Ladies Night at the Dreamland

Ladies Night at the Dreamland PDF Author: Sonja Livingston
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820349135
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
In this lyrical collection, Sonja Livingston weaves together strands of research and imagination to conjure figures from history, literature, legend, and personal memory. The result is a series of essays that highlight lives as varied, troubled, and spirited as America itself.

Ladies Night at the Dreamland

Ladies Night at the Dreamland PDF Author: Sonja Livingston
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820349135
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
In this lyrical collection, Sonja Livingston weaves together strands of research and imagination to conjure figures from history, literature, legend, and personal memory. The result is a series of essays that highlight lives as varied, troubled, and spirited as America itself.

High Yella

High Yella PDF Author: Steve Majors
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820360325
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
They called him “pale faced or mixed race.” They called him “light, bright, almost white.” But most of the time his family called him “high yella.” Steve Majors was the white passing, youngest son growing up in an all-Black family that struggled with poverty, abuse, and generational trauma. High Yella is the poignant account of how he tried to leave his troubled childhood and family behind to create a new identity, only to discover he ultimately needed to return home to truly find himself. And after he and his husband adopt two Black daughters, he must set them on their own path to finding their place in the world by understanding the importance of where they come from. In his remarkable and moving memoir, Majors gathers the shards of a broken past to piece together a portrait of a man on an extraordinary journey toward Blackness, queerness, and parenthood. High Yella delivers its hard-won lessons on love, life, and family with exceptional grace.

Dreamland

Dreamland PDF Author: Sophie Essex
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781913038687
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
At heart, Dreamland is an elemental feminine landscape. These twenty-one stories from female-identifying writers embody the disconnect between reality and the subconscious, the desire for meaning and the need for escape, the too-blue sky and the abyss. These are voices that embrace the topography of the other: the weird, transgressive, uncanny and strange. Voices that displace, unsettle and unnerve, that are subtly subversive in their power.

Southbound

Southbound PDF Author: Anjali Enjeti
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820360074
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
A move at age ten from a Detroit suburb to Chattanooga in 1984 thrusts Anjali Enjeti into what feels like a new world replete with Confederate flags, Bible verses, and whiteness. It is here that she learns how to get her bearings as a mixed-race brown girl in the Deep South and begins to understand how identity can inspire, inform, and shape a commitment to activism. Her own evolution is a bumpy one, and along the way Enjeti, racially targeted as a child, must wrestle with her own complicity in white supremacy and bigotry as an adult. The twenty essays of her debut collection, Southbound, tackle white feminism at a national feminist organization, the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the South, voter suppression, gun violence and the gun sense movement, the whitewashing of southern literature, the 1982 racialized killing of Vincent Chin, social media’s role in political accountability, evangelical Christianity’s marriage to extremism, and the rise of nationalism worldwide. In our current era of great political strife, this timely collection by Enjeti, a journalist and organizer, paves the way for a path forward, one where identity drives coalition-building and social change.

One by One, the Stars

One by One, the Stars PDF Author: Ned Stuckey-French
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820361798
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
A tireless and discerning advocate for contemporary practitioners of creative nonfiction, Ned Stuckey-French was at the center of every national discussion about the genre. He greatly contributed to our scholarly understanding of the history of the essay and was working on his first essay collection when he died of cancer in 2019. That collection, One by One, the Stars, presents new, highly personal essays tracing Stuckey-French’s childhood in Indiana and a burgeoning interest, during adolescence, in politics and social justice to his life as a father, teacher, and writer. Thematic threads connect these elements, and foremost is his growing commitment to activism on behalf of the disadvantaged, overlooked, or threatened. The volume also features some of Stuckey-French’s “greatest hits” as a public scholar and writer, including “Don’t Be Cruel: An Argument for Elvis,” “Our Queer Little Hybrid Thing: Toward a Definition of the Essay,” and his popular essay on his Facebook addiction—for which he was widely known. Along the way, his stories and reflections offer fascinating and timely insights into family dynamics, history, politics, ecology, social justice, and literature. All of it is infused with Ned Stuckey-French’s guiding spirit, full of curiosity, compassion, and conviction.

