UNO Authors: UNO Alumni
UNO Alumni Authors
The Casual Presence of Borders by
Borders exist in and are occupied by space and time ritualized by seen and unseen, known and unknown, human struggles. Mackie Blanton's The Casual Presence of Borders captures borders present around denizens or friends gathered at bars or over coffee, over new births, over silence and meals; at nearby places of worship or warfare or death; or unvisited planets or islands of our knowledge or imagination; or the sensed presence of the cells and arteries of the human body; and human beings noticed in easy chairs, in backyards across fences, or caught crossing in woods, swamps, bridges. Blanton is driven by two concepts: the protection of fiction inhabiting poems and a guiding principle of a post-contemporary sensibility that slips through and away from modernism and postmodernism to grasp elsewhere a possible unfamiliar, hardly-quite-there-yet, future.
Call Number: PS3602 .L3936 A6 2019ISBN: 9781608011780Publication Date: 2020-02-12
I Got the Dog by
I Got the Dog has teeth. Amanda Boyden's memoir is unflinching, poignant, raw, sometimes hilarious, sometimes brutally painful--the self-portrait of a woman unafraid to scream into the universe: I survived this! And this. And this. Follow my lead. Dog tails Boyden from childhood in Chicago to adult heartbreak, from a devastating rape as a young woman, reexamined and illumined by distance, to the crushing end of her marriage to a famous Canadian author, destroyed by infidelity and another woman's pregnancy. Boyden hasn't just survived, though. She chooses to rise. She gets up from the pavement and dusts herself off. She stands and says: You, too, can do this. This memoir finds joy in the details, courage in family, beauty in the natural world, and salvation in a little chihuahua who hangs in there through thick and thin. Amanda Boyden is the author of two novels, Pretty Little Dirty and the international bestseller Babylon Rolling. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Maclean's, Globe and Mail, Third Coast, Mid-American Review, Sonora Review, and others. The recipient of Nerve.com's Henry Miller Award for Best Literary Sex Scene in Pretty Little Dirty, she lives in New Orleans with her rescue chihuahua, Fry.
Call Number: PS3602 .O934 Z46 2020ISBN: 9781944884819Publication Date: 2020-08-12
How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill by
More than 30 acclaimed writers--including diverse voices such as Nikki Giovanni, David Omotosho Black, Natasha Trethewey, Barry Jenkins, Jacqueline Woodson, Tayari Jones, and Angela Flournoy--reflect on their experience and expertise in this unique book on the craft of writing that focuses on the Black creative spirit. How We Do It is an anthology curated by Black writers for the creation and proliferation of Black thought. While a creator's ethnicity does not solely define them, it is inherently part of who they are and how they interpret the world. For centuries, Black creators have utilized oral and written storytelling traditions in crafting their art. But how does one begin the process of constructing a poem or story or character? How do Black writers, when faced with questions of "authenticity," dive deep into the essence of their lives and work to find the inherent truth? How We Do It addresses these profound questions. Not a traditional "how to" writing handbook, it seeks to guide rather than dictate and to validate the complexity and range of styles--and even how one thinks about craft itself. An outstanding list of contributors offer their insights on a range of important topics. Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown explores the lives personified in poetry, while Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey explores decolonizing enduring metaphors. National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy illuminates the pain of grief in all forms and how it can be revealed in the act of creation, and iconoclast Nikki Giovanni offers an elegiac declaration on language. New and previously published essays and interviews provide encouragement, examples, and templates, and offer lessons on everything from poetic form and plotting a story to the lessons inherent in the act of writing, trial & error, and finding inspiration in the works of others, including those of Toni Morrison, Shakespeare, and Edward P. Jones. A handbook and a reference tool, How We Do It is a thoughtful and welcome tool that offers direction to help Black artists establish their own creative practice while celebrating and widening the scope of the Black writer's role in art, history, and culture. Contributors include Daniel Omotosho Black, Jericho Brown, Breena Clark, Rita Dove, Camille T. Dungy, W. Ralph Eubanks, Curdella Forbes, Angela Flournoy, Ernest Gaines, Nikki Giovanni, Marita Golden, Ravi Howard, Terrance Hayes, Mitchell S. Jackson, Barry Jenkins, Charles Johnson, Tayari Jones, Jamaica Kincaid, Tony Medina, E. Ethelbert Miller, Elizabeth Nunez, Carl Phillips, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Rion Amilcar Scott, Evie Shockley, Natasha Trethewey, Frank X Walker, Afaa M. Weaver, Crystal Wilkinson, Jacqueline Woodson, Tiphanie Yanique.
