Nashville native Drew Bratcher writes musically about memory and memorably about music in uncommonly beautiful essays that announce the arrival of a major new voice. The title essay, a requiem in fragments, tells the story of a grandfather through his ear, comb, hands, El Camino, and clothes. Bratcher delivers a tough and moving tribute to a man who “went on ahead, on up the road, and then the road turned.” Elsewhere, Bratcher directs his attention to Johnny Cash’s looming presence over his childhood, the relative pain of red paper wasp stings, Dolly Parton’s generative homesickness, the humiliations and consolations of becoming a new father, the experience of hearing his name in a Taylor Swift song, and the mystifying hymns treasured by both his great grandmother and D. H. Lawrence.

Seamlessly blending memoir and arts criticism and aiming at both the heart and the head, this is a book about listening closely to stories and songs, about leaving home in order to find home, and about how the melodies and memories absorbed along the way become “a living music that advances and prevails upon us at formative moments, corralling chaos into the simple, liberating stockade of verse, chorus, verse.”
 

2023 John Leo & Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies, Popular and American Culture Association (PACA) / Popular Culture Association (PCA)

2023 Honorable Mention, Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies, Popular and American Culture Association (PACA) / Popular Culture Association (PCA)

2024 MPCA/ACA Best Single Work by One or More Authors, Midwest Popular Culture Association / Midwest American Culture Association (MPCA/ACA)

A celebration of the distinctive and politically defiant art of Black queer, cis-, and transfemmes, from the work of Janelle Monáe and Janet Mock to that of Indya Moore and Kelsey Lu.

The Color Pynk is a passionate exploration of Black femme poetics of survival. Sidelined by liberal feminists and invisible to mainstream civil rights movements, Black femmes spent the Trump years doing what they so often do best: creating politically engaged art, entertainment, and ideas. In the first full-length study of Black queer, cis-, and trans-femininity, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley argues that this creative work offers a distinctive challenge to power structures that limit how we color, gender, and explore freedom.

Tinsley engages 2017–2020 Black femme cultural production that colorfully and provocatively imagines freedom in the stark white face of its impossibility. Looking to the music of Janelle Monáe and Kelsey Lu, Janet Mock’s writing for the television show Pose, the fashion of Indya Moore and (F)empower, and the films of Tourmaline and Juliana Huxtable, as well as poetry and novels, The Color Pynk conceptualizes Black femme as a set of consciously, continually rescripted cultural and aesthetic practices that disrupts conventional meanings of race, gender, and sexuality. There is an exuberant defiance in queer Black femininity, Tinsley finds—so that Black femmes continue to love themselves wildly in a world that resists their joy.

An October 2022 IndieNext pick

”[An] engaging and beautifully narrated quest for personal fulfillment and musical recognition...This is a fast-paced tale in which music and love always take center stage...A truly gifted musician, Price writes about her journey with refreshing candor.”—Kirkus, starred review

”Brutally honest…a vivid and poignant memoir.”—The Guardian

Country music star Margo Price shares the story of her struggle to make it in an industry that preys on its ingenues while trying to move on from devastating personal tragedies.

When Margo Price was nineteen years old, she dropped out of college and moved to Nashville to become a musician. She busked on the street, played open mics, and even threw out her TV so that she would do nothing but write songs. She met Jeremy Ivey, a fellow musician who would become her closest collaborator and her husband. But after working on their craft for more than a decade, Price and Ivey had no label, no band, and plenty of heartache.

Maybe We’ll Make It is a memoir of loss, motherhood, and the search for artistic freedom in the midst of the agony experienced by so many aspiring musicians: bad gigs and long tours, rejection and sexual harassment, too much drinking and barely enough money to live on. Price, though, refused to break, and turned her lowest moments into the classic country songs that eventually comprised the debut album that launched her career. In the authentic voice hailed by Pitchfork for tackling "Steinbeck-sized issues with no-bullshit humility," Price shares the stories that became songs, and the small acts of love and camaraderie it takes to survive in a music industry that is often unkind to women. Now an award-winning artist with a global fanbase, Price tells a love story of music, collaboration, and the struggle to build a career while trying to maintain her singular voice and style.

“We, the Barbarians” embarks on a careful and exhaustive reading of three of the most prominent authors in the latest wave of Mexican fiction: Yuri Herrera, Fernanda Melchor, and Valeria Luiselli. Originally published in Mexico in 2021, this work is divided into three parts, one for each author’s narrative production. The book analyzes all of the literary works published by Herrera, Melchor, and Luiselli from the beginning of their writing careers until 2021, allowing for a diachronic interpretation of their respective narrative projects as well as for comparative approaches to their aesthetic and ideological contours.

Characterized by the fragmentation of civil society and the decomposition of the myths that accompanied the consolidation of the modern nation, Mexican visual and literary arts have explored a myriad of representational avenues to approach the phenomena of violence, institutional decay, and political instability. The critical and theoretical approaches in “We, the Barbarians” explore a variety of alternative symbolic representations of topics such as nationalism, community, and affect in times impacted by systemic violence, precariousness, and radical inequality. Moraña perceives the negotiations between regional/local imaginaries and global scenarios characterized by the devaluation and resignification of life, both at individual and collective levels. Though it uses three authors as its focus, this book seeks to more broadly theorize the question of the relationship between literature and the social in the twenty-first century.