Summary

Bringing together artwork, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, Essential Voices shares the perspectives of people from vulnerable populations as they were affected by COVID-19 in 2020, before the release of the vaccine. The pieces in this volume represent a range of writers and artists, some from international locations, whose work may be less likely to be seen because of race, ethnicity, or current legal status. Contributors include individuals who identify as BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, or seniors; those who are immunocompromised or undocumented; those working in medicine, food service, factories, and sanitation; and parents who were unable to work from home, along with individuals who were being held in correctional facilities or facing mental health concerns. This multigenre collection preserves the history of the pandemic by documenting and publishing these essential voices.

Essential Voices will be of interest to readers who want to consider the diverse lived experiences of people during the pandemic when outcomes were most uncertain. It will also be useful for teachers, students, activists, and policy makers in a variety of settings, including government, hospitals, prisons, homeless shelters, colleges, art schools, and secondary schools.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword | Maria del Guadalupe Davidson

Introduction

Acknowledgments

Fear: It lives in droplets

Monster under Me
Fiction | Nathan Blalock

Table of Contents for a Manual of Pandemic Response Protocols
Poetry | Rasha Abdulhadi

The Worst of Times
Essay | Frances Ogamba

Essentials
Poetry | Maria James-Thiaw

Recipe for Troubled Times
Poetry | Linda Parsons

Night Guard
Poetry | Linda Parsons

Pandemic Pandemonium
Poetry | Kenneth Moore

Even the Robins Know
Poetry | Robert Okaji

Distance: As we moan into the phone

How Corona Evolves or Makes Us Evolve, or We Have to Evolve Together
Poetry | Xiaoly Li

Sequestered Alone
Poetry | Joan Hofmann

To whom it may concern,
Letter and Poetry | Alyce Copeland

Love in the Time of Corona
Poetry | John Cuetara

What We Know about the Fatalities
Fiction | Lisa Michelle Moore

Do Lockdowns Ever End?
Poetry | Diego Islas

Wish You Were Here
Poetry | Joan Goodreau

Comfort
Poetry | Celeste Blair

Didn’t We Once Call It Love?
Poetry | E. Ethelbert Miller

The Cheat
Poetry | Rayna Momen

How I’ve Survived This Long, Part 3
Poetry | Kasha Martin Gauthier

What it’s like to get married in prison during a pandemic
Essay | Christopher Blackwell

Mask: A parachute that catches my breath

Invisi dis ability in COVID Times
Essay | Catherine Young

Corona Spring
Poetry | Deborah DeNicola

Unmasked
Poetry | Faiza Anum

The Fabric of Society
Fiction | Alice Benson

Masked
Poetry | Christine Rhein

Melt Down
Poetry | Mary K O’Melveny

May 6, 2020
Poetry | Kevin McLellan

Barriers
Essay | Robbie Gamble

from The Quarantinas
Poetry | Stephanie Lenox

Labor: Warnings on the floor

Bezos Knows
Poetry | Ranney Campbell

We Are Family: A Lesson Learned as an On-line English Teacher during COVID-19
Essay | Maya Lear Brewer

Line Speed
Poetry | Ben Gunsberg

Staying Socially and Politically Active while Socially Distancing: Making the Issues around COVID-19 Part of One’s Activism
Essay | C. Liegh McInnis

