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One winter morning, poet Dawn Potter sat down at her desk in Harmony, Maine, and began copying out the opening lines of John Milton's Paradise Lost. Her intent was to spend half an hour with a poem she had never liked, her goal to transcribe a page or two. Maybe she would begin to appreciate the poet's art, though she had no real expectations that the exercise would change her mind about the poem. Yet what began as a whim turned rapidly into an obsession, and soon Potter was immersed in a strange and unexpected project: she found herself copying out every single word of Milton's immense, convoluted epic.

Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton is her memoir of that long task. Over the course of twelve chapters, Potter explores her very personal response to Milton and Paradise Lost, tracing the surprising intersections between a seventeenth-century biblical epic and the routine joys and tragedies of domestic life in contemporary rural Maine. Curious, opinionated, and eager, she engages with the canon on mutable, individual terms. Though she writes perceptively about the details and techniques of Milton's art, always her reactions are linked to her present-tense experiences as a poet, small-time farmer, family member, and citizen of a poor and beleaguered north-country town.

A skilled and entertaining writer, Potter is also a wide-ranging and sophisticated reader. Yet her memoir is not a scholarly treatise: her enthusiasms and misgivings about both Milton and Paradise Lost ebb and flow with the days. Tracing Paradise reminds us that close engagement with another artist's task may itself be a form of creation. Above all, Potter's memoir celebrates one reader's difficult yet transformative love affair with Milton's glorious, irritating, inscrutable masterpiece.

Tracy Y. Cannon guided the musical voice of Mormonism from its provincial roots at the turn of the twentieth century into a state of maturity by the end of his career in 1960. Cannon served as Salt Lake Tabernacle organist from 1905 until 1930, accompanying some of the first radio broadcasts of Music and the Spoken Word. Under his leadership, the McCune School of Music and Art became a cultural hub, offering accredited music degrees as well as community enrichment activities, influencing Utah’s next generation of music educators, composers, leaders, and policymakers. But perhaps his most lasting legacy was his work with the General Music Committee of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, through which he oversaw the creation of two hymnals, many anthem books, organ anthologies, method books, and an expansive organist and chorister education program.

Cannon’s musical tastes—dignified, refined, reverent, and heavily influenced by Northern European tradition—became the norm for Latter-day Saint congregations for generations. Through his multifaceted career, this brief biography explores the evolution of Latter-day Saint hymnody, “art music,” cultural taste, and music education during the first half of the twentieth century.

Journalist, editor, critic, translator, and women’s rights advocate, Margaret Fuller was America’s first major female intellectual. Throughout much of the late-19th and 20th centuries, however, critics and scholars largely saw her as a minor figure in the transcendentalist movement with which she is associated, and her work was considered secondary to that of male figures like Emerson and Hawthorne. While her biography—including her marriage to an Italian noble and her dramatic death in a shipwreck—was often the focus, her skill as a writer was generally overlooked, and her intellectual development largely ignored. 

In the early 1980s, David M. Robinson was one of the first scholars to publish an article that focused on Fuller’s mind and art. Now Transcendent Woman completes and extends this early work. Outlining the development of her philosophy, which Robinson defines as a “purpose-oriented form of thinking, tailored to the commitment and assets of each individual,” he traces Fuller’s intellectual journey, first in relation to her family and the people around her in New England and later in her travels in the midwestern United States and, more importantly, through Europe and her residency in Italy. He focuses first and foremost on what Fuller was reading (Goethe was key), what she was thinking as revealed in her letters and journals, and what she was writing, including seminal works such as Summer on the Lakes and Woman in the Nineteenth Century as well as lesser-known essays, translations, and short stories. Drawing extensively on primary sources, Robinson charts Fuller’s development and achievement as an original thinker and fearless advocate of democracy. 

