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“Where are you from?” For Catherine Jagoe, a set of complicated assumptions often lies behind this seemingly banal question. While partly an immigrant narrative, Jagoe’s memoir in essays is not so much—or not only—about moving to the US and putting down roots but rather more about feeling perpetually in-between and never quite “home.” Throughout, Jagoe wrestles with what identity and fidelity mean for a woman with three nationalities, a job as a translator who frequently lives in a fourth country, a history of depression, and chronically divided allegiances. Together, these essays paint a deeply personal yet incredibly relatable portrait of what it means to be an American—and an immigrant—in the twenty-first century. 

“Where are you from?” For Catherine Jagoe, a set of complicated assumptions often lies behind this seemingly banal question. While partly an immigrant narrative, Jagoe’s memoir in essays is not so much—or not only—about moving to the US and putting down roots but rather more about feeling perpetually in-between and never quite “home.” Throughout, Jagoe wrestles with what identity and fidelity mean for a woman with three nationalities, a job as a translator who frequently lives in a fourth country, a history of depression, and chronically divided allegiances. Together, these essays paint a deeply personal yet incredibly relatable portrait of what it means to be an American—and an immigrant—in the twenty-first century. 

2025 San Antonio Conservation Society Publication Award

Unheard Witness foregrounds a young woman’s experience of domestic abuse, resistance, and survival before the mass shooting at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966.

In 1966, Kathy Leissner Whitman was a twenty-three-year-old teacher dreaming of a better future. She was an avid writer of letters, composing hundreds in the years before she was stabbed to death by her husband, Charles Whitman, who went on to commit a mass shooting from the tower at the University of Texas at Austin. Kathy’s writing provides a rare glimpse of how one woman described, and sought to change, her short life with a coercive, controlling, and violent partner.

Unheard Witness provides a portrait of Kathy’s life, doing so at a time when Americans are slowly grasping the link between domestic abuse and mass shootings. Public violence often follows violence in the home, yet such private crimes continue to be treated separately and even erased in the public imagination. Jo Scott-Coe shows how Kathy's letters go against the grain of the official history, which ignored Kathy’s perspective. With its nuanced understanding of abuse and survival, Unheard Witness is an intimate, real-time account of trust and vulnerability—in its own way, a prologue to our age of atrocities.