Essential Medical Workers Are to Report to Duty
Poetry | Michele Bombardier

These Hands
Fiction | Z. S. Roe

Postcard from Pandemic
Poetry | Robert Okaji

A Classroom Hums in Wait.
Poetry | Vanessa Chica Ferreira

Sickness: My stomach charlie-horsed

My COVID Story
Essay | Brett L. Massey

Essentially Unseen
Poetry | Lavinia Kumar

Nudge
Poetry | Phrieda Bogere

Elegy
Poetry | Bianca Alyssa Pérez

I Cut Up My Hillary T-shirt to Make a COVID Mask
Poetry | Joan E. Bauer

A Story of Constantine, COVID-19, and Pandora
Fiction | Waliyah Oladipo

New Age
Poetry | Robert J. Levy

Alcohol Woman
Poetry | Deidra Suwanee Dees

Grief: Interjected like a comma

Elegy, Interrupted
Poetry | Emily Ransdell

My Mother Whispers, Doesn’t He Look So Peaceful
Poetry | Bianca Alyssa Pérez

A Sonnet for the Living
Poetry | Bianca Alyssa Pérez

#covidclarity
Essay | Marcelle Mentor

Trapped
Poetry | Deidra Suwanee Dees

Love, Coronavirus
Poetry | Lisa Suhair Majaj

A Poet Attempts to Homeschool, Week 6: Fractions
Poetry | Kasha Martin Gauthier

Evaporating Villanelle during a Time of Pandemic
Poetry | Jen Karetnick

A Day in the Life
Essay | Eric Ebers

What You Want to Say
Poetry | Maria Rouphail

Zoom Funeral
Poetry | Laura Glenn

For Jon, Who Died Because of Time
Poetry | Rayna Momen

Survival: Remember every surface you touch

Essential Nonessentials in Lockdown
Poetry | Katy Giebenhain

The Eaters
Fiction | Danielle Lauren

Off-Script
Poetry | Monserrat Escobar Arteaga

Heroes
Fiction | Mark Brazaitis

15 Mar 2020—A (a roll in the hand is worth two on the shelf) Haiku
Poetry | Peter Joel

We Will Sing of Gone Bodies Some Days from Now
Poetry | Blessing Omeiza Ojo

In Times of Quarantine
Poetry | Rosalie Hendon

Halmoni’s Kimchi Pancakes
Recipe | Elia Min

COVID Curriculum
Essay | Dominique Traverse Locke

Monkeys
Poetry | Fabiyas M V

Justice and Reckoning: Colonial co-morbidities

How to Make White Supremacy Generative/How to Survive a Pandemic
Essay | Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán

Blackout
Poetry | Thomas Beckwith

The Marrow-Sucking Grip of Immigration Injustice
Poetry | Kim Denning

White
Poetry | Roan Davis

we’ve been here before
Poetry | Liseli A. Fitzpatrick

Crosstown
Poetry | Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán

My Uncertain Story
Essay | Noe Hernandez

Em Ontvlecetv / Invaded
Poetry | Deidra Suwanee Dees

POV
Poetry | Jameka Hartley

The Home of the Brave
Poetry | David Antonio Reyes

Things I Never Told You
Poetry | Steve Ramirez

Environment and Place: Let the river turn the stone

Lines before Lockdown
Poetry | Lisa Suhair Majaj

hymn
Poetry | Caroline Furr

May Shivers
Poetry | Lukpata Lomba Joseph

For the emptiers have emptied them out
Poetry | Alan Smith Soto

While the World Fell Apart around Us
Poetry | Aimee Nicole

COVID Spring Comes to Southeast Pennsylvania
Poetry | Kenneth Pobo

2020
Poetry | Yuan Changming

Folded Up
Poetry | donnarkevic

Social Distance
Poetry | Fred Shaw

Austin
Poetry | Jeffrey Taylor

Hope: Beyond sorrow there’s a gardenia tree

During quarantine, I embrace myself as a long-hauler,
Poetry | Jen Karetnick

Magdalena
Poetry | Deborah “Deby” Rodriguez

Too Loud to Sleep
Essay | Natalie Mislang Mann

When the Games Return
Poetry | E. Ethelbert Miller

Wasted
Essay | Celeste Blair

This Is Not the End of the World
Poetry | Darius Atefat-Peckham

Touch Screen
Fiction | Mohini Malhotra

Notes
Contributors
About the Editors

Editors

Amy M. Alvarez is an Affrilachian poet and professor living in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Pamela Gemme is a poet, artist, and creative writing tutor from Massachusetts.

