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Drawing on Terry’s long friendships and professional associations, Dizzy, Duke, Brother Ray, and Friends offers readers a rare opportunity to hear intimate conversations with some of the world’s greatest musical figures. Dizzy Gillespie offers his thoughts on playing with “sanctified” rhythm and the all-important personal touch in performance. Duke Ellington discourses on jazz history and concludes an interview to sing a self-written ditty in Italian. Ray Charles gives candid thoughts on race and politics while taking charge of Terry’s tape recorder. Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, Horace Silver, Bill Evans—all provide Terry and her readers with unforgettable encounters. The result is a collection of profiles, some stretching over a decade or more, that reveal these performers in ways that illuminate their humanity and expand our appreciation of their art.

This Music is the final, intimate work of celebrated Koyoonk’auwi (Concow) poet and essayist Janice Gould, completed posthumously by a collective of close friends and literary scholars.

Told through lyrical prose poems and personal photographs, this memoir traces Gould’s life as a queer/Two-Spirit California Native coming of age in the late 1960s, navigating family, identity, activism, and art. With reflections on her mixed-blood heritage, her experiences in lesbian feminist circles, and her journey as a poet and musician, Gould’s voice resonates with clarity, tenderness, and fierce honesty.

The book opens with a foreword by Joy Harjo and an introduction from the editorial collective, including an essay by Gould’s spouse, Marie-Elise Wheatwind, framing the memoir as both a literary achievement and a loving tribute.

This Music is a vital contribution to Indigenous and LGBTQ+ literatures, offering readers a rare and powerful account of gender, sexuality, and Native identity in mid-century and contemporary America. As the one hundredth volume in the Sun Tracks series, this work honors Gould’s legacy while expanding the canon of poetic memoir. Ideal for readers of poetry, memoir, and Indigenous literature, this book will resonate deeply with scholars, students, and anyone drawn to stories of resilience, creativity, and the enduring power of memory.

During the mid-1960s, a small group of young journalists made it their mission to write about popular music, especially rock, as something worthy of serious intellectual scrutiny. Their efforts not only transformed the perspective on the era's music but revolutionized how Americans have come to think, talk, and write about popular music ever since. 

In Writing the Record, Devon Powers explores this shift by focusing on The Village Voice, a key publication in the rise of rock criticism. Revisiting the work of early pop critics such as Richard Goldstein and Robert Christgau, Powers shows how they stood at the front lines of the mass culture debates, challenging old assumptions and hierarchies and offering pioneering political and social critiques of the music. Part of a college-educated generation of journalists, Voice critics explored connections between rock and contemporary intellectual trends such as postmodernism, identity politics, and critical theory. In so doing, they became important forerunners of the academic study of popular culture that would emerge during the 1970s. 

Drawing on archival materials, interviews, and insights from media and cultural studies, Powers not only narrates a story that has been long overlooked but also argues that pop music criticism has been an important channel for the expression of public intellectualism. This is a history that is particularly relevant today, given the challenges faced by criticism of all stripes in our current media environment. Powers makes the case for the value of well-informed cultural criticism in an age when it is often suggested that “everyone is a critic.”