Blackberries, Blackberries

Author(s):
Crystal Wilkinson
Book summary:

As the title implies, this beautifully written collection bursts with stories reminiscent of blackberries - small, succulent morsels that are inviting and sweet, yet sometimes bitter. Crystal Wilkinson provides an almost voyeuristic glimpse into the lives of her characters: Two misfit teenagers seek stolen moments of love and acceptance in the cloak of night (Hushed); a woman spends every waking hour obsessed with dying yet ironically watching her loved ones pass away before her (Waiting on the Reaper); a wife confronts her husband’s mistress in a diner over potato skins and cornbread (Need); and a pious young woman’s torment erupt in a violent and unsuspecting resolution (No Ugly Ways).



The stories in this award-winning collection are terse and transient, like snippets taken from random dreams, thoughts, or conversations. Wilkinson is able to embed a vibrancy into each stunningly descriptive and evocative tale. Infused with humor, sadness and honesty, this provocative and haunting work features a new foreword and a new afterword by nationally acclaimed authors Nikky Finney and Honoree Jeffers.

Publication year:
2018
Publisher:
Toby Press and University Press of Kentucky
Bio:
Photo:
Short bio:
Crystal Wilkinson is the award-winning author of The Birds of Opulence (winner of the 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence), Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries. Nominated for both the Orange Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, she has received recognition from The Kentucky Foundation for Women, The Kentucky Arts Council, The Mary Anderson Center for the Arts, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and is a recipient of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her short stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including most recently in the Oxford American and Southern Cultures. She currently teaches at the University of Kentucky where she is Associate Professor of English in the MFA in Creative Writing Program.
Book URL:
https://www.kentuckypress.com/live/title_detail.php?titleid=2642#.XBkXfmhKizw

The Birds of Opulence

Author(s):
Crystal Wilkinson
Book summary:

In this novel four generations of women confront life and love in small-town Opulence, Kentucky weaving their family's portion of a southern black American community's fabric.

Publication year:
2016
Publisher:
University Press of Kentucky
Award(s):
Ernest J. Gaines Award for Excellence
Weatherford Award
Appalachian Book of the Year
Judy Gaines Award
Praise:
Quote:
Lyrical and visionary, unconventional, and infused with beauty.
Credit:
Maurice Manning, author of The Common Man, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
Quote:
Those birds. . . . They swoop down on and around Opulence, Kentucky, proffering a sweeping perspective of more than three decades that’s both grand and intimate. Yes, they are all here, several generations of women - Minnie Mae, Tookie, Lucy, Francine, Yolanda, and Mona - and there are a few good men, too, each and every one of them indelible. Burnished with Wilkinson’s stunning prose, The Birds of Opulence is golden and magnificent.
Credit:
Robin Lippincott, author of Blue Territory, and In the Meantime
Bio:
Photo:
Short bio:
Crystal Wilkinson is the award-winning author of The Birds of Opulence (winner of the 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence), Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries. Nominated for both the Orange Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, she has received recognition from The Kentucky Foundation for Women, The Kentucky Arts Council, The Mary Anderson Center for the Arts, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and is a recipient of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her short stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including most recently in the Oxford American and Southern Cultures. She currently teaches at the University of Kentucky where she is Associate Professor of English in the MFA in Creative Writing Program.
Book URL:
https://www.kentuckypress.com/live/title_detail.php?titleid=4840#.XBkV12hKizw

Literate Zeal: Gender and the Making of a New Yorker Ethos

Author(s):
Janet Carey Eldred
Book summary:

In Literate Zeal, Janet Carey Eldred examines the rise of women magazine editors during the mid-twentieth century and reveals their unheralded role in creating a literary aesthetic for the American public. Between the sheets of popular magazines, editors offered belles-lettres to the masses and, in particular, middle-class women. Magazines became a place to find culture, humor, and intellectual affirmation alongside haute couture.



Eldred mines a variety of literary archives, notably the correspondence of Katharine Sargeant White of the New Yorker, to provide an insider's view of the publisher-editor-author dynamic. She chronicles the work at the major women's magazines of the day: Ladies' Home Journal, Mademoiselle, Vogue, and others enacted an editorial style similar to that of the New Yorker by offering literature, values, and culture to an educated and aspiring middle class. These publications created and sustained a mass literacy never before seen in American publishing.