Shana Hill is a poet and founder of Poetica Pastor. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Alexis Ivy is a poet and outreach advocate for homeless people in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

“The work is emotionally moving. The attention to the quotidian, lived experiences of those affected offers unique insights into a global catastrophe that has turned precious lives and deaths into statistics. . . . An important cultural response.”
Darius Bost, author of Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence

“This is a text of powerful firsthand accounts that capture the current context in critical and intersectional ways that are attentive to how individual lives are shaped by structural realities. It is important that these voices are engaged.”
Nana Osei-Kofi, Oregon State University

Summary

American Energy Cinema explores how Hollywood movies have portrayed energy from the early film era to the present. Looking at classics like Giant, Silkwood, There Will Be Blood, and Matewan, and at quirkier fare like A Is for Atom and Convoy, it argues that films have both reflected existing beliefs and conjured new visions for Americans about the role of energy in their lives and their history.

The essays in this collection show how film provides a unique and informative lens to understand perceptions of energy production, consumption, and infrastructure networks. By placing films that prominently feature energy within historical context and analyzing them as historical objects, the contributing authors demonstrate how energy systems of all kinds are both integral to the daily life of Americans and inextricable from larger societal changes and global politics.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Part 1: When Disaster Strikes

1. Blackouts, Bad Guys, and Belly Laughs: Exploring America’s First Cascading Power Failure in Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? (1968)
Julie A. Cohn

2. Meltdown: Nuclear Cinema and the Martha Mitchell Effect in The China Syndrome (1979) and Silkwood (1983)
Caroline Peyton

3. “The Juice”: The Road Warrior (1981) and the Cultural Logic of Energy Denial in the Early Days of Modern Globalization
Christopher R. W. Dietrich

4. Built for Pyro: A Perfect Inferno on the Deepwater Horizon (2016)
Tyler Priest

5. Chernobyl (2019): A Soviet Propaganda Win Delivered Thirty-Three Years Late
Kate Brown

Part 2: Energy and Nature

6. Wings (1927): Aviation, War, and Energy
Conevery Bolton Valencius

7. Derricks and Skulls: Filming and Promoting the Extractive Landscapes of Boom Town (1940)
Michaela Rife

8. Petrodocumentary in the 1940s: The Standard Oil Photography Project, Louisiana Story (1948), and the Domestication of the US Oil Industry
Emily Roehl

9. TVA and the Price of Progress: Elia Kazan’s Wild River (1960)
Donald C. Jackson

10. Do Action Movies and an Environmental Message Mix? About as Much as Oil and Water: On Deadly Ground (1994)
Teresa Sabol Spezio

Part 3: Critiquing the Western

11. Selling the American “Oil Frontier”: Tulsa (1949), Giant (1956), and American Resource Politics during the Early Cold War
Sarah Stanford-McIntyre

12. Ranches to Oil Wells: Reconfiguring the Western Hero in Hellfighters (1968) and Fires of Kuwait (1992)
Ila Tyagi

13. Revisiting Matewan (1987): Upending the Appalachian “Western” and Broadening an Old Labor Tale
James R. Allison III

14. “This Is the Third World”: Coal-Fired America in Montana (1990) and Powwow Highway (1989)
Ryan Driskell Tate

15. Hydrocarbon Nostalgia and Climate Disaster: An Environmental History of Hell or High Water (2016)
Mark Boxell

Part 4: Energy and Morality

16. Control of the Industry: Nineteenth-Century Oil and Capitalism in High, Wide and Handsome (1937)
Alexander Finkelstein

17. The Formula (1980): Corporate Villains, Synthetic Fuel, and Environmental Fantasies
Raechel Lutz

18. “Keep Moving”: Convoy (1978), Car Films, and Petropopulism in the 1970s
Caleb Wellum

19. There Will Be Petroleum Cinema: Portraying the Corrosion of Oil Addiction in There Will Be Blood (2007)
Brian C. Black

