Waiting for the Cemetery Vote begins with an overview chapter of Arkansas election fraud since the nineteenth century and then moves on to more specific examples of fraudulent activities over a dozen or so years that coincide with the onset of the modern progressive era in Arkansas. Author Tom Glaze, who was a trial lawyer battling election fraud during this time, is the ideal chronicler for this topic, bringing a memoirist's intimate insight together with a wealth of historical knowledge. Glaze describes the manipulation of absentee ballots and poll-tax receipts; votes cast by the dead, children, and animals; forgeries of ballots from nursing homes; and threats to body or livelihood made to anyone who would dare question these activities or monitor elections. Deceptive practices used to control election results were disturbingly brazen in the gubernatorial elections in the 1960s and were especially egregious in Conway and Searcy Counties in the 1970s and in special elections for the state senate in Faulkner, Conway, and Van Buren Counties. A clean-election movement began in the early 1970s, led not by party or political leaders but by individual citizens. These vigilant and courageous Arkansans undertook to do what their public institutions persistently failed to: insure that elections for public office were honest and that the will of the people was scrupulously obliged. Prominent and colorful among these groups was a small band of women in Conway County who dubbed themselves the "Snoop Sisters" and took on the long-established corrupt machine of Sheriff Marlin Hawkins. Written with longtime Arkansas political writer Ernie Dumas and illustrated with cartoons from the inimitable George Fisher, Waiting for the Cemetery Vote will be an entertaining and informative read for any Arkansas history and politics buffs.

From Carole Simmons Oles comes a new modern poetry biography, this one based on the life of American sculptor Harriet Hosmer (1830–1908). After an exceptional apprenticeship in Rome, Hosmer opened a studio there where she was associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and the Brownings. Though some of her work survives today, much of it has disappeared. Oles rediscovers Hosmer’s life in Waking Stone. This is a dialogue, an exploration of what Oles calls their “parallel universes.” In beautiful and affecting lyric and narrative poems, some in Hosmer’s voice, some in her own, Oles bends time and circumstances to reveal the essential kinship between two women artists. Oles keeps readers moving through Hosmer’s story, with its flashes of delight, anger, mischief, and triumph, as well as through Oles’s life and time, speaking imaginatively to young women about cutting themselves with razor blades, and to older women about suffering disfiguring treatments for breast cancer.

Attachment to the familiar and the challenge of leaving it for new horizons link the poems in this collection by Margaret Holley. The poems are full of feeling and wisdom in equal parts, and are enriched and informed by the poet’s landscape, whether it is Switzerland or Arizona. The landscape, in fact, becomes a kind of mirror we gaze into to see the future that at every turn is approaching and moving through us to illuminate the past. The journey of this book shows how the conditions of our lives are illumined by our cultural forbears—Goethe, Chopin, Nietzsche, Bonnard, Klee—by the heritage of personal memory, and by the ever amazing “book of nature.” A book remarkable for the complete authenticity of its feeling and candor, Walking Through the Horizon shows us the simultaneity of the past and the future and is grounds for hopefulness and joy: “These are gifts worth passing on: / the beckoning vista, the sudden frontier, / the rivers of days and years to come.”

Finalist, 2018 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

Walking with Eve in the Loved City is an ambitious collection. Using a variety of male figures—Jeff Goldblum, Ringo Starr, the poet’s uncle Billy, to name a few—these poems skillfully interrogate masculinity and its cultural artifacts, searching for a way to reconcile reverence for the father figure with a crisis of faith about the world as run by men. And yet, despite the gravity of the subjects these poems engage, this is a hopeful, frequently funny book that encourages the reader to look deeply at the world, and then to laugh if she can.

Roy Bentley often accomplishes this work through a careful balancing of honesty and misdirection, as when in the poem “Can’t Help Falling in Love” the real drama of the narrative—the appearance of an affair between the speaker’s father and a drive-in restaurant carhop—operates as a backdrop for the eight-year-old speaker’s puerile attraction to the woman; or when the vampire Nosferatu (a frequent figure in the poems) materializes in a trailer park, his immortality becoming a lens through which to process the speaker’s righteous anger about wealth and poverty.

