natural State. The twenty-one articles are arranged in four sections, ranging from the state’s socioeconomic and political context to the workings of its policymaking institutions and the key policy puzzles facing the state in the early twenty-first century. Some of the topics covered include demographics, legislation, issues of church and state, the role of African Americans in the legislature, term limits, constitutional reform, civil rights, and education reform. Ideal for use in introductory and advanced undergraduate courses, the book will also appeal to lawmakers, administrators, journalists, and those interested in how politics and government work in the state.

The scene is a Roman bar, where the narrator tells—in outrageous sonnets—of Columbus’s battle with the Spanish bureaucracy for supplies and ships, of the endless storms that pound the ocean, of the voyagers’ inevitable swindling of the natives, and of Columbus’s final fall from royal favor. After several interruptions and promptings by a skeptical and impatient audience, the narrator comes to the point of his yarn—that genius will sometimes exact a heavy price.

Winner of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets

Partly a roman à clef, partly a paradic "novel-within-a-novel," Writing for Love and Money is perhaps best described as a comic odyssey into the world of the bestseller, a tour guide for writing a blockbuster. Playfully weaving literary puns and allusions into an enthralling narrative, Perutz allows Kate, assisted by a host of "real" and fictional authors, to learn page by page the ingredients of popular fiction. While some critics may argue about the genre—is the book a novel? a memoir? an expose?—Perutz's readers will agree that Writing for Love and Money is one of the funniest nonnovels, nonmemoirs, nonexposes they've read.

Winner, 2018 ASFS (Association for the Study of Food and Society) Book Award, Edited Volume

This collection of new essays offers groundbreaking perspectives on the ways that food and foodways serve as an element of decolonization in Mexican-origin communities.

The writers here take us from multigenerational acequia farmers, who trace their ancestry to Indigenous families in place well before the Oñate Entrada of 1598, to tomorrow’s transborder travelers who will be negotiating entry into the United States. Throughout, we witness the shifting mosaic of Mexican-origin foods and foodways in the fields, gardens, and kitchen tables from Chiapas to Alaska.

Global food systems are also considered from a critical agroecological perspective, including the ways colonialism affects native biocultural diversity, ecosystem resilience, and equality across species, human groups, and generations.

Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements is a major contribution to the understanding of the ways that Mexican-origin peoples have resisted and transformed food systems. It will animate scholarship on global food studies for years to come.

Containing Multitudes: A Documentary Reader of US History provides nearly two hundred primary documents that narrate aspects of US history from the period before European contact through the twenty-first century. Presented in two volumes, this curated selection—including letters, literature, journalism, and visual art—provides access to historical voices from a wide range of subject positions and belief systems.

Designed for US history survey courses, this reader provides both analysis and instructional support in the form of brief introductory essays and questions to promote student discussion and reflection. Containing Multitudes not only conveys a rich and complex portrait of the American past but also offers readers valuable insight into the many dimensions of the historian’s craft.

Named one of New York Public Library's Best Books, 2023

Winner, 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

To Be Named Something Else is a high-spirited celebration of Black matriarchy and lineage—both familial and literary. Centering the coming-of-age of Black femmes in Harlem, Shaina Phenix’s debut collection, in the words of series judge Patricia Smith: “enlivens the everyday—the everyday miraculous, the everyday hallelujah, the numbing everyday love, the everyday risk of just being Black and living. There is absolutely nowhere these poems aren’t—we’re dancing and sweating through our clothes, terminating a pregnancy in a chilled room of white and silver, finally gettin’ those brows threaded and nails did, practicing gettin’ the Holy Ghost, sending folks to their rest, having babies, listening carefully to the lessons of elders, and sometimes even talking back. . . . To Be Named Something Else is a book of reason and reckoning, substance and shadow. It’s tender and wide-aloud and just about everything we need right now, when both reason and reckoning are in such woefully short supply.” Phenix’s full-throated poetry, with its “superlative combination of formalism and funk,” is assuredly something else.

Counterculture flourished nationwide in the 1960s and 1970s, and while the hippies of Haight–Ashbury occupied the public eye, a faction of back to the landers were quietly creating their own haven off the beaten path in the Arkansas Ozarks. In Hipbillies, Jared Phillips combines oral histories and archival resources to weave the story of the Ozarks and its population of country beatniks into the national narrative, showing how the back to the landers engaged in “deep revolution” by sharing their ideas on rural development, small farm economy, and education with the locals—and how they became a fascinating part of a traditional region’s coming to terms with the modern world in the process.

Winner of the 2005 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

From the author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America and the National Book Award finalist Elegy for a Broken Machine: Poems, here is the first collection from award-winning poet Patrick Phillips.