Call Number: PN187 .H69 2023ISBN: 9780063278189Publication Date: 2023-07-04
An Illustrated History of Domestic Arthropods by
An Illustrated History of Domestic Arthropods is an artifact from an imagined world where humans are the only vertebrates and the rest of the animal.kingdom is populated by giant insects, arachnids, and crustaceans. This book, which is a hand-made art object, describes the centipedes in Marie Antoinette's garden, the grasshoppers tamed by Alexander the great, and the discovery by Empress Xi Ling-Shi of the silkworm cocoon. This book also contains recipes, advertisements, and numerous ink illustrations that offer insight into a word in which the animals are very different from those in our world, and the humans are largely the same.
Call Number: QL434.14 T89 2021ISBN: 9781608012183Publication Date: 2021-05-20
Gas! Gas! Gas! by
Artist Evan Hallmark interprets this essay from writer Guy Choate's account of enduring basic combat training and the result is a 60-page collaborative piece of art readers will find aesthetically and emotionally endearing.
Call Number: PS3603 .H62 G3 2020ISBN: 9781734348309Publication Date: 2020-03-01
Amiss by
Gina Ferrara's collection Amiss might be subtitled, "American Femicide": these lyric poems are sympathetic, even intimate, elegies for, and apostrophes to, women killed or missing in every state in the Union. "Gina Ferrara's collection Amiss might be subtitled, 'American Femicide': these lyric poems are sympathetic, even intimate, elegies for, and apostrophes to, women killed or missing in every state in the Union, and our North American landscape (beautifully evoked), seems involved in their fates. Notice, for instance, how often the vaunted freedom of the road turns out to be something else for these passengers: women 'driven in the direction / of what always goes wrong.' Notice, also, the details, as Ferrara chooses her images with the fierce attention of an angelic detective--a bright blue van, a bible, a deck of cards spilled from an abandoned purse--so that an earned and grounded empathy propels the clear voice, along with the desire for justice. In these quick and vivid poems Ferrara makes of grief an illuminating fire, from which the poet speaks of and to the missing and dead women with exemplary, tenderly respectful, imagination, memory, and knowledge. I have so much admiration for this poet's courage--Ferrara has gone among the ghosts and faced the terror every woman in our violent homeland spends a significant portion of her life trying not to think about..." --Laura Mullen "Gina Ferrara writes with an uncanny attention to color and light, evoking depths of emotion from minute sensory details. This, her signature technique, is employed with chilling effectiveness in this collection of elegies to 52 murdered women, one for each of our United States, plus two more, as if the grief expressed here would overflow any national or political container. And yet it is a sobering chronicle of a distinctly American epidemic of violence against women. This is a stunning book, reverent, powerful, immensely sad."--Bill Lavender Poetry. Women's Studies.
Call Number: PS3606 .E7348 A65 2023ISBN: 9781953252760Publication Date: 2023-04-20
The Poetry Buffet by
The Poetry Buffet is an anthology of nearly 100 poets from and around the New Orleans area who have contributed to either the Poetry Buffet Reading Series (hosted for the last sixteen years at The Latter Library on St. Charles Avenue) or the greater New Orleans poetry community.
Call Number: PS559 .N4 P64 2023ISBN: 9780938498124Publication Date: 2023-09-18
Lily-Livered by
"'On Earth, a fish barricades her den / and emerges male two months later, / melon-head worthy of brawling and teeth,' announces one of the brilliant sectioned poems central to Lily-livered. 'On Mars, the sunset is blue. / She asks me about this second life / of red dirt, burnt skin. What do you enjoy // about being a man?' Although framed by a series of 'transiversaries,' to describe this collection in diaristic terms would not do justice to the overlay of questions raised around gender, beauty, diet, desire, violence, medication and self-medication. An interest in refrain and cyclical structures anchors us, pleasingly counterbalanced against enjambment and an adventuresome sense of the line; we welcome cultural cameos from Shakespeare, HBO, and indie rock. This is a stunning read that showcases a sophisticated, exciting approach to contemporary poetics." -Sandra Beasley, Count the Waves
Call Number: PS3608 .A715223 L55 2021ISBN: 9781949065107Publication Date: 2021-03-02- A Faster Grave by In A Faster Grave, poet and native New Orleanian Skye Jackson explores a delicious tangle of millennial concerns: love, family, heartbreak and the tragedy of how “nobody actually / talks face-to-face anymore.” She interrogates Beyonce, intoxicating ex-lovers and the most mysterious figure of them all: herself. She conveys lessons for the lovestruck as well as the wistful, wild yearnings of a young Black woman filled with longing, laughter and unrepentant desire. Skye Jackson was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. She has served as a poetry editor for Bayou Magazine and several other publications. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Green Mountains Review, RATTLE and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, A Faster Grave, won the 2019 Antenna Prize. She was also a finalist for the 2020 RATTLE Poetry Prize. In 2021, she won the AWP Intro Journals Award and was twice nominated for Best New Poets. Her work was recently selected by former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins for inclusion in the Library of Congress. Poets & Writers has also recognized her as a New Orleans “Poet to Watch.”Call Number: Not owned by libraryPublication Date: 2019
Luna and the heart of the forest by Call Number: PS3611 .A75875 L86 2024ISBN: 1778530087Publication Date: 2024
On the Trail of the Catahoula by
Descended from ancient European hounds and used for hunting, herding, and even as a stalker of feral swamp pigs, the history of the Catahoula Leopard Dog has a history that sheds light on the interdependent relationship Louisiana has with its natural environment. Today these energetic and loyal Catahoula is are beloved, serving as the official state dog of Louisiana. This full-color, illustrated reference guide by Walter LeBon synthesizes geography, history, and anthropology to provide a delightful and informative discussion of this singular breed.
Call Number: SF429 .C35 L43 2022ISBN: 9781608012022Publication Date: 2022-02-24
I'll Give You a Reason by
The vibrant stories in I'll Give You a Reason explore race, identity, connection, and belonging in the Ironbound, an immigrant neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey. A young widow goes on her first date since her husband's death and finds herself hunting a bear in the woods with a near stranger. An unhappy wife compares her mother's love spells and rituals to her own efforts to repair her strained marriage. A self-conscious college student discovers a porn star who shares her name and becomes obsessed with her doppelgänger's freedom and comfort with her own body. Annell López's indelible characters tread the waters of political unrest, sexuality, religion, body image, Blackness, colorism, and gentrification--searching for their identities and a sliver of joy and intimacy. Through each story, a nuanced portrait of the "American Dream" emerges, uplifting the voices of those on its margins.
Call Number: PS3612 .O5825 I45 2024ISBN: 1558613129Publication Date: 2024-04-09
The Ones Who Don't Say They Love You by
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE * A collection of raucous stories that offer a "vibrant and true mosaic" (The New York Times) of New Orleans, from the critically acclaimed author of We Cast a Shadow SHORTLISTED FOR THE ERNEST J. GAINES AWARD * LONGLISTED FOR THE STORY PRIZE * ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR--Garden & Gun, Electric Lit * "Every sentence is both something that makes you want to laugh in a gut-wrenching way and threatens to break your heart in a way that you did not anticipate."--Robert Jones, Jr., author of The Prophets, in The Wall Street Journal Maurice Carlos Ruffin has an uncanny ability to reveal the hidden corners of a place we thought we knew. These perspectival, character-driven stories center on the margins and are deeply rooted in New Orleanian culture. In "Beg Borrow Steal," a boy relishes time spent helping his father find work after coming home from prison; in "Ghetto University," a couple struggling financially turns to crime after hitting rock bottom; in "Before I Let Go," a woman who's been in NOLA for generations fights to keep her home; in "Fast Hands, Fast Feet," an army vet and a runaway teen find companionship while sleeping under a bridge; in "Mercury Forges," a flash fiction piece among several in the collection, a group of men hurriedly make their way to an elderly gentleman's home, trying to reach him before the water from Hurricane Katrina does; and in the title story, a young man works the street corners of the French Quarter, trying to achieve a freedom not meant for him. These stories are intimate invitations to hear, witness, and imagine lives at once regional but largely universal, and undeniably New Orleanian, written by a lifelong resident of New Orleans and one of our finest new writers.
Call Number: PS3618 .U4338 R84 2021ISBN: 9780593133408Publication Date: 2021-08-17
On a Wednesday night : poems from the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans by
The anthology, On a Wednesday Night, is a collection of poems written by faculty and graduates of the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans. The poems range in length from three lines to three pages, and a variety of forms from highly formal poems such as pantoums, villanelles, terza rima, sestinas, and a sonnet crown to prose poems, concrete poetry, and an assortment of highly experimental verse. It is edited by Kay Murphy, Professor Emerita.
