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A nonfiction work examining a confluence of bodily and worldwide transition

Stream is an exploration of the large- and small-scale changes taking place in a single body and on our planet as a whole. Using a stream as a biological, technological, and psychological metaphor, Angus layers lyric essay, journal entries, and the detritus of a life spent writing about the climate within and without to consider how we remain fluid in a time of constant change. Each section of Stream flows into the next, weaving through thaws, floods, cataracts, and eddies while asking how a melting of rigid categories, from seasons to gender, might help us approach a changing world anew. From winery workers dying in the fields to endangered desert tortoises unable to outrun the flames, Stream is an outpouring of climatological grief toward those who perpetuate inaction, an elegy for those we’ve lost to the heat, and a tribute to the tributaries that help us see the world from other perspectives.

A beloved member of the country music community, David “Stringbean” Akeman found nationwide fame as a cast member of Hee Haw. The 1973 murder of Stringbean and his wife forever changed Nashville’s sense of itself. Millions of others mourned not only the slain couple but the passing of the way of life that country music had long represented.

Taylor Hagood merges the story of Stringbean’s life with an account of murder and courtroom drama. Mentored by Uncle Dave Macon and Bill Monroe, Stringbean was a bridge to country’s early days. His instrumental savvy and old-time singing style drew upon a deep love for traditional country music that, along with his humor and humanity, won him the reverence of younger artists and made his violent death all the more shocking. Hagood delves into the unexpected questions and uneasy resolutions raised by the atmosphere of retribution surrounding the murder trial and recounts the redemption story that followed decades later.

With acclaimed films like Sink or Swim and The Odds of Recovery, Su Friedrich’s body of work stands at the forefront of avant-garde and Queer cinema. Barbara Mennel examines the career of an experimental auteur whose merger of technical innovation and political critique connects with both cinephiles and activists. Friedrich’s integration of cinematic experimentation with lesbian advocacy serves as a beginning rather than an end point of analysis. With that in mind, Mennel provides an essential overview of the filmmaker’s oeuvre while highlighting the defining characteristics of her artistic and political signature. She also situates Friedrich within the cultural, political, and historical contexts that both shape the films and are shaped by them. Finally, Mennel expands our notion of auteurism to include directors who engage in collaborative and creative processes rooted in communities.

A memoir of lessons learned from an Ojibwe grandmother during the time of Relocation
 

Why, her mother asked, did Janis keep running away from kindergarten? She wanted to go home. But not to the house they had just moved to in Duluth, with its gravel yard and traffic noise. She was a country girl, and home was the log cabin among the wildflowers on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation in Bena, Minnesota. Knowing they were now going to stay in the city, Janis’s parents offered her a compromise: during the summer, Janis could leave the bustle of Duluth and live with her grandmother on the Fond du Lac Reservation, listening to stories, learning Ojibwe, and finding her place in the world. In Sugar Bush Babies, Janis A. Fairbanks returns to that time of Relocation, dislocation, and discovery, taking us home with her through stories of childhood and lessons learned at her grandmother’s knee, enveloped in love and tradition.

Through the eyes of a child and the teachings of an elder, Fairbanks revisits her life during Indian Relocation from reservations to urban areas, from Ojibwe villages to white communities whose ideas about Indians came from Hollywood Westerns. Recalling her early childhood at Leech Lake, her school days in Duluth, and her summers in Fond du Lac, Janis brings the gifts of living history full circle, continuing the traditions of carrying family lore, women’s wisdom, and Indigenous culture from generation to generation.

There are tales told at nighttime or during thunderstorms; lessons in Native medicine; stories of Grandma’s recollections of boarding school, Daddy’s days as a lumberjack, and Mother’s special powers; memories of wash days and dancing, of powwows and Girl Scout camp, of snaring rabbits, selling lilacs, and attending the circus. A lyrical memoir, Sugar Bush Babies conveys the eloquence of women speaking and sharing through generations and the lasting power of tradition.

Annette White-Parks offers the first full-length biography of the woman now remembered as North America's first published Asian writer. White-Parks reveals an author who defied the in vogue style of "yellow peril" literature to show Chinatowns and their inhabitants as complex, feeling human beings. Her insider's sympathy focused in particular on Chinese American women and children. Confronted with social divisions and discrimination, Sui Sin Far experimented with trickster characters and irony, sharing the coping mechanisms used by other writers who struggled to overcome the marginalization forced on them because of their race, gender, or class.