A river runs through Patrick Phillips’s collection Chattahoochee, and through a family saga as powerful and poignant as the landscape in which it unfolds. Here are tales of a vanished South, elegies for the lost, and glimpses of what Flannery O’Connor called the “action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.” In language delicate and muscular, tender and raw-boned, Phillips writes of family, place, and that mythic conjunction of the two we call home.

Forging Communities explores the importance of the cultivation, provision, trade, and exchange of foods and beverages to mankind’s technological advancement, violent conquest, and maritime exploration. The thirteen essays here show how the sharing of food and drink forged social, religious, and community bonds, and how ceremonial feasts as well as domestic daily meals strengthened ties and solidified ethnoreligious identity through the sharing of food customs. The very act of eating and the pleasure derived from it are metaphorically linked to two other sublime activities of the human experience: sexuality and the search for the divine.

This interdisciplinary study of food in medieval and early modern communities connects threads of history conventionally examined separately or in isolation. The intersection of foodstuffs with politics, religion, economics, and culture enhances our understanding of historical developments and cultural continuities through the centuries, giving insight that today, as much as in the past, we are what we eat and what we eat is never devoid of meaning.

A deeply divided border state, heir to the “Bleeding Kansas” era, Missouri became the third most fought-over state in the war, following Virginia and Tennessee. Rich in resources and manpower, critical politically to both the Union and the Confederacy, it was the scene of conventional battles, river warfare, and cavalry raids. It saw the first combat by organized units of Native Americans and African Americans. It was also marked by guerrilla warfare of unparalleled viciousness. This volume, the ninth in the series, includes hundreds of photographs, many of them never before published. The authors provide text and commentary, organizing the photographs into chapters covering the origins of the war, its conventional and guerrilla phases, the war on the rivers, medicine (Sweeny’s medical knowledge adds a great deal to this chapter and expands our knowledge of its practice in the west), the experiences of Missourians who served out of state, and the process of reunion in the postwar years.

At the start of the Civil War, Dr. William McPheeters was a distinguished physician in St. Louis, conducting unprecedented public-health research, forging new medical standards, and organizing the state's first professional associations. But Missouri was a volatile border state. Under martial law, Union authorities kept close watch on known Confederate sympathizers. McPheeters was followed, arrested, threatened, and finally, in 1862, given an ultimatum: sign an oath of allegiance to the Union or go to federal prison. McPheeters "acted from principle" instead, fleeing by night to Confederate territory. He served as a surgeon under Gen. Sterling Price and his Missouri forces west of the Mississippi River, treating soldiers' diseases, malnutrition, and terrible battle wounds. From almost the moment of his departure, the doctor kept a diary. It was a pocket-size notebook which he made by folding sheets of pale blue writing paper in half and in which he wrote in miniature with his steel pen. It is the first known daily account by a Confederate medical officer in the Trans-Mississippi Department. It also tells his wife's story, which included harassment by Federal military officials, imprisonment in St. Louis, and banishment from Missouri with the couple's two small children. The journal appears here in its complete and original form, exactly as the doctor first wrote it, with the addition of the editors' full annotation and vivid introductions to each section.

In his third collection, My Father Says Grace, Donald Platt combines elegy with verse of larger historical allusion and reference. At the center of the book stand poems detailing a father’s stroke and slowly developing Alzheimer’s disease and how it affects one family. An extended meditation on a mother-in-law’s dying provides counterpoint to elegies for more public figures like Walt Whitman and Janis Joplin. The private life in “the valley of the shadow of death” often gets juxtaposed with explicitly political verse. One of these poems records the racially charged conversations in a small southern town’s Amazing Grace Beauty Salon. Another describes a Vietnam protestor, famously photographed while sticking flowers in an MP’s gun barrel, alongside images from his later life as a transvestite. The poems tend to find themselves in the midst of crisis, historical or personal. They yearn for “transport” and strive “to be ‘carried across,’ away, out, toward, back into / / some new country / where the soul improvises, croons scat to itself alone.”

Finalist, 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

In Jessica Poli’s Red Ocher, the wild mortality of the natural world merges with melancholic expressions of romantic loss: a lamb runt dies in the night, a first-time lover inflicts casual cruelties, brussels sprouts rot in a field, love goes quietly and unbearably unrequited. This is an ecopoetics that explores the cyclical natures of love and grief, mindful that “there will be room for desire / again, even after it leaves / like a flood receding, / the damaged farmhouses / and washed-away bridges / lying scattered the next day / amid silt and debris.” Throughout, Poli’s poems hold space for the sacred—finding it in woods overgrown with thorny weeds, in drunken joy rides down rural roads, and in the red ocher barns that haunt the author’s physical and emotional landscapes.