Call Number: PS617 .O52 2019ISBN: 9781608011711Publication Date: 2019-11-22
Thinning Blood by
Leah Myers may be the last member of the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe in her family line, due to her tribe's strict blood quantum laws. In this unflinching and intimate memoir, Myers excavates the stories of four generations of women in order to leave a record of her family. Beginning with her great-grandmother, the last full-blooded Native member in their lineage, she connects each woman with her totem to construct her family's totem pole: protective Bear, defiant Salmon, compassionate Hummingbird, and perched on top, Raven. As she pieces together their stories, Myers weaves in tribal folktales, the history of the Native genocide, and Native mythology. Throughout, she tells the larger story of how, as she puts it, her "culture is being bleached out," offering sharp vignettes of her own life between White and Native worlds: her naïve childhood love for Pocahontas, her struggles with the Klallam language, the violence she faced at the hands of a close White friend as a teenager. Crisp and powerful, Thinning Blood is at once a bold reclamation of one woman's identity and a searingly honest meditation on heritage, family, and what it means to belong.
Call Number: E99 .C82 M94 2023ISBN: 9781324036708Publication Date: 2023-05-16
Sensitive Creatures by
In unflinching yet hopeful prose, this debut memoir in essays explores the most animal parts of our human nature. Discussions of various creatures in the natural world serve as portals to the painful realities Kirsten Reneau confronts in the process of breaking-and remaking-a home. Honest in their descriptions of sexual assault and its traumatic effects, these essays are at once clinical and lyrical reflections on the ways that desire can permeate our lives for better or worse, as well as how it can be channeled into a lifegiving force for women in a world often hostile to their basic needs. Sensitive Creatures ultimately is a story of darkness, resilience, and the light that still manages to crack through.
Call Number: PS3618 .E57483 Z46 2024ISBN: 9781960215130Publication Date: 2024-03-19American Daughters by
Call Number: PS3618 .U4338 A84 2024ISBN: 0059372390Publication Date: 2024
We Imagined It Was Rain by
Hailed by ZZ Packer as "a master of tone, detail, and imagery," Andrew Siegris's debut collection, We Imagined It Was Rain, is a love song to Tennessee. These loosely connected stories are imbued with tenderness, seriousness, and a deep understanding of the human spirit. A young man moves to the mountains and builds an heirloom chest in the wake of his son's death; a town official must make the decision to execute a circus elephant; two siblings help their father commit suicide; a preacher picks up the pieces of his ruined church, and his marriage, after a devastating flood; locals share stories of the girl with eyelashes so long she can braid them. Siegrist demonstrates careful attention to the smallest moments, to the rain on a windowpane, to individual mementos passed down through generations, in this far-reaching and thoughtful collection. We Imagined It Was Rain is the winner of our 2020 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize.
Call Number: PS3619 .I38395 W4 2021ISBN: 9781938235887Publication Date: 2021-10-12
Just off Elysian Fields by
A journey towards redemption and reunion by the most unlikely group of characters.
Call Number: PS3620 .H6446 J87 2021ISBN: 9781734490022Publication Date: 2021-09-15
Family Meal by Call Number: PS3623 .A86737 F36 2023ISBN: 1838954449Publication Date: 2023
Lot: stories by
Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn portrait of life in Houston's neighborhoods vibrates with energy, wit, and soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life.
Call Number: PS3623 .A86737 A6 2020ISBN: 1432867830Publication Date: 2019-09-11
Memorial: A novel by
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Vanity Fair, O, the Oprah Magazine, Esquire, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, Refinery29, Real Simple, Kirkus Reviews, Electric Literature, and Lit Hub "A masterpiece." --NPR "No other novel this year captures so gracefully the full palette of America." --The Washington Post "Wryly funny, gently devastating." --Entertainment Weekly A funny and profound story about family in all its strange forms, joyful and hard-won vulnerability, becoming who you're supposed to be, and the limits of love. Benson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston. Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson's a Black day care teacher, and they've been together for a few years--good years--but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. There's the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other. But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan he undergoes an extraordinary transformation, discovering the truth about his family and his past. Back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together as unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted. Without Mike's immediate pull, Benson begins to push outwards, realizing he might just know what he wants out of life and have the goods to get it. Both men will change in ways that will either make them stronger together, or fracture everything they've ever known. And just maybe they'll all be okay in the end.
Call Number: PS3623 .A86737 M46 2021ISBN: 9780593087275Publication Date: 2020-10-27
The banana empire : New Orleans international power by
The Banana Empire is the fascinating description of life under the power of the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) and the Standard Fruit Company (now Dole). These rich and mighty companies greatly dominated life in Central America and the Caribbean. Many books and articles have been written about these powerful companies but none have exposed personal existence with the sure hand of someone who lived under their colossal influence like Banana Empire has achieved.
Call Number: PS3576 .W42 Z46 2020ISBN: 9781716909016Publication Date: 2020