God too features prominently—as does doubt. Drawing from the vernacular of his childhood, Bentley accesses the simultaneous austerity and lyrical opulence of the King James Bible to invent stories in which the last note struck is often a call to pay kinder attention. More than anything, these poems serve as humanistic advocates, using the power of narrative—film, interview, imagination, memoir—to highlight how people matter.

Walking with Eve in the Loved City invites the reader to join in this watching and witnessing, to take part in renewing how we see.

This is a lively history of specific social, political, ad economic changes that all-out war brought to the home front in mid-America. Drawing from letters to the editor in local and state papers, from editorials, from personal interviews, and from the manuscript collections left by state political leaders, Calvin Smith brings into focus the impact of wartime not only upon agricultural and business economics but also upon particular social groups and the lives of individuals.

The war generated the beginnings of a rights revolution in black communities throughout the nation. The author takes a careful look at the resulting strain on relations between the state’s black and white citizens. No less important is the consideration of Japanese Americans from the West Coast who were relocated to camps in Arkansas, and of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who would not take part in the war effort either on the battlefield or at home.

War and Wartime Changes illuminates a fascinating and sometimes embarrassing segment of history which until now has not been presented in a single, cohesive work. The author details the unique experiences Arkansas had at this time as well as the patriotism its citizens felt for their country.

Here is the story for the historian, for every student of society and its ways, and for anyone who wants to understand or remember the patriotic fervor of Americans during World War II. Calvin Smith has created, with persistent and imaginative research, a rare admixture of nostalgia and solid scholarship.

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.

In this compelling book, the author alternately recounts the events and details of the 1890 massacre of the Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee and his participation, one hundred years later, in the commemorative Big Foot Memorial Ride. The counterpoint and contrast between the two events produces a powerful effect; the oral accounts of the survivors of the slaughter are sometimes so brutal that the reader needs to be taken away, if only into the cold and wind of a century later.

In her poetry Terese Svoboda walks out to the edge where language is made and destroyed. Her subject is human suffering. Called “disturbing, edgy and provocative” by Book Magazine, her work is often the surreal poetry of a nightmare yet is written with such wit, verve, and passion that she can address the direst subjects. Weapons Grade is a collection of poems about the power of occupation—political and personal. They often play with sestina, sonnet, and couplets, as if only form can contain the fury of between the occupier and the occupied. There's a pervading sense of dread, of expiation, of portents—even in potato salad. There's also elegy and lullaby and seduction but, in the words of the sixties tune "Wooly Bully," the reader must "Watch it now, watch it." Highly poised, grand and intensely lyrical, the poems veer from the political to the personal, then finish on the elegiac, releasing complex and unexpected meaning with emotional precision. Looking directly into the contemporary apocalyptic, Weapons Grade, Svoboda’s fifth collection of poetry, draws readers back to the radiant present.

In this lucid and balanced treatise Alan Jacobs reveals the true parameters of Auden's change after the poet's move to America in 1939. By carefully examining poems that represent transitional moments in Auden's thinking, Jacobs identifies the points at which the tectonic plates of the poet's intellect clashed and the buckles and rifts these pressures caused in Auden's body of work.

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

In When We Were Birds, Joe Wilkins wrests his attention away from the griefs, deprivations, and high prairies of his Montana childhood and turns toward “the bean-rusted fields & gutted factories of the Midwest,” toward ordinary injustice and everyday sadness, toward the imminent birth of his son and his own confusions in taking up the mantle of fatherhood, toward faith and grace, legacy and luck.

A panoply of voices are at play—the escaped convict, the late-night convenience store clerk, and the drowned child all have their say—and as this motley chorus rises and crests, we begin to understand something of what binds us and makes us human: while the world invariably breaks all our hearts, Wilkins insists that is the very “place / hope lives, in the breaking.”

Within a notable range of form, concern, and voice, the poems here never fail to sing. Whether praiseful or interrogating, When We Were Birds is a book of flight, light, and song. “When we were birds,” Wilkins begins, “we veered & wheeled, we flapped & looped— / it’s true, we flew.”