An associate justice on the renowned Warren Court whose landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education overturned racial segregation in schools and other public facilities, Tom C. Clark was a crusader for justice throughout his long legal career. Among many tributes Clark received, Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger opined that "no man in the past thirty years has contributed more to the improvement of justice than Tom Clark."

Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark is the first biography of this important American jurist. Written by his daughter, Mimi Clark Gronlund, and based on interviews with many of Clark's judicial associates, friends, and family, as well as archival research, it offers a well-rounded portrait of a lawyer and judge who dealt with issues that remain in contention today—civil rights, the rights of the accused, school prayer, and censorship/pornography, among them. Gronlund explores the factors in her father's upbringing and education that helped form his judicial philosophy, then describes how that philosophy shaped his decisions on key issues and cases, including the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the investigation of war fraud, the Truman administration's loyalty program (an anti-communist effort), the Brown decision, Mapp v. Ohio (protections against unreasonable search and seizure), and Abington v. Schempp (which overturned a state law that required reading from the Bible each day in public schools).

A compelling merger of biography and sports history, Surf and Rescue brings to light the forgotten figure whose novel way of seeing the beach sparked the imaginations of people around the world.

On November 8, 1985, 18-year-old Tom Odle brutally murdered his parents and three siblings in the small southern Illinois town of Mount Vernon, sending shockwaves throughout the nation.  The murder of the Odle family remains one of the most horrific family mass murders in U.S. history. Odle was sentenced to death and, after seventeen years on death row, expected a lethal injection to end his life.  However, Illinois governor George Ryan’s moratorium on the death penalty in 2000, and later commutation of all death sentences in 2003, changed Odle’s sentence to natural life.

The commutation of his death sentence was an epiphany for Odle.  Prior to the commutation of his death sentence, Odle lived in denial, repressing any feelings about his family and his horrible crime. Following the commutation and the removal of the weight of eventual execution associated with his death sentence, he was confronted with an unfamiliar reality.  A future.  As a result, he realized that he needed to understand why he murdered his family.  He reached out to Dr. Robert Hanlon, a neuropsychologist who had examined him in the past. Dr. Hanlon engaged Odle in a therapeutic process of introspection and self-reflection, which became the basis of their collaboration on this book.

Hanlon tells a gripping story of Odle’s life as an abused child, the life experiences that formed his personality, and his tragic homicidal escalation to mass murder, seamlessly weaving into the narrative Odle’s unadorned reflections of his childhood, finding a new family on death row, and his belief in the powers of redemption.

As our nation attempts to understand the continual mass murders occurring in the U.S., Survived by One sheds some light on the psychological aspects of why and how such acts of extreme carnage may occur.  However, Survived by One offers a never-been-told perspective from the mass murderer himself, as he searches for the answers concurrently being asked by the nation and the world.

Weaving together a personal narrative and a sociological perspective, Surviving Alex movingly describes how even children from “good families” fall prey to addiction, and recounts the hellish toll it takes on families. Drawing from interviews with Alex’s friends, family members, therapists, teachers, and police officers—as well as files from his stays in hospitals, rehab facilities, and jails—Roos paints a compelling portrait of a young man whose life veered between happiness, anxiety, success, and despair. And as she explores how a punitive system failed her son, she calls for a community of action that would improve care for substance users and reduce addiction, realigning public health policy to address the overdose crisis.

    Betty Berzon, renowned psychotherapist and author of the bestselling book Permanent Partners, tells her own incredible story here. Berzon’s journey from psychiatric patient on suicide watch—her wrists tethered to the bed rails in a locked hospital ward—to her present role as a groundbreaking therapist and gay pioneer makes for purely compelling reading.
    Berzon is recognized today as a trailblazing co-founder of a number of important lesbian and gay organizations and one of the first therapists to focus on means of developing healthy gay relationships and overcoming homophobia. Her sometimes bumpy road to success never fails to fascinate. Along the way she encounters such luminaries as Anaïs Nin, Eleanor Roosevelt, the Sitwells, Evelyn Hooker, and Paul Monette. Her recollections here provide a collective portrait of her fellow pioneers and a stirring lesson in twentieth-century history.
    It is, however, the intimate story of Berzon’s own private passage toward self-discovery—from mental breakdown and suicide attempts, through hospitalization, eventual triumphant recovery, and her own coming out as an open lesbian at the age of forty—that makes this memoir an urgent, insightful, and deeply emotional testament to human survival.

The biography of a poet seminal to postwar American poetry

The poet Larry Eigner (1927–1996) was a key figure in New American poetry, which grew out of the Black Mountain School and San Francisco Renaissance, and a major influence on the Language poets. Eigner also had cerebral palsy as the result of an accident at birth. It is fortuitous that the poet lived his life in two locations vibrant in both poetics and disability activism. Except for brief periods attending camp and school, he lived with his parents in Swampscott, Massachusetts, until the age of 51. Later, he moved to Berkeley, California, at the height of the disability rights movement. In the 1950s, Eigner attended Camp Jened, which later became famous in the film Crip Camp.

Bartlett’s biography covers every significant phase of Eigner’s life: his childhood and young adulthood when he began typing poems with one finger on the manual typewriter that was a bar mitzvah gift; his first publications and the maturation of his poetic interests through correspondence with poets of the era; and after his move to Berkeley, the ever-expanding circle of friends, poets, caretakers, and collaborators he established there. The result is a deeply insightful account of an utterly distinctive voice whose influence widens and deepens with each new generation that encounters him.
 

A memoir of discovery, loss, and wonder that shows us how to slow down 

When psychologist and author Susan Baur first slipped into a Cape Cod pond with a snorkel, she wasn’t looking for transformation, just a swim. But beneath the surface, she discovered something extraordinary: minnows hiding among water lilies; fresh-water jellies like jewels and—most striking of all—painted, musk, and snapping turtles. Whether the turtles were buried in mud, teetering on a submerged branch, or drifting like ancient astronauts, they pulled her into a mysterious happiness she could not explain. 

Learning to move slowly enough to see them became both her new discipline and her greatest joy. Each dive required patience, curiosity, and humility, and she learned to read the water, follow a subtle shadow, and anticipate the turtles’ rhythms without disturbing their world. As she mastered the art of swimming with turtles, Baur also fell in love with an older man whose companionship deepened her connection to the natural world. When he passed away, grief drove her deeper into the water. There, among the turtles, she found solace and purpose: a reason to keep diving, looking, and learning. 

Over nearly two decades, Baur became a self-taught naturalist, children’s author (of The Turtle Sisters series), and unlikely environmental advocate, founding Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage to protect the ponds she had grown to love. With humor, heart, and vivid observation, Baur shows that wonder isn’t reserved for the young or the lucky—it waits beneath the surface for anyone willing to slow down, look closely, and stay a while.

A memoir of discovery, loss, and wonder that shows us how to slow down 

When psychologist and author Susan Baur first slipped into a Cape Cod pond with a snorkel, she wasn’t looking for transformation, just a swim. But beneath the surface, she discovered something extraordinary: minnows hiding among water lilies; fresh-water jellies like jewels and—most striking of all—painted, musk, and snapping turtles. Whether the turtles were buried in mud, teetering on a submerged branch, or drifting like ancient astronauts, they pulled her into a mysterious happiness she could not explain. 

Learning to move slowly enough to see them became both her new discipline and her greatest joy. Each dive required patience, curiosity, and humility, and she learned to read the water, follow a subtle shadow, and anticipate the turtles’ rhythms without disturbing their world. As she mastered the art of swimming with turtles, Baur also fell in love with an older man whose companionship deepened her connection to the natural world. When he passed away, grief drove her deeper into the water. There, among the turtles, she found solace and purpose: a reason to keep diving, looking, and learning. 

Over nearly two decades, Baur became a self-taught naturalist, children’s author (of The Turtle Sisters series), and unlikely environmental advocate, founding Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage to protect the ponds she had grown to love. With humor, heart, and vivid observation, Baur shows that wonder isn’t reserved for the young or the lucky—it waits beneath the surface for anyone willing to slow down, look closely, and stay a while.

From militant suffragette at the beginning of the twentieth century to campaigner against colonialism in Africa after the Second World War, Sylvia Pankhurst dedicated her life to fighting oppression and injustice.

In this vivid biography Katherine Connelly examines Pankhurst’s role at the forefront of significant developments in the history of radical politics. She guides us through Pankhurst's construction of a suffragette militancy which put working-class women at the heart of the struggle, her championing of the Bolshevik Revolution and her clandestine attempts to sabotage the actions of the British state, as well as her early identification of the dangers of Fascism.

The book explores the dilemmas, debates and often painful personal consequences faced by Pankhurst which were played out in her art, writings and activism. It argues that far from being an advocate of disparate causes, Pankhurst’s campaigns were united by an essential continuity which hold vital lessons for achieving social change. This lively and accessible biography presents Pankhurst as a courageous and inspiring campaigner, of huge relevance to those engaged in social movements today.