 

Publication year:
2014
Publisher:
University of Pittsburgh Press
Praise:
Quote:
"A beautifully crafted homage to those editors and to the American literary aesthetic they created. . . . an 'insider view' that enriches our understanding of women editors in creating an American literature that otherwise wouldn't have existed. . . . Eldred opens up fascinating new territory for understanding the inner workings of a magazine that was widely regarded as a woman's magazine at this time."
Credit:
American Journalism
Quote:
"Eldred recounts the fascinating history of the New Yorker's development as an iconic literary institution, reconstructing the publishing culture of the early-to-middle twentieth century, when slick mass-circulation magazines regularly published stories and poems by the day's literary stars....Eldred makes it fresh by using the particular case of the New Yorker to trace the influence of female editors and readers in the creation of a national appetite for what she terms 'haute literacy.'"
Credit:
Georgia Review
Quote:
"In recovering and re-visioning women's history, Eldred also calls into question the tendency of many social and literary histories to ignore the overlap between the kinds of authors and works published in 'literary' magazines and those published in what are conventionally seen as 'women's' magazines. While the book's focus is on the 'making of a 'New Yorker' ethos,' among Eldred's key points is that this ethos was not created in a vacuum."
Credit:
Feminist Collections
Quote:
"Long excerpts from White’s correspondence with authors and with other New Yorker staff comprise so much of Literate Zeal that one may enjoy the book as an intimate and revealing epistolary biography of an important figure in twentieth-century American print culture. And Literate Zeal is indeed such a book, but Eldred clearly has more than that in mind, writing, ‘One can’t simply make autobiography, memoir, and personal letters stand in for critical histories.’” And as a critical history, Literate Zeal is a pointed intervention in the history of feminist media studies..."
Credit:
Sean Zwagerman, Peitho
Bio:
Photo:
Short bio:
Janet Carey Eldred is Professor of English and affiliate faculty in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies. She is the author of four books. In collaboration with Peter Mortensen, she authored "Reading Literacy Narratives."
A&S department affiliation:
Book URL:
https://www.upress.pitt.edu/books/9780822963271/

More Sonnets from the Portuguese

Author(s):
Janet C.M. Eldred
Book summary:

More Sonnets from the Portuguese is a sonnet novella that chronicles one year in the life of Zélia Nunes, a widow in her mid-40s. When Zélia receives an email from an ex-lover, her powerful inner longings threaten long-held traditions of Azorean-American and Azorean life. Capturing the essence of a very visible culture, Silicon Valley, and a mostly invisible one, the San Joaquin Valley, More Sonnets from the Portuguese is familiar and exotic.

Publication year:
2016
Publisher:
Whitepoint Press
Award(s):
Al Smith Artist Fellowship
Praise:
Quote:
"In More Sonnets from the Portuguese, an internet connection rekindles an affair of twenty years earlier...The delightful playfulness of Eldred's language enhances her sonnet cycle chronicling how this cyber-love both blesses and tortures the lonely hours of Zelia's widowhood--an archetypal story charmingly recast in 21st-century terms."
Credit:
Jill Allyn Rosser, Professor of English at Ohio University and author of Mimi's Trapeze
Quote:
"Many writers capture the pleasures of young love, but Janet Eldred shocks us with the voltage of late life's passions. The sonnets unravel the intricate, densely woven cables through which the memories of passion move--moments of loss, skin, longing, compromise, duty--across the falsely secure networks of virtual reconnection. This is a volume so intimate and wise it needs to be read in solitude."
Credit:
Teresa Mangum, Professor of Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies at University of Iowa and author of Married, Middlebrow and Militant
Quote:
"More sonnets from the Portuguese is an ambitious sonnet sequence, given its marriage of the religion and the carnal and its strong parallels to Browning's acclaimed book Sonnets from the Portuguese. Eldred's sonnets are varied and skillful and her ability to maintain a narrative in lyric form is admirable. Her use of playful language and the role she gives to technology brig a freshness to a classic story line."
Credit:
Nancy Chen Long, National Endowment of the Arts creative-writing fellow and author of Light Into Bodies
Quote:
“More Sonnets from the Portuguese tells a poignant and powerful tale about passion suppressed, rekindled, and magnified through years of deep longing and restraint. Elizabeth Barrett Browning would surely applaud.”
Credit:
Lillian Faderman, Professor Emeritus at California State University Fresno and author of Naked in the Promised Land
Bio:
Photo:
Short bio:
Janet C.M. Eldred grew up in California’s San Joaquin Valley. She is currently Professor of English at the University of Kentucky where she teaches creative nonfiction, poetry, and literature in the English Department. She is the author of four books, including Sentimental Attachments (Heinemann, 2005), a volume of creative nonfiction; and Literate Zeal (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012; 2014), a look into the editing practices and editorial secrets of The New Yorker magazine. She is a recipient of an Al Smith Artist Fellowship from the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
A&S department affiliation:
Book URL:
https://www.amazon.com/More-Sonnets-Portuguese-Janet-Eldred/dp/1944856064/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1544808275&sr=8-1&keywords=more+sonnets+from+the+portuguese
Book keywords:

REUNION

Author(s):
Hannah Pittard
Book summary:

Five minutes before her flight is set to take off, Kate Pulaski, failed screenwriter and newly failed wife with scarcely a hundred dollars to her name, learns that her estranged father has killed himself. More shocked than saddened by the news, she gives in to her siblings' request that she join them, along with her many half-siblings and most of her father's five former wives, in Atlanta, their birthplace, for a final farewell.



Written with huge heart and bracing wit, REUNION takes place over the following four days, as family secrets are revealed, personal foibles are exposed, and Kate-an inveterate liar looking for a way to come clean-slowly begins to acknowledge the overwhelming similarities between herself and the man she never thought she'd claim as an influence, much less a father.



Hannah Pittard's "engaging and vigorous" prose masterfully illuminates the problems that can divide modern families--and the ties that prove impossible to break. (Chicago Tribune)

Publication year:
2014
Publisher:
Hachette
Praise:
Quote:
"An indelible portrait of a family, messy and raw. Prickly Kate isn't a particularly sympathetic character-but she feels like a real one."
Credit:
Entertainment Weekly
Quote:
"Fast-paced . . . [Pittard] makes writing short, lively scenes look easy."
Credit:
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Quote:
"Richly rewarding . . . A family drama you won't want to put down."
Credit:
People
Quote:
"Hannah Pittard is the writer you won't be able to stop talking about...Her writing will make you laugh and cry in public...Her books are the sort that leave you reading the blurbs, scanning the small print, and prolonging the reading experience. . . She's the kind of writer who gets in your head and makes you evangelize to all of your friends-wide eyes, quick gasp: 'Do you know about Hannah Pittard?' If she's not on your radar yet, she should be. . . . The sibling bond-that complicated and often inexplicable love [is] expertly encapsulated in Reunion."
Credit:
Buzzfeed
Quote:
"Pittard is working with a fertile premise here--a family's discovery of one another's secrets following the death of its patriarch--that bears some unexpected and affecting fruit. The framework feels reminiscent of Jonathan Tropper's This Is Where I Leave You, but the messy blending of Pittard's Pulaski clan gives a familiar construction some very particular complications."
Credit:
Shelf Awareness (starred review)
Bio:
Photo:
Short bio:
Hannah Pittard is the author of four novels, including Listen to Me (a New York Times Editors' Choice) and Visible Empire (a New York Times "New & Noteworthy" selection). She is winner of the 2006 Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and a consulting editor for Narrative Magazine.
A&S department affiliation:

“Feminist Pedagogy, Media Literacy & the Politics of Black Women’s Contemporary Art”

This talk will use a hybrid, multi-disciplinary lens to explore how Black women’s art intersects with and influences popular media through mainstream visual representation, as well as its relationship to political discourses on race, gender and embodied experience. Drawing on Black feminism, Literacy Studies and Critical Theory, I focus on the work of Kara Walker and Julie Dash as situated within the contested and politically charged narratives that animate the ways in which we understand current trends and cultural productions ranging from Beyonce’s Lemonade to #BlackGirlMagic to post-Katrina New Orleans. By theorizing these artifacts and relationships, the talk also grapples with contextualizing these works as part of a continuum wherein Black women’s experiences (through artistic production) reflect and constitute a complex network of literacies engaging with race, class, gender, sexuality and revolution. Lastly, the talk aims to mobilize these subjects for classroom practice that responds to the growing need for instructional and curricular innovations that not only include but center Black women's art and feminist theory as potential catalysts for social change.

Sponsored by Gender & Women’s Studies and the College of Arts & Sciences

Co-sponsored by Sociology, English, Social Theory, African American & Africana Studies

Date:
Location:
Alumni Gallery (Young Library)

Consumable Sexual Excess: Trafficking, Justice and“Un-Settling” the Meaning of “Free”

Often discussed as individual vulnerabilities exploited by a nefarious “other,” the blueprint for US trafficking began before the establishment of the nation-state—specifically, with the forced movement of indigenous peoples purportedly for the protection of a burgeoning citizenry.  Imagining an indigenous legal futurity, Dr. April Petillo envisions how justice more dependent on radical freedom from targeting than on capture and removal might improve anti-trafficking interventions. Blending legal ethnography, critical trafficking studies and sociolegal analysis reliant on indigenous critique/perspective, Dr. Petillo interrogates the ways that existing anti-trafficking efforts as constitutive tools of a punitive criminal system.  Using her work gathering indian country policy influencer perspectives on claims of targeted recruitment of indigenous peoples for sex trafficking, Dr. Petillo examines how trafficking discourse informed by “law-and-order” feminist rhetoric derails decolonial efforts and reifies jurisdictional coloniality. from this perspective, existing interventions are narrowly defined distractions which simultaneously divert attention from the structural violences that they represent as they increase harm and decrease justice for racialized peoples.  Dr. Petillo also addresses where this perspective shines a different light on approaches grounded in community-defined justice and decolonization than on incarceration.



Sponsored by Gender & Women’s Studies and the College of Arts & Sciences

Co-sponsored by African American & Africana studies

Date:
Location:
330E Student Center

Listen to Me

Author(s):
Hannah Pittard
Book summary:

Mark and Maggie’s annual drive east to visit family has gotten off to a rocky start. By the time they’re on the road, it’s late, a storm is brewing, and they are no longer speaking to each other. Adding to the stress, Maggie – recently mugged at gunpoint – is lately not herself, and Mark is at a loss about what to make of the stranger he calls his wife. When the couple is forced to stop for the night at a remote inn completely without power, Maggie’s paranoia reaches an all-time and terrifying high. But as Mark finds himself threatened in a dark parking lot, it’s Maggie who takes control.

Publication year:
2016
Publisher:
Houghton Mifflin
Praise:
Quote:
“Pittard proves herself a master of ordinary suspense.”
Credit:
New York Times
Quote:
“Listen to Me elides so many genres that it’s Houdini-like, bursting through constraints. It moves between its two characters’ inner lives as effortlessly as an Olympic swimmer strokes through water.”
Credit:
Ann Beattie, Paris Review blog
Quote:
“A psychologically complex, addictive, and quick-moving read. I didn’t want it to end!”
Credit:
M.O. Walsh, author of New York Times best-selling novel My Sunshine Away
Quote:
“Pittard deserves the attention of anyone in search of today’s best fiction.”
Credit:
Washington Post
Quote:
“Revelatory.”
Credit:
The New Yorker
Quote:
“[Listen to Me] gripped me completely and even gave me nightmares, which is high praise in my book.”
Credit:
Chicago Tribune
Bio:
Photo:
Short bio:
Hannah Pittard is the author of four novels, including Listen to Me (a New York Times Editors' Choice) and Visible Empire (a New York Times "New & Noteworthy" selection). She is winner of the 2006 Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, a MacDowell Colony Fellow, recipient of a 2018 Kentucky Arts Council Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship, and a consulting editor for Narrative Magazine. Her work has appeared in the Sewanee Review, the New York Times, and other publications. She is a professor of English at the University of Kentucky, where she directs the MFA program in creative writing.
A&S department affiliation:
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