Winner, 2017 Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry, Oregon Book Awards

White Man's Heaven is the first book to investigate the lynching and expulsion of African Americans in the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kimberly Harper shows how an established tradition of extralegal violence and the rapid political, economic, and social change of the New South era combined to create an environment that resulted in interracial violence. Even though some whites tried to stop the violence and bring the lynchers to justice, many African Americans fled the Ozarks, leaving only a resilient few behind and forever changing the racial composition of the region.

This highly readable folklore collection highlights the most representative and evocative tales in the twenty-five hundred pages of backwoods stories collected by Silas Tunbo toward the end of the last century. Turnbo and his informants, antebellum Ozarks natives, believed that the legends of the hunt were, as William Faulkner would write, “the best of all breathing and forever the best of all listening.”

With no apology, the first settlers on the southern frontiers became predators in their own environment. They embraced blood sport and sought its rewards at every turn. The chase promised them a sureness of profit more predictable than land speculation, timbering, or commercial agriculture.

These early opportunists believed that the greatest natural resource along the lush White River drainages in Missouri and Arkansas was large game. Although surrounded by  living waters, climax forests, and luxuriant grasses, the tellers of Turnbo’s stories only incidentally made mention of flora. Silas Turnbo and his  informants were fascinated by animals and the settlers’ ongoing relationship with them—a relationship often defined by contents for supremacy.

Significantly, Tunbo’s education included only a few years in subscription schools of the 1850s. His writing is direct and in the idiom of hte Ozarks, including spellings that are occasionally whimsical, perfectly befitting these “fireside stories” of the great outdoor drama of the southern frontiers.

Examining the ways the publishing experiences of Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence affected their fiction, Wexler draws on diverse sources of evidence to challenge some of the myths of modernism.

Bringing together the work of prominent scholars and rising stars in southern, western, and Indian history, A Whole Country in Commotion explores lesser-known aspects of one of the better-known episodes in U.S. history. While the purchase has been seen as a great boon for the United States, doubling the size of the new nation and securing American navigation on the Mississippi River, it also brought turmoil to many. Looking past the triumphal aspects of the purchase, this book examines the “negotiations among peoples, nations and empires that preceded and followed the actual transfer of territory.” Its nine essays highlight the “commotion” the purchase stirred up—among nations, among Louisiana residents and newcomers, even among those who remained east of the Mississippi. Many of these essays look at the portion of the Louisiana territory that would become Arkansas to illustrate the profound impact of the purchase on the diverse populations of the American Southwest. Others explore the woeful commotion brought to many thousands of lives as Jefferson’s “noble bargain” set the stage for the forced migration of native and African Americans from the east to the west of the Mississippi.

This collection of letters written between Theophilus and Harriet Perry during the Civil War provides an intimate, firsthand account of the effect of the war on one young couple. Perry was an officer with the 28th Texas Cavalry, a unit that campaigned in Arkansas and Louisiana as part of the division known as “Walker’s Greyhounds.” His letters describe his service in a highly literate style that is unusual for Confederate accounts. He documents a number of important events, including his experiences as a detached officer in Arkansas in the winter of 1862–63, the attempt to relieve the siege of Vicksburg, mutiny in his regiment, and the Red River campaign, just before he was killed in the battle of Pleasant Hill. Harriet’s writings allow the reader to witness the everyday life of an upper-class woman enduring home front deprivations, facing the hardships and fears of childbearing and childrearing alone, and coping with other challenges resulting from her husband’s absence.

One of the most important volumes of short fiction published before the Civil War. The Wigwam and the Cabin represents William Gilmore Simms at his very best. It is the work that led Poe to say of Simms, ". . . in invention, in vigor, in movement, in the power of exciting interest, and in the artistical management of his themes, he has surpassed, we think, any of his countrymen." Praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic, The Wigwam and the Cabin focuses n the Southern frontier that Simms knew so well, a frontier whose vernacular, courage, humor, folklore, violence, injustice, and beauty are vividly brought to life through the strokes of his pen. "I have seen the life," Simms wrote, "—have lived it—and much of my material . . . is the planter, the squatter, the Indian, the negro—the bold and hardy pioneer, the vigorous yeomen—these are the subjects." Simms's portrayal of frontier life is the most realistic and graphic in all nineteenth-century American literature; and the Arkansas edition of The Wigwam and the Cabin, with Dr. Guilds's fine editing and informative introductin, brings back into print an invaluable contribution to the development of the short story in America.