Elizabeth Lowe charts her journey to becoming a translator through a series of vignettes relating her life as a “third-culture kid” and living and working abroad in a kaleidoscope of cultures and languages. She lived in Germany as a young child immediately after the Second World War while her father worked in the Nuremberg trials and as a newly married military spouse during the Vietnam War; she lived in Haiti just prior to Papa Doc's consolidation of power, in Brazil when the military dictatorship seized the country in its two-decade vise, at the University of Coimbra, Portugal during Salazar, and Colombia at the height of the guerrilla conflicts, and in Miami during the heyday of the cartels. The book is a reflection on translation as an art, on five decades teaching languages, literatures, and translation, and on her close relationship with writers from the Lusophone world. It explores theoretical aspects of translation as well as practical challenges faced by translators, especially those working in Portuguese literature. Lowe offers intimate insights into the creative process of the writers she translates and her own philosophy of literary translation. 
 

Beyond an adrenaline ride or a chronicle of bravura heroics, this unflinching view of a Minneapolis firefighter reveals the significant toll of emergency response

In this remarkable memoir, Jeremy Norton marshals twenty-two years of professional experience to offer, with compassion and critique, an extraordinary portrayal of emergency responders. Trauma Sponges captures in arresting detail the personal and social toll the job exacts, as well as the unique perspective afforded by sustained direct encounters with the sick, the dying, and the dead.

From his first days as a rookie firefighter and emergency medical technician to his command of a company as a twenty-year veteran, Norton documents the life of an emergency responder in Minneapolis: the harrowing, heartbreaking calls, from helping the sick and hurt, to reassuring the scared and nervous, to attempting desperate measures and providing final words. In the midst of the uncertainty, fear, and loss caused by the Covid pandemic, Norton and his crew responded to the scene of George Floyd’s murder. The social unrest and racial injustice Norton had observed for years exploded on the streets of Minneapolis, and he and his fellow firefighters faced the fires, the injured, and the anguish in the days and months that followed.

Norton brings brutally honest insight and grave social conscience to his account, presenting a rare insider’s perspective on the insidious role of sexism and machismo in his profession, as well as an intimate observer’s view of individuals trapped in dire circumstances and a society ill equipped to confront trauma and death. His thought-provoking, behind-the-scenes depiction of the work of first response and last resort starkly reveals the realities of humanity at its finest and its worst.

A poet’s debut essay collection exploring American faults through the eyes of a Dominican American

In Traveling Freely: Essays, Roberto Carlos Garcia explores intersecting topics such as race, identity, American socioeconomic inequality, police violence, our inability to partake in our culture as innocents, and our complicity as Americans in all that’s wrong with the United States from the author’s specific vantage point as a Black Dominican American man. The voice in these essays is both clear and nuanced, and as readers move through the collection, the various themes cohere into a multilayered investigation of institutional racism and the inherent exploitations of capitalism.

In essays that are uniquely straightforward and accessible, Garcia insists that in order to resist state-sanctioned violence against marginalized bodies and populations, we must understand our shared history of oppression—so that we can rise against it effectively and find new paths forward.

A stunning lyrical commentary on the constructions of race, gender, and class in the fraught nexus of a Black woman’s personal experience and cultural history

The Fair Housing Act passed in 1968, and more than fifty years later, yours seems to be the only Black family on your block in Minneapolis. You and your Black African husband, both college graduates, make less money than some White people with a felony record and no high school diploma. You’re the only Black student in your graduate program. You just aren’t working hard enough. You’re too sensitive. Sandra Bland? George Floyd? Don't take everything so personally. Amid the White smiles of Minnesota Nice and the Minnesota Paradox—the insidious racism of an ostensibly inclusive place to live—what do you do? If you’re Taiyon J. Coleman, you write.

In Traveling without Moving, Coleman shares intimate essays from her life: her childhood in Chicago—growing up in poverty with four siblings and a single mother—and the empowering decision to leave her first marriage. She writes about being the only Black student in a prestigious and predominantly White creative writing program, about institutional racism and implicit bias in writing instruction, about the violent legacies of racism in the U.S. housing market, about the maternal health disparities seen across the country and their implication in her own miscarriage. She explores what it means to write her story and that of her family—an act at once a responsibility and a privilege—bringing forth the inherent contradictions between American ideals and Black reality.

