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A father’s memoir of preparing a dual-language household for a stint living abroad—and all of the ensuing challenges and rewards

After living in Modena, Italy, for three years, Eric Dregni and his wife, Katy, dreamed of returning one day—future children in tow—to give their kids the experience of living abroad. When they become parents, they decide to raise their children with a global perspective in a bilingual household: Katy speaking only English to them and Eric speaking only Italian.

Despite their extended family’s confusion about this experiment, they persist through their three kids’ childhoods, sending them to an immersion language camp and preparing them for life abroad. Eventually, the family packs up and moves to Florence, where the bambini can stop to see Michelangelo’s David on the way home from school, indulge in fresh pasta and gelato, and learn how to argue like real Italians. Sooner than anyone would like, three months of la dolce vita comes to an end, and they head back to Minnesota, trying to bring a taste of Italian culture home with them.

A fast-paced memoir/travelogue, Raising Bilingual Bambini is Dregni’s passionate testament to the value of an international perspective, his loving tribute to the family’s time together in Italy, and a bittersweet reflection on what it meant to return to Minnesota (until their trip to Sicily several years later). Writing with his signature humor and sincerity, Eric Dregni offers a heartfelt story about family and finding a home together in a new place.

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The account of one radically new school year for a Teacher of the Year and for his nonbinary, art-obsessed, brilliant child 

Seven-year-old Ollie was researching local advanced school programs—because every second grader does that, right? Ollie, who used to hate weekends because they meant no school, was crying on the way to school almost every day. Sure, there were the slings and arrows of bullies and bad teachers, but, maybe worse, Ollie, a funny, anxious, smart kid with a thing for choir and an eye for graphic art, was gravely underchallenged and also struggling with identity and how to live totally as themselves. Ollie begged to switch to a new school with “kids like me,” where they wouldn’t feel so alone, or so bored, and so they made the change. 

Raising Ollie is dad Tom Rademacher’s story (really, many stories) of that eventful and sometimes painful school year, parenting Ollie and relearning every day what it means to be a father and teacher. As Ollie—who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, and prefers art to athletics, vegetables to cake, and animals to most humans—flourishes in their new school, Rademacher is making an eye-opening adjustment to a new school of his own, one that’s whiter and more suburban than anywhere he has previously taught, with a history of racial tension that he tries to address and navigate. 

While Ollie is learning to code, 3D model, animate, speak Japanese, and finally feel comfortable at school, Rademacher increasingly sees how his own educational struggles, anxieties, and childhood upbringing are reflected in his teaching, writing, and parenting, as well as in Ollie’s experience. And with this story of one anything-but-academic year of inquiry and wonder, doubt and revelation, he shows us how raising a kid changes everything—and how much raising a kid like Ollie can teach us about who we are and what we’re doing in the world.

Regally bearing its Latin title, Rara Avis captures in sparse, moving verse both the splendor and the loneliness of what it means to be exceptional — a rarified specimen, a strange bird. A son, a husband, and now a father, seasoned poet Blas Falconer explores the relationships among men — between peers, lovers, parents and children — to consider and question existing models of authority and power. Falconer’s lucid but feeling gaze reveals social complexities with searing and graceful imagery, asking what it means to live outside the heteronormative experience while existing as a man, simultaneously a casualty and a participant in the project of masculinity. 

These poems carefully delineate the casual cruelties of queer youth and the beautiful and bitter revelations of adulthood. The wisdom propelling Rara Avis is the knowledge that we are each of us that rare bird; we share our singularity. Everyone has a pancreas, but only one organ matters when Falconer learns his father is afflicted. Alchemized by love, one thing, unlike any other, becomes all things. “All day, everything, / no matter how / small, makes me // think of it” … The bee / crawling in / blossoms // scattered on / the glass/tabletop. The sound of // a pitcher fill- / ing slowly / with water.” 

2018 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

When DJ Lee’s dear friend vanishes in the vast Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness of Idaho and Montana, she travels there to seek answers. The journey unexpectedly brings to an end her fifteen-year quest to uncover the buried history of her family in this remote place. Although Lee doesn’t find all the answers, she comes away with a penetrating memoir that weaves her present-day story with past excursions into the region, wilderness history, and family secrets.

As she grapples with wild animal stand-offs, bush plane flights in dense fog, raging forest fires, and strange characters who have come to the wilderness to seek or hide, Lee learns how she can survive emotionally and how the wilderness survives as an ecosystem. Her growing knowledge of the life cycles of salmon and wolverine, the regenerative role of fire, and Nimíipuu land practices helps her find intimacy in this remote landscape.

Skillfully intertwining history, outdoor adventure, and mystery, Lee’s memoir is an engaging contribution to the growing body of literature on women and wilderness and a lyrical tribute to the spiritual connection between people and the natural world.

A poetic reckoning with personal, political, and historical wounds

The titular “repair attempts” describes the words and actions people use to heal broken connections and de-escalate conflict. In his debut collection, Cameron Quan transforms this concept into a powerful lens for examining moral responsibility in contemporary America. Quan’s Repair Attempts navigates Asian American identity, American exceptionalism, patriarchal violence, grief, and the nature of apologies. The speakers grapple with transgression and healing from unexpected angles, asking what kind of repair is possible in a world marred by atrocities. These poems dance across landscapes—from an imagined American holiday of atonement to the pope’s apology to Indigenous peoples, from a mother preparing to flee domestic violence to an unsettling childhood game boys play with butterflies. A chorus of repair attempts that toggle between the personal and political, this collection invites us into difficult territory where failure, wrongdoing, and shame require a collective reckoning and a collective effort to be better.

Stand-up comedy, a celebrity non-apology, observations of racism, and the slipperiness of nostalgia underpin Replica. In poignant, witty poems, Lisa Low navigates the tensions of solidarity and hostility in white spaces as she sets out to write differently about race.

“The problem of being with a white man is also a problem of writing,” Low says in a prose poem that turns writing about identity on its head. She peers in from outside the poem, as if through an open ceiling. The poem itself becomes a site of investigation—a counterpoint to constricting narratives about Asian American identity—reimagined as a dollhouse, a stage with props, an image the speaker wears like a bodysuit. Replica asks what it means to represent yourself and your experiences in a world where you are indistinguishable from others.

The inspiring life story of Minnesota’s first woman lieutenant governor: breaking political ground, navigating patriarchal tradition, and persevering through great personal loss

Marking a milestone for women in state government, Marlene M. Johnson became Minnesota’s first woman lieutenant governor under Rudy Perpich’s gubernatorial administration in January 1983. That same year, she met her husband, Peter, and their deeply loving relationship profoundly sustained her for twenty-seven years. Rise to the Challenge weaves these personal and professional stories together in a courageous portrait of dedication and leadership.

Growing up in rural Minnesota, Johnson began organizing and advocating for change early, beginning with a campaign to introduce foreign languages into her high school curriculum. Pursuing a deeply felt commitment to improving the lives of others, she continued to sharpen her leadership skills throughout her life, participating in activist work in college, cofounding organizations to support women entrepreneurs and politicians, and eventually running an international education nonprofit.

A stalwart supporter, her husband gave Marlene strength and encouragement to face the challenges of the political landscape and its gender biases. Then, in 2010, he suffered a traumatic brain injury that would change both of their lives. Learning how to be a medical advocate and, eventually, facing the sorrow of Peter’s death, Marlene relied on the hard-fought resilience and belief in herself that Peter had helped her to develop.

A story of learning and leadership in politics, business, and public service, Rise to the Challenge is a moving portrayal of spirit, perseverance, and grace in the face of daunting personal challenges, supported by unwavering faith in the public good.

    Trick-or-treating. Flower girls. Bedtime stories. Bar and bat mitvah. In a nation of increasing ethnic, familial, and technological complexity, the patterns of children's lives both persist and evolve. This book considers how such events shape identity and transmit cultural norms, asking such questions as:
 
    * How do immigrant families negotiate between old traditions and new?
    * What does it mean when children engage in ritual insults and sick jokes?  
    * How does playing with dolls reflect and construct feelings of racial identity?  
    * Whatever happened to the practice of going to the Saturday matinee to see a Western?
    * What does it mean for a child to be (in the words of one bride) "flower-girl material"?  How does that role
        cement a girl's bond to her family and initiate her into society?  
    * What is the function of masks and costumes, and why do children yearn for these accoutrements of disguise?

    Rituals and Patterns in Children's Lives suggests the manifold ways in which America's children come to know their society and themselves.

A poet’s candid and probing exploration of faith, Blackness, and masculinity

With poems that closely examine familial bonds and heritage, biblical teachings, a shifting understanding of home, and the violence of toxic masculinity, Justin Danzy’s Run in Such a Way sits at the crossroads of religion, race, gender, and more. A collection about pursuit, tracking the narrative of its speaker’s journey toward a deeper understanding of himself and of his community as he moves from child to man, the book wrestles with the way an identity is constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed again throughout one’s life. Playful and sincere in equal measure, Danzy’s command of the line carries us through as we travel with the speaker to the precipice of belief. Danzy’s lyrical voice and fealty to his people pays homage to the world that made him, and considers all that the speaker of this tremendous debut has—both wisely and foolishly—run toward and away from in the search for truth.

Tina Ontiveros was born into timber on both sides of the family. Her mother spent summers driving logging trucks for her family’s operation, and her father was the son of an itinerant logger, raised in a variety of lumber towns, as Tina herself would be.

A story of growing up in turmoil, rough house recounts a childhood divided between a charming, mercurial, abusive father in the forests of the Pacific Northwest and a mother struggling with small-town poverty. It is also a story of generational trauma, especially for the women—a story of violent men and societal restrictions, of children not always chosen and frequently raised alone.

Ontiveros’s father, Loyd, looms large. Reflecting on his death and long absence from her life, she writes, “I had this ridiculous hope that I would get to enjoy a functional relationship with my father, on my own terms, now that I was an adult.” In searingly honest, straightforward prose, rough house is her attempt to carve out this relationship, to understand her father and her family from an adult perspective.

While some elements of Ontiveros’s story are universal, others are indelibly grounded in the logging camps of the Pacific Northwest at the end of the twentieth century, as the lumber industry shifted and contracted. Tracing her childhood through the working-class towns and forests of Washington and Oregon, Ontiveros explores themes of love and loss, parents and children, and her own journey to a different kind of adulthood.