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Cajun Women and Mardi Gras is the first book to explore the importance of women’s contributions to the country Cajun Mardi Gras tradition, or Mardi Gras “run.” Most Mardi Gras runs--masked begging processions through the countryside, led by unmasked capitaines--have customarily excluded women. Male organizers explain that this rule protects not only the tradition’s integrity but also women themselves from the event’s rowdy, often drunken, play. 
Throughout the past twentieth century, and especially in the past fifty years, women in some prairie communities have insisted on taking more active and public roles in the festivities. Carolyn E. Ware traces the history of women’s participation as it has expanded from supportive roles as cooks and costume makers to increasingly public performances as Mardi Gras clowns and (in at least one community) capitaines. Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork interviews and observation in Mardi Gras communities, Ware focuses on the festive actions in Tee Mamou and Basile to reveal how women are reshaping the celebration as creative artists and innovative performers.

“Skinner’s Catullus in Verona . . . gives a dazzling demonstration of how even the seemingly over-familiar can yield fresh insights. Subtly interweaving old biographical platitudes and new literary theory, persona and person, she offers us a Catullus (sorry, construct of Catullus) faced with a public and private crisis of late Republican values—political, social, and literary—that forced him to abandon his neoteric models, to rethink all his relationships; plus a Lesbia, the ‘written woman,’ who here generates more semantic flux than heartbreak. Skinner’s readers, too, will end by rethinking a group of poems they thought they knew. This is no small achievement.” —Peter Green, The Times Literary Supplement

“This book is an important contribution to the study of Catullus, and more broadly to the study of Latin poetry. As an example of erudite scholarship and sensitive, supple criticism, I believe it will be of interest as well to a wider audience, including scholars and students working in other disciplines in the humanities.” —David Wray, assistant professor of classics, University of Chicago

Gaius Valerius Catullus is one of Rome’s greatest surviving poets and also one of the most popular Latin authors. Comprehensive treatments of his work have been hindered, however, by the problems posed by the Catullan collection as it has come down to us. Although many scholars now believe that Catullus did publish his verse in one or more small volumes (libelli), the theory that these books were rearranged after his death means that individual pieces continue to be read and analyzed separately, without reference to their placement within the collection. Skinner challenges this theory of posthumous editorship by offering a unified reading of Catullus’ elegiac poetry (poems 65–116 in our collection) and arguing that it constitutes what was once a separately circulated libellus whose authorial arrangement has been preserved intact. Purportedly issued from the poet’s native city, Verona, to his Roman readership, the volume presents itself as a valedictory.

This reading of the elegiac collection represents a major departure in Catullan studies. The methodological contention that Catullus’ elegiac poems are better approached as a single cohesive poetic statement makes this book a valuable new contribution to Catullan scholarship.

Arguing that composition should renew its interest in reading pedagogy and research, Chasing Literacy offers writing instructors and literacy scholars a framework for understanding and responding to the challenges posed by the proliferation of interactive and multimodal communication technologies in the twenty-first century.

Employing case-study research of student reading practices, Keller explores reading-writing connections in new media contexts. He identifies a culture of acceleration—a gathering of social, educational, economic, and technological forces that reinforce the values of speed, efficiency, and change—and challenges educators to balance new “faster” literacies with traditional “slower” literacies. In addition, Keller details four significant features of contemporary literacy that emerged from his research: accumulation and curricular choices; literacy perceptions; speeds of rhetoric; and speeds of reading.

Chasing Literacy outlines a new reading pedagogy that will help students gain versatile, dexterous approaches to both reading and writing and makes a significant contribution to this emerging area of interest in composition theory and practice.

An excellent introduction to the man and his thoughts on the painstaking craftsmanship involved in the art of writing poetry, Ciardi Himself includes some hard lessons, but in the hands of this master teacher, the going is easy.

Over the years, American colleges and universities have made various efforts to provide prisoners with access to education. However, few of these outreach programs presume that incarcerated men and women can rise to the challenge of a truly rigorous college curriculum. The Bard Prison Initiative is different.

College in Prison chronicles how, since 2001, Bard College has provided hundreds of incarcerated men and women across the country access to a high-quality liberal arts education. Earning degrees in subjects ranging from Mandarin to advanced mathematics, graduates have, upon release, gone on to rewarding careers and elite graduate and professional programs. Yet this is more than just a story of exceptional individuals triumphing against the odds. It is a study in how the liberal arts can alter the landscape of some of our most important public institutions giving people from all walks of life a chance to enrich their minds and expand their opportunities.

Drawing on fifteen years of experience as a director of and teacher within the Bard Prison Initiative, Daniel Karpowitz tells the story of BPI’s development from a small pilot project to a nationwide network. At the same time, he recounts dramatic scenes from in and around college-in-prison classrooms pinpointing the contested meanings that emerge in moments of highly-charged reading, writing, and public speaking. Through examining the transformative encounter between two characteristically American institutions—the undergraduate college and the modern penitentiary—College in Prison makes a powerful case for why liberal arts education is still vital to the future of democracy in the United States.

Academic writing often requires students to incorporate material from outside sources (like statistics, ideas, quotations, paraphrases) into their own written texts-a particular obstacle for students who lack strong reading skills. In Connecting Reading and Writing in SecondLanguage Instruction, Alan Hirvela contends that second language writing students should be considered as readers first and advocates the integration of reading and writing instruction with a survey of theory, research, and pedagogy in the subject area.

Although the integrated reading-writing model has gained popularity in recent years, many teachers have little more than an intuitive sense of the connections between these skills. As part of the popular Michigan Series on Teaching Multilingual Writers, Connecting Reading and Writing in Second Language Instruction will provide invaluable background knowledge on this issue to ESL teachers in training, as well as teachers who are already practicing.

In this substantively revised new edition, Hirvela moves beyond the argument he made in the first edition of the value of connecting reading and writing. This new edition explains various dimensions of those connections and offers a fresh look at how to implement them in L2 writing instruction. It also provides both new and experienced teachers of writing with a solid grounding in the theoretical foundations and pedagogical possibilities associated with reading-writing connections.
 
The new edition features two new chapters. The first is a chapter on assessment because students are now being asked to connect reading and writing in the classroom and on formal assessments like the TOEFL®. The second new chapter is an argument for accounting for transfer elements in the teaching and researching of reading-writing connections.
 
The goals of this revised volume are to provide: resources for those wishing to pursue reading-writing connections, summaries of the beliefs underlying those connections, ideas for teaching the connections in the classroom, and information about the work others have done to develop this domain of L2 writing.