This Is One Way to Dance

This Is One Way to Dance PDF Author: Sejal Shah
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820357243
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
In the linked essays that make up her debut collection, This Is One Way to Dance, Sejal Shah explores culture, language, family, and place. Throughout the collection, Shah reflects on what it means to make oneself visible and legible through writing in a country that struggles with race and maps her identity as an American, South Asian American, writer of color, and feminist. This Is One Way to Dance draws on Shah’s ongoing interests in ethnicity and place: the geographic and cultural distances between people, both real and imagined. Her memoir in essays emerges as Shah wrestles with her experiences growing up and living in western New York, an area of stark racial and economic segregation, as the daughter of Gujarati immigrants from India and Kenya. These essays also trace her movement over twenty years from student to teacher and meditate on her travels and life in New England, New York City, and the Midwest, as she considers what it means to be of a place or from a place, to be foreign or familiar. Shah invites us to consider writing as a somatic practice, a composition of digressions, repetitions—movement as transformation, incantation. Her essays—some narrative, others lyrical and poetic—explore how we are all marked by culture, gender, and race; by the limits of our bodies, by our losses and regrets, by who and what we love, by our ambivalences, and by trauma and silence. Language fractures in its attempt to be spoken. Shah asks and attempts to answer the question: How do you move in such a way that loss does not limit you? This Is One Way to Dance introduces a vital new voice to the conversation about race and belonging in America.

Made Holy

Made Holy PDF Author: Emily Arnason Casey
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820371580
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
In haunting prose that will follow you for days to come, Made Holy tells the story of the American family. Love, loss, and addiction entwine in this moving debut collection. Emily Arnason Casey employs the lyric imagination to probe memory and the ever-shifting lens of time as she seeks to make sense of the disease that haunts her maternal family tree and the alchemy of loss and longing. The lakes of her childhood in Minnesota form the interior landscape of this book, a kind of watery nostalgia for something just beyond her reach. “I know this feeling,” she writes. “We travel along the surface of time and then suddenly the layers give way and we are in another year, another body, another place.” Casey’s willingness to honestly examine the past and present with contemplative lyricism offers fresh perspective and new understanding. In electric moments that are utterly relatable, she weaves a tale of love and commitment to the truth of her experience despite the incredible desire to keep alive a legacy of secrets. Like the mullein plant she invokes in the final essay, these essays form a kind of “guardian to the lost.”

It Takes a Worried Woman

It Takes a Worried Woman PDF Author: Debra Monroe
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 082036309X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
Debra Monroe has always written about the source of trouble, “that one incident you zero down to and everything bad that happens afterward happens because of it.” The illusion that every problem has a clear-cut cause and discernible solution is apparently her gateway drug. It Takes a Worried Woman explores the outer limits of her faith that all past hardship could have been prevented and all future hardship might still be. Yet one person’s trouble is often a small eddy in the outflow of history, and this book becomes a meditation on the price of effort exerted against fixed circumstances. Dense with history, lyrical, at times darkly funny, these essays explore sexism, racism, hate speech, violence, Monroe’s grief about dwindling access to the natural world, and her fears as her daughter’s adult life unfolds. Whether depicting the ubiquitous pressure to marry, the search for a shape-shifting familiar old enough to be her mother, or childcare as a game of risk, Monroe takes a measured look at problems that could be solved, problems that may never be, and at all the ways that trouble is big but hope, new strategies, fresh patience, and endurance are eventually big enough.

Brooding

Brooding PDF Author: Michael Martone
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 082035306X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
This collection of more than twenty-five essays, both meditative and formally inventive, considers all kinds of subjects: everyday objects such as keys and hats, plus concepts of time and place; the memoir; writing; the essay itself; and Michael Martone’s friendship with the writers David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Kurt Vonnegut. Throughout the essays, Martone’s style expands with the incorporation of new technological platforms. Several of the pieces were written specifically for online venues, while the essays on the death of Martone’s mother and father were written on Facebook while the events happened. One essay about using new technologies in the classroom was written solely in tweets. Brooding—the book’s title and the title of an essay—draws a parallel between the disappearance of early browsers and the emergence, after seventeen years, of a brood of cicadas. Throughout these essays Martone’s words inhabit spaces where the reconnection to people in the past and the metaphors of electronic memory converge.

Nola Face

Nola Face PDF Author: Brooke Champagne
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820366552
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Early in Brooke Champagne’s childhood, her Ecuadorian grandmother Lala (half bruja, half santa) strictly circumscribed the girl’s present and future: become beautiful but know precisely when to use it; rationalize in English but love in God’s first language, the superior Spanish; and if you must write, Dios help you, at least make a subject of me. Champagne’s betrayal of these confounding dictates began before they were even spoken, and she soon started both writing and hiding the truth about whom she was becoming. The hilarious, heartbreaking essays in this collection trace the evolutions of this girlhood of competing languages, ethnicities, aesthetics, politics, and class constraints against the backdrop of a boozy New Orleans upbringing. In these essays, Champagne and members of her family love poorly and hate well, whip and get whipped, pray and curse in two languages, steal from The Man and give to themselves, kiss where it hurts, poke where it hurts worse, and keep and spill each other’s secrets—first face-to-face, then on the page. They believe and doubt and reckon with the stories they tell about themselves and where they come from, finally becoming most human, most alive, in their connections to one another.