Keep up to date with what’s going on at the UGA Press with Short Takes. Continue reading for information about our upcoming events, our latest releases, and news and reviews.
Food, Culture and Place: A Public Discussion of Foodways:
Friday, October 5 at 10:30 a.m., Richard B. Russell Special Collections Library Auditorium,
300 S. Hull Street, Athens, GA 30605
Join the UGA Press, the UGA History Department, Grady College of Journalism, Willson Center for Humanities, UGA Libraries, and the Southern Foodways Alliance at the Special Collections Library for a special treat: a discussion panel on foodways of the American South! The panel will be moderated by Rosalind Bentley, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a contributor to the Southern Foodways Alliance’s Gravy. Panelists include:
André Joseph Gallant, author of A High Low Tide: The Revival of a Southern Oyster;
Sara Camp Milam, co-author of The Southern Foodways Alliance Guide to Cocktails and Managing Editor of the Southern Foodways Alliance;
Julian Rankin, author of Catfish Dream: Ed Scott’s Fight for His Family Farm and Racial Justice in the Mississippi Delta;
Thomas Ward, contributor of the new forward to Still Hungry in America.
Check out our events calendar or Facebook page for more information and upcoming events!
New Releases:
September was a busy month for us at the press, and we released six new titles to add to your bookshelves!
Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary: Sit-ins, Civil Rights, and Black Women’s Student Activism by Robert Cohen
Robert Cohen presents a thorough historical overview as well as an entrée to Howard Zinn’s diary. One of the most extensive records of the political climate on a historically black college in 1960s America, Zinn’s diary offers an in-depth view. It is a fascinating historical document of the free speech, academic freedom, and student rights battles that rocked Spelman and led to Zinn’s dismissal from the college in 1963 for supporting the student movement.
Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy edited by Nicole Seitz and Jonathan Haupt
Through the voices of more than fifty authors, a vibrant, multifaceted portrait of New York Times best-selling author Pat Conroy comes to life and sheds new light on the writer and the man. Loosely following Conroy’s own chronology, the essays in Our Prince of Scribes wind through his river of a story, stopping at important ports of call. Cities he called home and longed to visit, along with each book he birthed, become characters that are as equally important as the people he touched and loved along the way. In sharing their stories of Conroy, his fellow writers honor his memory and advance our shared understanding of his lasting impact on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary life in and well beyond the American South.
What It Doesn’t Have to Do With by Lindsey Bernal
This poetry collection explores—through sculpture, painting, pornography, and performance art—changing views on gender and sexuality. The elegiac meditations throughout this collection link the objectification of women in art and life to personal narratives of heartbreak, urban estrangement, and suicide. Haunted by the notions of femininity and domesticity, the protagonist struggles to define the self in shifting cultural landscapes. Ezra Pound, Louise Bourgeois, and Morrissey coexist within the unruly, feminist imagination of these poems. Through quick turns and juxtapositions, Lindsay Bernal navigates the paradoxical states of grief and love, alternating between vulnerability and irony, despair and humor. Her wry, contemporary voice confronts serious subjects with unpredictable wit.
Life of Miracles along the Yangtze and Mississippi by Wang Ping
“Life of Miracles along the Yangtze and Mississippi is free-wheeling, unusual, and always charged as it swings back and forth in time and cultures. These are mountain and river tales wound together like eels navigating the muddy waters of political, cultural, and personal displacement and wars waged against the human spirit. Episodes wriggle between cities on either side of the Pacific, China to the U.S. and back again, from Tiger Leaping Gorge to New York, to Tibet, to the Yangtze and the Mississippi. Between the trapped and the free as the writer swims between homes and two rivers simultaneously.”
—Gretel Ehrlich
A High Low Tide: The Revival of a Southern Oyster by André Joseph Gallant
Oysters are a narrative food: in each shuck and slurp, an eater tastes the place where the animal was raised. But that’s just the beginning. André Joseph Gallant uses the bivalve as a jumping-off point to tell the story of a changing southeastern coast, the bounty within its waters, and what the future may hold for the area and its fishers. With A High Low Tide he places Georgia, as well as the South, in the national conversation about aquaculture, addressing its potential as well as its challenges.
The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960-1980 by Zachary J. Lechner
In this interdisciplinary work, Zachary J. Lechner bridges the fields of southern studies, southern history, and post–World War II American cultural and popular culture history in an effort to discern how conceptions of a tradition-bound, “timeless” South shaped Americans’ views of themselves and their society’s political and cultural fragmentations. Wide-ranging chapters detail the iconography of the white South during the civil rights movement; hippies’ fascination with white southern life; the Masculine South of George Wallace, Walking Tall, and Deliverance; the differing southern rock stylings of the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd; and the healing southernness of Jimmy Carter. The South of the Mind demonstrates that we cannot hope to understand recent U.S. history without exploring how people have conceived the South, as well as what those conceptualizations have omitted.
News:
The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon is a Fall Book Pick for Philadelphia Weekly
Philadelphia Weekly listed Christine Flanagan’s The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon as one of their fall book picks! Our Philadelphia readers can join Flanagan at Head House Books TONIGHT, October 3rd, at 7:30 p.m to celebrate her book launch.