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.

When the 206th Coast Artillery Regiment of the Arkansas National Guard was called into federal service in January of 1941, few of the soldiers saw this action as anything more than a temporary detour in their lives. The war, after all, was in Europe and Asia and did not seem to involve them; many of the men thought they would serve their one-year enlistment and go home. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed all that.

The Williwaw War highlights the event sthat shaped the service of Arkansas’s 206th in the Aleutian Islands, including the Japanese strikes on Dutch Harbor on the third and fourth of June 1942, as well as the naval battle of the Komandorski Islands and the recapture of Attu and Kiska.

Written by the noted co-authors of the best-welling books on World War II, The Williwaw War chronicles the efforts of the men of the 206th as they battled terrible weather, overwhelming boredome and deprivation, and the Japanese, who were succesfully attempting to distract the Americans from the main Japanese assault on Midway Island.

Thomas Hauser's annual collections have been avidly anticipated from the time A Beautiful Sickness was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2001 until his most recent collection, Boxing Is . . . , was named a 2010 Best Sports Book of the Year by Booklist, which has called Hauser "the current champ in boxing literature." Sportswriter Donald McRae recently wrote, "Thomas Hauser has become boxing's indispensable writer with a stream of books and internet columns that strip away the layers of intrigue to reveal a seamy but addictive world. Whether writing Muhammad Ali's biography, or shredding boxing's power brokers, Hauser instills passion and gravitas into his work." Winks and Daggers continues that tradition with Hauser's writing from 2010. Hauser brings readers into Manny Pacquiao's intimate circle in the moments before last year's two biggest fights. His award-winning investigative journalism exposes the inner workings of HBO Sports and examines the use of performance-enhancing drugs in boxing. There's a look back in time at Rocky Marciano and Sugar Ray Leonard. And there's much more in this latest collection in the series that has become, according to reviewer Bart Barry, "an essential part of boxing's official record and the chronicles of this era most likely to endure."

As grandson of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller Sr. and son of philanthropist John D. Jr., Winthrop Rockefeller was born into one of the most affluent and influential families in the world. But he was a nonconformist and often felt isolated from the rest of his family. Still, he amazed many when he left the New York elite for a farm in rural Arkansas, where he would ultimately serve two terms as governor and create a philanthropic legacy all his own. In Winthrop Rockefeller, Philanthropist, John L. Ward draws from his years as Rockefeller’s speech writer and campaign advisor to create a remarkably readable and comprehensive narrative. Ward provides valuable insights into Rockefeller’s complicated relationships with his father and brothers and convincingly argues that Rockefeller’s extraordinarily innovative approach to philanthropy changed the way Arkansas was viewed by its citizens and by the rest of the world. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in twentieth-century philanthropy.

The 431 examples of picture postcards offer a fascinating glimpse into the lives of Arkansans during the early part of the twentieth century.

When Arkansas seceded from the Union in 1861, it was a thriving state. But the Civil War and Reconstruction left it reeling, impoverished, and so deeply divided that it never regained the level of prosperity it had previously enjoyed. Although most of the major battles of the war occurred elsewhere, Arkansas was critical to the Confederate war effort in the vast Trans-Mississippi region, and Arkansas soldiers served—some for the Union and more for the Confederacy—in every major theater of the war. And the war within the state was devastating. Union troops occupied various areas, citizens suffered greatly from the war’s economic disruption, and guerilla conflict and factional tensions left a bitter legacy. Reconstruction was in many ways a continuation of the war as the prewar elite fought to regain economic and political power.