Using a powerful blend of perspectives that move between a first-person lens of lived experience and a wider-ranging critique of U.S. culture, policy, and academia, Coleman’s writing evinces how a Black woman in America is always on the run, always Harriet Tubman, traveling with her babies in tow, seeking safety, desperate to survive, thrive, and finally find freedom.

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An arborist’s lifelong journey reveals the deep connections between people and trees.
Bruce Allison has spent decades listening to trees and making sense of what they tell us. In this intimate and absorbing memoir, he deftly weaves personal stories, botanical insights, and moments of wonder and revelation into a captivating ode to trees.
Trees as a Way of Life follows Allison on his journey from seedling to sapling to maturity, as he explores a eucalyptus grove as a boy in Bonita, California; learns the tree ethic as an apprentice arborist in Baltimore, Maryland; and establishes his own tree care company in Madison, Wisconsin. After more than fifty years as a professional arborist, he tells stories of stewarding the trees at the Wisconsin State Capitol and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, among other sites, and describes formative encounters with notable tree-loving clients, including American Girl creator Pleasant Rowland and Epic Systems founder Judith Faulkner. As he tells his own story, Allison incorporates the voices and stories of renowned naturalists like Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson.
Allison also uses his own tree encounters as jumping-off points for deep dives into individual species, memorable moments in tree history, and tips and tricks for tree care and maintenance. As only an accomplished arborist and educator could, he provides a detailed-yet-accessible tutorial on trees, from the upper canopy of stem and crown, through the veil of bark, to the hidden underground landscape of tree roots and fungi.
In the tradition of the international bestseller The Hidden Life of Trees, this book carries readers root by root and limb by limb to a deeper understanding of the trees that feed us, protect us, shade us, and inspire us. In an engaging narrative style that blends the personal, the scientific, and the poetic, Allison’s story is an intimate love letter to trees, a master class in understanding and appreciating them, and an invitation to readers who also long to make trees a way of life.

A gripping firsthand account of loyalty, resistance, and survival in Confederate Tennessee, this memoir reveals the untold story of Unionist courage behind enemy lines.

Tried Men and True, or Union Life in Dixie is the memoir of a Union supporter in south-central Tennessee. In it, he chronicles in vivid and emotional detail the local tensions between Unionists and Confederates during the Civil War South and offers a rare first-person account of the guerrilla war that devastated Western Tennessee.

Thomas Jefferson Cypert (1827-1918) was a staunch Union man of Wayne County, Tennessee. In 1863, he helped organize the Second Tennessee Mounted Infantry, a regiment of loyalist Southerners enlisted to combat Confederate cavalry in West Tennessee and Northern Alabama. Tried Men and True is Cypert’s memoir of his time as Captain of Company A, including his capture by Confederate cavalry and subsequent daring escape, in which he was aided by local Union sympathizers and slaves.

After the Civil War, Cypert served two terms in the Tennessee State Senate, one of them during the heated first years of Reconstruction, when Tennessee disenfranchised former rebels and attempted to establish Unionist Republican rule in the state. Cypert clearly wrote his memoir to defend Unionism, condemn secession and rebellion, and support loyalists’ claims for post-war power through an account of their wartime sacrifices. Never before published, the manuscript has been preserved in nearly perfect condition by Cypert’s descendants over the generations. This book is a remarkable and engagingly written account of resistance to the Confederacy by a group of southwestern Tennessee loyalists.

A haunting and poetic journey of memory, identity, and reconciliation in the heart of the Black South.

Winner of the Excellence in Minority Fiction Award

Trouble the Water moves among finely woven layers of time and place as it takes on a new and controversial theme in contemporary black writing, the search for family reconciliation. Twenty years after running away from home in Pee Dee, North Carolina, Jordan Henry believed he had found success, as a young college professor of history, a married man, and a resident of New England, whose colonial past he knew so well. When Jordan finds his career stymied by local prejudices, his world crumbles. Word of his grandmother's death reaches him, and he returns home to claim the ambiguous legacy of her farmland and face the consequences of his long absence.