Part 5: Energy and the State

20. There’s No Business Like Oil Business: The Allure of Tax-Sheltered Oil Income to Hollywood’s Wealthy
Yuxun Willy Tan

21. “Limitless Power at Man’s Command”: A Is for Atom (1953), the Cold War, and Visions of the Nuclear Future in the 1950s
Sarah E. Robey

22. Syriana (2005): The Oil Curse and Hollywood’s 9/11 Film
Robert Lifset

23. Hoover Dam in Hollywood: Energy Anxiety in Superman (1978), Transformers (2007), and San Andreas (2015)
Daniel Macfarlane

Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index

Editors

Robert Lifset is the Donald Keith Jones Associate Professor of History in the Honors College at the University of Oklahoma and the author of Power on the Hudson: Storm King Mountain and the Emergence of Modern American Environmentalism. Raechel Lutz teaches history and civics at the Wardlaw+Hartridge School. Sarah Stanford-McIntyre is assistant professor of engineering, ethics, and society at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Reviews

“A rich and compelling collection of essays covering a broad range of moments and films in the histories of oil, coal, nuclear power, and energy in America.”
Toby Jones, Rutgers University 

“Movies are a fun escape from reality, cultural snapshots in time, and valuable historical documents. That’s the key thesis and value of this book: it gives readers an engaging way to learn the history of energy—rather, the history of American society—with a century of thrillers, dramas, comedies, and whodunits. Addressing a range of genres, story lines, and themes, this collection of essays will be captivating and informative for movie lovers, energy enthusiasts, and historians alike.”
Michael E. Webber, host and creator of the PBS special Energy at the Movies 

Summary

Ecologies of a Storied Planet in the Anthropocene is a tour de force. With transdisciplinarity and theoretical lucidity, it rethinks the Anthropocene from a material ecocritical perspective, envisioning innovative modes of knowledge for deeper understandings of Anthropocene ecologies. Focusing on nonhuman agencies, Serpil Oppermann shows in fascinating detail how to better imagine an ecological future on our storied planet that has suffered enormously from an anthropocentric mindset.

Contents

Introduction

1. The Storied Planet in the Anthropocene

2. The Scale of the Anthropocene and New Anthroposcenarios

3. Migrant Ecologies of the Anthropocene

4. Postnatural Ecologies of the Anthropocene

5. The Ecology of Colors in the Anthropocene

Coda

Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index

Author

Serpil Oppermann is professor of environmental humanities and director of the Environmental Humanities Center at Cappadocia University. She is the coeditor of many books, including International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism, Material Ecocriticism, and Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene.

Reviews

“Simply dazzling. . . . The  book  is  shockingly revealing, honest, and  persuasive. It  shines.”
Ecocene

“Genuinely interdisciplinary, clear, and readable. This should be read across the academy—from geography to literary studies.”
Claire Colebrook, Penn State University

Summary

One of the first book-length studies of Robert Morgan, Community across Time considers the Appalachian writer’s explorations of memory, family history, and landscape. It provides a study of all of Morgan’s fiction to date, as well as a chapter on his poetry and some reference, where appropriate, to his nonfiction. Rebecca Godwin examines the family history that informs much of this body of work, offering an extended biographical essay that ties characters and plot details to Morgan’s ancestors’ lives and to his own experiences growing up in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Religious rifts, economic hardships, class conflicts, the place of women and Indigenous peoples, and the failure of humans to recognize the divinity of the natural world are among the motifs centering Morgan’s writing. Community across Time explores those themes as it looks to Morgan’s relationship to the Appalachian South.

Contents

Preface

1. Influences and Context: Robert Morgan in Literary Community

2. Roots of a Writing Life: His Appalachian Homes, South and North

3. Sixteenth- through Nineteenth-Century History: Fictionalizing Pioneers and Conflicts

4. The Family Novels: Two Generations of Paternal and Maternal Ancestors

5. More Short Fiction: Classism, War, Machine-Age Destruction

6. Poetry’s Place: Memory, Nature, Science, Resurrection

7. Final Words: The Morgenland Elohist

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Author

Rebecca Godwin is professor of English and Elizabeth H. Jordan Chair of Southern Literature at Barton College in Wilson, North Carolina. She is author of a book on Lee Smith as well as forty essays and book reviews in critical anthologies or scholarly journals, all focused on southern or Appalachian writers.