In this, the fourth volume in the Histories of Arkansas series, Thomas DeBlack not only describes the major players and events in this dramatic and painful story, but also explores the experiences of ordinary people. Although the historical evidence is complex—and much of the secondary literature is extraordinarily partisan—DeBlack offers a balanced, vivid overview of the state’s most tumultuous period.

Women and Slavery offers readers an opportunity to examine the establishment, growth, and evolution of slavery in the United States as it impacted women-enslaved and free, African American and white, wealthy and poor, northern and southern. The primary documents-including newspaper articles, broadsides, cartoons, pamphlets, speeches, photographs, memoirs, and editorials-are organized thematically and represent cultural, political, religious, economic, and social perspectives on this dark and complex period in American history.

A classic that has been in print since its first publication in 1983, Womenfolks is both a personal memoir and a meditation on the often pernicious mythologies of southern cultural history. Shirley Abbott gives us the gritty, independent women of the backwoods, the South’s true heroines, whose hardscrabble world is one of red dirt and hard work—a far cry from the hoopskirts and magnolias of southern lore. As honest, vibrant, and remarkable as the women whose stories illuminate these pages, Womenfolks draws a vivid portrait of a rural culture beset by poverty and sustained by deeply rooted traditions. In her new preface to this edition, Abbott assesses what has changed—and what may never change—about the burdens of southern history and expresses her hope that the better angels of our nature may prevail in our still-new century.

Words Unbound draws on Milton Burke’s thirty years of teaching experience to help educators bring Inferno alive for today’s young reader. In a conversational, “colleague-to-colleague” style, Burke shares the interpretations, questions, and exercises he found effective in his high-school classroom, emphasizing group discussion to help students, no matter their religious or philosophical moorings, engage meaningfully with the notoriously difficult text.

In 1999 Robert Gibb published The Origins of Evening, selected by Eavan Boland for W. W. Norton as that year’s National Poetry Series selection. Nearly five years later he published The Burning World with the University of Arkansas Press, and Stanley Plumley described the “evolving, working lyric narrative [that was] underway.” Indeed, in Gibb’s new collection, World over Water, this evolving, lyric narrative finds its conclusion in the third volume of his Pittsburgh trilogy. The new collection continues to explore the lost industrial world—a world of steel mills, fire-strewn rivers, and working-class lives, in which place and family stand as metaphors for each other. The poems reach back to the late nineteenth century in a mixture of elegy and chronicle, genealogy and history, reclaiming the past and its witnesses. World over Water is not a remembrance of what was but an act of imagination that wills the past alive in all its savage beauty.

In this diverse collection of stories derived from interviews, Arkansans who lived through the greatest global conflict of the century share their memories with unaffected candor. From those who fought in the Battle of the Bulge and the invasion of Tarawa to those who labored on the home front, the larger story of World War II emerges, a story full of heroism and tenacity, horror and triumph. The distinct voice of the person interviewed rises from each story in straightforward language that is frequently modest and humble, at times joyful, and often still dismayed at the scope and fury of the war. Through these voices, one can begin to understand how Americans dealt with the immense changes that occurred as their nation emerged from the Great Depression and joined the other Allied forces to win a war of incomparable scale and consequence.

Worthy of the Cause for Which They Fight chronicles the experiences of a well-educated and articulate Confederate officer from Arkansas who witnessed the full evolution of the Civil War in the Trans-Mississippi Department and western theater. Daniel Harris Reynolds, a community leader with a thriving law practice in Chicot County, entered service in 1861 as a captain in command of Company A of the First Arkansas Mounted Rifles. Reynolds saw action at Wilson's Creek and Pea Ridge before the regiment was dismounted and transferred to the Army of Tennessee, the primary Confederate force in the western theater. As Reynolds fought through the battles of Chickamauga, Atlanta, Nashville, and Bentonville, he consistently kept a diary in which he described the harsh realities of battle, the shifting fortunes of war, and the personal and political conflicts that characterized and sometimes divided the soldiers. The result is a significant testimonial offering valuable insights into the nature of command from the company to brigade levels, expressed by a committed Southerner coming to grips with the realities of defeat and the ultimate demoralization of surrender.

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.