Scholars of Flannery O’Connor will be pleased to hear that The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon has also made the Flannery O’Connor Review‘s Checklist for Contributors! Hers is the twelfth book to make this list as an authoritative, primary source on O’Connor.
Still Hungry in America featured in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Read about Al Clayton and his work chronicling the poverty and malnutrition of the American South in this profile by Suzanne Van Atten in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 1968 the photographs Clayton took were published as a collection titled Still Hungry in America, which the UGA Press has re-released earlier this year.
You can also visit Blue Mark Studios on October 6th at 7:00 p.m. for the opening reception of a new exhibition of Clayton’s work, “Still Hungry in America … Not if We Can Help It!” The event will serve as a fundraiser for the Atlanta Community Food Bank and Clifton Sanctuary Ministries. Hedgepeth and Clayton’s daughter, Jennie Clayton, will be there to talk about the project. Tickets are on sale now!
Jennifer Wren Atkinson Interview on Gardenland
Jeanne Maglaty from Smithsonian Magazine talked with Jennifer Wren Atkinson about her new book, Gardenland, which explores garden literature in America from the nineteenth century to today.
Atkinson on what the best garden writers do well: “All of them go far beyond just looking at nature as scenery: They’re engaging it with their whole bodies, plunging their hands in the earth and smelling the compounds in the soil, tasting the bitterness of herbs, feeling the effects of a day’s work in their back muscles. That physical intimacy really makes them expert observers of natural detail that can be lacking from accounts based solely on visual observation.”
William D. Bryan–The Price of Permanence–on New Books in Environmental Studies Podcast with Brian Hamilton
Listen to William D. Bryan, author of The Price of Permanence, discuss the South’s economic development after the Civil War, the mythos of the New South, and boosters who helped build a “permanent” economy with Brian Hamilton. Together, they uncover how the South reconstructed its economy.
In Hamilton’s review of The Price of Permanence, he writes that, “Bryan has not only given us a more convincing, nuanced, and unified account of the New South, he also offers a cautionary tale of the dangers of a politics of sustainability too narrowly shaped around profits and growth.”
Update on Alice Dunnigan Statue at the Newseum:
In our last Short Takes, we mentioned the Newseum’s announcement of a statue in honor of Alice Dunnigan, and the statue is now finished! Dunnigan was the first African American woman given the credentials to cover the White House and Congress.
In the wake of the statue’s unveiling on September 21st, various news sources reported on the statue and the book that helped bring Dunnigan back into the national spotlight. The Kentucky Kernel (where you can see the finished statue), the Philadelphia Tribune, the Dallas Weekly, and the Washington Post are just a few. The Newseum also organized a program, “Remembering Alice Allison Dunnigan,” which features editor of Alone atop the Hill Carol Booker, the artist behind the statue Amanda Matthews, and Dunnigan’s own granddaughter Soraya Dunnigan Brandon.
You can see the statue at the Newseum in Washington D.C., but only for a short time. After December 16th, the statue will move to a permanent place at the West Kentucky African American Heritage Center in Dunnigan’s home state.
Annotations Continues with Decatur Book Festival Panels:
The UGA Press has some exciting news, too! Last month, we mentioned our eight author panels at the Decatur Book Festival, and if you missed the festival or couldn’t make it, have no fear! Most of the discussions will be posted, and the first one is already up! Robert Cohen’s discussion of Howard Zinn and his Spelman students is available here. If you’re interested in learning more about the behind the scenes action of student activism in the 1950’s and 1960’s, check it out along with Cohen’s book, Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary.
Keep an eye out for more panels in the coming weeks!
Reviews:
Time to get Tough: How Cookies, Coffee, and a Crash Led to Success in Business and Life by Michael J. Coles and Catherine Lewis
Through setbacks, such as a severe motorcycle accident that left him severely disabled, and achievements, including beating his dire prognosis to finish a post-accident cross-country bike trip and franchising his cookie company, he illustrates a never-give-up spirit. […] Uplifting and entertainingly written, Coles’s work offers something for everyone who has ever faced and overcome a significant challenge.
Life of Miracles along the Yangtze and Mississippi by Wang Ping
A testament to human resilience. How do we face loss and hardship? With hope and defiance — like a river.
William Faulkner in Hollywood: Screenwriting for the Studios by Stefan Solomon
Perhaps the greatest payoff (and there are many) in Stefan Solomon’s wide-ranging William Faulkner in Hollywood : Screenwriting for the Studios arises from its compelling account of Faulkner’s not insignificant role in, as his aesthetic practices directly engaged with, so many of the transformations that occurred mid century across a range of expressive technologies: sound film, broadcast radio, television and Cinemascope.
Warren H. Manning: Landscape Architect and Environmental Planner edited by Robin Karson, Jane Roy Brown, and Sarah Allaback
Robin Karson’s role in the long genesis of this book was both personal and professional, exercised through her position as executive director of the Library of American Landscape History and as the guiding spirit of an effort that gained status as the Warren H. Manning Research Project. She was thus the ideal, best-placed scholar to provide an overview of Warren H. Manning’s career, and she did so in these pages with intelligence and a sure feeling for the man, his time, and his place in history.
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