Jordan's estranged father also returns to Pee Dee on a quest of his own restoring his good name in a community which blames him for Chloe Henry's death in childbirth. Chloe was Jordan's mother and his grandmother's only child. Unresolved hostility in the family and in the community breaks out, making Jordan the unsuspecting pawn in a plot of revenge against his father. Jordan may be the only one who can free his family from the past and the equally troubled present.

Trouble the Water gains resonance from its unflinching confrontation with dualities common in the Afro-American experience: reality and myth, folklore and sophistication, North and South, rural and cosmopolitan. While sacrificing none of its complexities for the sake of simplicity, it has the relentless movement of a fairy tale that reaches deep into the unconscious roots of behavior. It is intensely lyrical and dense in realism. Trouble the Water is magical in the way it reveals the Afro-American psyche and symbolizes fundamental truths about American life.

This book presents Emily Dickinson as one of America's great thinkers and argues that she has even more to say to the twenty-first century than she did to the nineteenth. Jed Deppman weaves together many strands in Dickinson's intellectual culture—philosophy, lexicography, religion, experimental science, the female Bildungsroman—and shows how she developed a lyricized, conversational hermeneutics uniquely suited to rethinking the authoritative discourses of her time. 

Through Deppman's original analysis, readers come to see how Dickinson's mind and poetry were informed by two strong but opposing philosophical vocabularies: on the one hand, the Lockean materialism and Scottish Common Sense that dominated her schoolbooks in logic and mental philosophy—Reid, Hedge, Watts, Stewart, Brown, and Upham—and on the other, the neo-Kantian modes of apprehending the supersensible that circulated throughout German idealism and Transcendentalism.

Blending close readings with philosophical and historical approaches, Deppman affirms Dickinson's place in the history of ideas and brings her to the center of postmodern conversations initiated by Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, and Gianni Vattimo. Trying her out in various postmodern roles—the Nietzschean accomplished nihilist, the Nancian finite thinker, the Vattimian weak thinker, and the Rortian liberal ironist—Deppman adds to the traditional expressive functions of her poetry a valuable, timely, and interpretable layer of philosophical inquiry. Dickinson, it turns out, is an ideal companion for anybody trying to think in the contemporary conditions that Vattimo characterizes as the “weakened experience of truth.”

"A memoir infused with both empathy and inquiry."

—Wendy J. Fox, Electric Literature

“Twenty Acres is an engaging, thoughtful memoir of growing up in an off-the-grid cabin as part of the 1970s back-to-the-land movement. Sarah Neidhardt captures her subject beautifully and offers a compelling portrait of a highly specific, historically significant time and place.”
—Kate Daloz, author of We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America

Sarah Neidhardt grew up in the woods. When she was an infant, her parents left behind comfortable, urbane lives to take part in the back-to-the-land movement. They moved their young family to an isolated piece of land deep in the Arkansas Ozarks where they built a cabin, grew crops, and strove for eight years to live self-sufficiently.
 
In this vivid memoir Neidhardt explores her childhood in wider familial and social contexts. Drawing upon a trove of family letters and other archival material, she follows her parents’ journey from privilege to food stamps—from their formative youths, to their embrace of pioneer homemaking and rural poverty, to their sudden and wrenching return to conventional society—and explores the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s as it was, and as she lived it.
 
A story of strangers in a strange land, of class, marriage, and family in a changing world, Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods is part childhood idyll, part cautionary tale. Sarah Neidhardt reveals the treasures and tolls of unconventional, pastoral lives, and her insightful reflections offer a fresh perspective on what it means to aspire to pre-industrial lifestyles in a modern world.

A pioneering educator's firsthand account of building opportunity and hope in Alabama's Black Belt.

Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt is one of the most important firsthand accounts of African American educational leadership and community development in the post-Reconstruction South. Originally published in 1918, this memoir by educator and institution-builder William J. Edwards documents his extraordinary efforts to create educational opportunities for Black citizens in Alabama's Black Belt during a period marked by segregation, economic hardship, and limited access to public resources.

Born in Snow Hill, Alabama, in 1869, Edwards rose from humble beginnings to attend the Tuskegee Institute under the leadership of Booker T. Washington. Inspired by Tuskegee's philosophy of education, self-reliance, and community advancement, he returned to rural Alabama determined to establish an institution that could provide both academic and practical instruction to African American students. His efforts led to the founding of the Snow Hill Institute in 1893, a school that became a vital center of learning and leadership for generations of Black Alabamians.

The memoir also offers valuable insight into the educational philosophies that shaped African American advancement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Edwards reflects on the influence of Booker T. Washington, the role of industrial and vocational education, fundraising efforts in the North, the Jeanes Fund, public-school reform, and the broader movement for racial uplift through education. His account illuminates the networks of educators, supporters, and community leaders who worked to expand opportunities for African Americans throughout the South.

At once inspirational and historically significant, Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt remains an essential source for understanding African American education, Southern race relations, and the determination of Black communities to create institutions that fostered dignity, opportunity, and progress. It stands as both a personal testament and a crucial historical document chronicling a transformative era in American history.

Billie Timmons was fourteen when he met Charles Goodnight—over a wagonload of manure that had been jammed on a gatepost—and he went to work on the Goodnight Cross J Ranch shortly thereafter. The spirit of helpfulness that led Mr. Goodnight to strip off his coat and lift the wagon free for a lad in need sets the tone of this book, in which the author unwinds a spool of recollections of range-riding in Texas and North Dakota over an eighteen-year period.

When Billie Timmons went to work for Mr. Goodnight in 1892, Texas was undergoing a rapid transition from open range to fences. But around Texas campfires he heard tales about the northern range, told by cowboys who had ridden there and who had seen the northern lights, the tall free grass, swollen streams, and stampeding cattle. A longing to see that exciting country took hold of young Timmons.

His chance came when four buffaloes from the Goodnight ranch needed a nursemaid for their freight car trip to Yellowstone Park. Once in the northern country, Timmons stayed, casting his lot with the cowmen of North Dakota. He became the protégé of an extraordinary man, William Ray; he was foreman, friend, and confidant of banker-rancher Wilse Richards, a member of the Cowboy Hall of Fame. But even during his days in North Dakota he never lost touch with Charles Goodnight, a lifelong friend, and his portrayal of Goodnight provides much insight into the character of the man whose name belongs to the West.

In this book you experience the terror of being lost in the dead-white expanse of a North Dakota snowstorm; the gaiety of cowboy dances, for which there were never enough women available; the excitement of a near-riot in a Hebron, North Dakota, saloon, where cowboys from the 75 Ranch drank up or poured out all the liquor, then smashed all the glasses and bottles—one day before the state became bone-dry; and the loneliness of work on the range, where a flickering lantern on the side of a chuck wagon on a stormy night meant home for many a cowboy. Running like a bright thread through the narrative is Billie Timmons’s love of horses, from whom he learned the wisdom that some horses and some men are to be handled with great care and others are not to be handled at all. His chapter on Buck, his best-loved horse, is memorable.

In North Dakota, as in Texas, fences brought the end of the big herds and the end of cowboying for a man who enjoyed it to the hilt.

The remarkable memoir of a Touretter’s journey of self-discovery—now back in print!

The story of Rose and Milton Friedman’s incredible lives and influential work told in their own words, now with a new foreword by Sebastian Edwards.

In Two Lucky People, Rose and Milton Friedman provide a memorable and lively account of their lives, the people they knew, and the work they shared. Their involvement with world leaders and many of this century's most important public policy issues moves their memoir beyond the merely personal and makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in the history of twentieth-century ideas.

This new edition of the Friedmans’ jointly authored memoir includes a foreword by economist Sebastian Edwards, the Henry Ford II Professor of International Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles.