Weatherford Award Winner, Nonfiction

On January 9, 2014, residents across Charleston, West Virginia, awoke to an unusual licorice smell in the air and a similar taste in the public drinking water. That evening residents were informed the tap water in tens of thousands of homes, hundreds of businesses, and dozens of schools and hospitals—the water made available to as many as 300,000 citizens in a nine-county region—had been contaminated with a chemical used for cleaning crushed coal.
 
This book tells a particular set of stories about that chemical spill and its aftermath, an unfolding water crisis that would lead to months, even years, of fear and distrust. It is both oral history and collaborative ethnography, jointly conceptualized, researched, and written by people—more than fifty in all—across various positions in academia and local communities. I’m Afraid of That Water foregrounds the ongoing concerns of West Virginians (and people in comparable situations in places like Flint, Michigan) confronted by the problem of contamination, where thresholds for official safety may be crossed, but a genuine return to normality is elusive.

Wide-ranging and deeply thoughtful, In Time is the culmination of a lifetime of reading and writing by a man whose work has made a substantial contribution to contemporary American poetry.

Indigenous Voices in Digital Spaces applies Indigenous frameworks and epistemologies to online cultural movements through four case studies, including hashtags, memes, cryptocurrency, and digital artistry, and develops decolonizing practices for digital rhetoric, online identity work, and digital literacy practices.
 
Tekobbe’s methods for analyzing and understanding Indigenous knowledges online center Indigenous storytelling and “thick” (broad, deep, and complex) Indigenous meaning-making. Employing this thickness to interpret Indigenous knowledge ways resists the settler-colonial logics that tend to flatten complex Indigenous concepts into one-note representations of racial stereotypes. Native Americans’ use of social media and digital platforms to support social movements uniquely constructs Indigenous identities as living, producing, and culture-making people, which confronts the commonplace, one-dimensional narrative that Indigenous North Americans either live in isolation or are people of history resigned to the long-forgotten past. Tekobbe’s methods are applicable to additional online research to break through Western paradigms of oppositional critique, the colonial power matrix embedded in hierarchical and taxonomical classification systems, and participant objectification.
 
Indigenous Voices in Digital Spaces offers new methodological and epistemological opportunities to explore digital communities and technologies, problematizing conventional Western critique. This book is useful to instructors in Indigenous studies, internet studies, digital literacies, cultural studies, and communications, as well as Indigenous and internet studies researchers.
 
 

By conducting interviews with seven deaf children, ages seven to ten, Martha Sheridan offers a fresh look at their private thoughts and feelings in this watershed book. Each child possesses a unique cultural background, and Sheridan communicated with each in his or her preferred method of communication. Her procedure remained consistent with each: In addition to standard questions, Sheridan asked each child to draw a picture based on his or her life, then tell a story about it. Next, she showed them magazine pictures and asked them to describe what they saw.

The results proved to be as varied as they were engaging. Angie, an adopted deaf girl who communicates in Signed English, expressed a desire to attend a hearing college when she grows up while also stating she hoped her own children will be deaf. Joe, an African-American, hard of hearing boy, drew pictures of deaf people who are teased in a public school, reflecting his own difficult experiences.

Sheridan calls upon her tenure as a social worker as well as her own experience as a deaf child growing up in a hearing family in analyzing her study’s results. She writes, “These children have strengths, they have positive experiences, and they enjoy positive relationships.” Inner Lives of Deaf Children will prove to be an enlightening read for parents and scholars alike.

In this unusual and insightful collection, fourteen full-length literary interviews with innovative female poets of the last forty years, enhanced with a selection of their poems and prefaced by short introductions, present a wide and accessible range of forms, schools, politics, and conversations. By giving us each poet’s own voice in a medium other than poetry, the interviews provide important cultural and historical contexts that help define notions of innovation and contribute to a fuller understanding of these experimental poems.Poets and literary scholars Elisabeth Frost and Cynthia Hogue selected writers with particular attention to diversity in terms of ethnicity, philosophical concerns, and aesthetic movements, including the New York School, the Black Arts Movement, and language writing. By bringing together poets not usually considered in the same critical context, the editors clarify the ways in which these innovative women have affected ideas of poetry and poetic practice.The engaging interviews (whose questions are often as interesting and informed as the responses), introductory texts, and selected poems allow readers to forge productive connections among the most important voices of late twentieth-century American poetry.

In 1972-73, Barney Childs embarked on an ambitious attempt to survey the landscape of new American concert music. He recorded freewheeling conversations with fellow composers, most of them under forty, all of them important but most not yet famous. Though unable to publish the interviews in his lifetime, Childs had gathered invaluable dialogues with the likes of Robert Ashley, Olly Wilson, Harold Budd, Christian Wolff, and others.

Virginia Anderson edits the first published collection of these conversations. She pairs each interview with a contextual essay by a contemporary expert that shows how the composer's discussion with Childs fits into his life and work. Together, the interviewees cover a broad range of ideas and concerns around topics like education, notation, developments in electronic music, changing demands on performers, and tonal music.

Innovative and revealing, Interviews with American Composers is an artistic and historical snapshot of American music at an important crossroads.