This powerful collection of fifteen memoirs by and about one of the greatest poets of our time weaves an unforgettable drama of friendship, grace, and courage, through long years of heartbreak and hunger.

Belonging with the work of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Julio Cortázar, this richly drawn story runs the gamut from lyrical to violent to pastoral. Originally published in 1975, Cavalls cap a la fosca was hailed by the public and critics alike as perhaps the most incisive Catalan novel since the Spanish Civil War. It was honored with four prestigious literary prizes, including the 1976 Spanish Literary Critics’ Award

In Horses into the Night, the narrator’s search for his roots—especially for his father—among the myths, stories, lies, and truths of his family and hometown, strikes a universal chord. As the plot becomes increasingly textured with piracy, smuggling, the Inquisition, morbid familial relationships, eroticism, and occult occurrences, it is all but impossible to resist this epic story described by El Pais as a “Mediterranean novel flooded with light and bathed in darkness.”

Springs and Autumns is a compelling novel that chronicles, through the voices of several family members, the intriguing history of an extended Majorcan family. The novel is set in Orlandis (a fictional version of Porcel’s hometown) on the island of Majorca. Even though the novel rises from this specific, exotic island setting, Springs and Autumns ultimately appeals to universal human emotions.

 John German has captured the rhythm and poetic nature of Porcel’s prose in his translation of Springs and Autumns. Working from Porcel’s original Catalan and Spanish versions of the text, Getman manages to remain faithful to the feel and tone of Porcel’s narrative while at the same time creating an exceptionally lucid English version.

Although the entire novel takes place as the family gathers at Taltavull Hall for a Christmas Eve dinner, the reader is conveyed to places as far away as South America and Asia, learning along the way about murder, love, rape, incest, travel, discovery, regret, and forgiveness. Porcel accomplishes this through a narrative strategy that pieces together a complex mosaic of the family’s history, with each new narrative layer adding insight to the previous narratives, ultimately creating a complex and engaging novel.

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.

The poems of Dannye Romine Powell take ordinary moments and transform them into rare and luminous epiphanies. These poems have the air of real places and real people who go about the perilous business of living in this world.

Powell is a poet of candor and clarity, and she has a wit that moves in surprising ways. These are poems not only to admire, but to relish and share; the pleasure they bring is closer to that of an old leather jacket than of a new pair of shoes. Powell writes like no one else, and she’s a joy to read.

With a quirky poignance, Dannye Romine Powell’s third collection probes the nature of loss—loss that's actual and loss that's feared. In these poems, loss takes many guises. With its ferny breath, loss is sometimes the lover who waits in secret on the porch. Sometimes even loss recognizes the feeling of loss and "calls the cops / to say his best friend / went fishing and won't answer his phone." Often, the poet mourns a loss of innocence, as when she learns, after attending the funeral of a friend, that the dead woman's husband has a history of infidelity. There's also the loss of romantic love, as when the woman "pulls / toward shore, a shore she calls by a name / she swore she'd never breathe again."

This revisionist work delineates the major social and economic contours of the large black population in the pivotal Southern city of Charleston, South Carolina., historic seaport center for the slave trade. It draws upon census data, manuscript collections, and newspaper accounts to expand our knowledge of this particular community of nineteenth-century black urbanites.

Although the federal government codified the rights of African-Americans into law following the Civil War, it was the initiatives taken by black men and women that actually transformed the theoretical benefits of emancipation into clear achievement.

Because of its large free black population, Charleston provided a case study of black social class stratification and social mobility even before the war. Reconstruction only emphasized that stratification, and Powers examines in detail the aspirations and concessions that shaped the lives of the newly freed blacks, who were led by a black upper class tat sometimes seemed more inclined to emulate white social mores than act as a vanguard for fundamental social change.

Unlike most Reconstruction studies, which concentrate on politics, Black Charlestonians explores the era’s vital socioeconomic challenges for blacks as they emerged into full citizenship in an important city in the South.

Choice’s 1996 Outstanding Academic Books List

Yonder Mountain, inspired by poet Miller Williams's Ozark, Ozark: A Hillside Reader, is rooted in the literary legacy of the Ozarks while reflecting the diversity and change of the region. Readers will find fresh, creative, honest voices profoundly influenced by the landscape and culture of the Ozark Mountains. Poets, novelists, columnists, and historians are represented--Donald Harington, Sara Burge, Marcus Cafagna, Art Homer, Pattiann Rogers, Miller Williams, Roy Reed, Dan Woodrell, and more.