Reviews

“Robert Morgan has established himself as a major American writer and one of the most important voices to have emerged from Appalachia in the past half century. Remarkably, no scholarly monograph has yet been published on his writing. Rebecca Godwin’s excellent treatment is poised to satisfy a demand that is keenly and widely felt.”
George Hovis, author of Vale of Humility: Plain Folk in Contemporary North Carolina Fiction

Summary

After spending four years of adolescence in suburban North Carolina, Kristine Langley Mahler, even as an adult, is still buffeted by the cultural differences between her pioneer-like upbringing in Oregon and the settled southern traditions into which she could never assimilate. Collecting evidence of displacement—a graveyard in a mall parking lot, a suburban neighborhood of white kids bused to desegregate public schools in the 1990s, and the death of her best friend—Curing Season is an attempt to understand her failed grasp at belonging.

Mahler’s yearning for acceptance remains buried like a splinter, which she carefully tweezes out in the form of artifacts from her youth. But it isn’t until she encounters a book of local family histories that she takes inhabitation and truth apart, grafting and twisting and imprinting her history on theirs, until even she can no longer tell the difference between their truth and her own. Using inventive essay forms, Mahler pries apart the cracks of exclusion and experiments with the nature of belonging, memory, and place. Curing Season is a coming-of-age memoir for anyone who grew up anywhere but home.

Contents

Surface Tension
Club Pines
Shadowbox
A Fixed Plot
Mädchenfänger
She’ll Only Come Out at Night
Creepsake
Not Something That’s Gone
Out Line
In the Burn Pile Behind the Old Nobles House
A Pit Is Removed, a Hollow Remains
Alignment
Pull Me Through the Doorway

Acknowledgments 
Notes

Author

Kristine Langley Mahler is a memoirist experimenting with the truth who lives near Omaha, Nebraska. Her work has been supported by the Nebraska Arts Council and is published in DIAGRAM, Ninth Letter, Brevity, Speculative Nonfiction, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is the director of Split/Lip Press.

Reviews

“An exquisite, aching memoir of adolescent girlhood. . . . Treasures await.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune

“These experimental essays about place, home, and the failed effort to belong are closely tied to Eastern North Carolina, but will resonate everywhere.”
Shelf Awareness

“Through careful excavation . . . Mahler manages to create a time machine harking back to the simplicity and complexity of adolescence in 1990s America.”
Booklist

“A fun, strange play on nostalgia and belonging that embodies something so middle school that it aches. . . . It’s a lovely and clever book of essays that add up to an intricate depiction of what must surely be everyone’s oddest time.”
The Rumpus

“Kristine Langley Mahler’s Curing Season is a lovely and rapturous excavation and examination of the past, a lesson in writing oneself into history when it doesn’t offer you a space. Displaced, coming of age, estranged from tradition, feeling out of place, this is a voice that teaches us how to live in the aftermath: you may not recognize life as you are living it, mementos may not reveal themselves until after the fact, what we miss and mourn may be what harmed us in the past. In imaginative forms and gripping prose, Mahler leads us to the entombed interiors of loss and shows us how to rewrite our stories so that we truly fit in.”
Jenny Boully, author of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life

“An exquisite excavation of childhood and adolescence, Curing Season recounts Kristine Langley Mahler’s long-ago attempts at fitting in after moving to her new town: from wanting to carry the right shopping bag in the mall to forming an alliance with one girl against others to mailing ‘histrionic letters of homesickness’ to friends at her old school. In wise, lyrical, and formally inventive essays, Mahler vividly illustrates the heartaches of trying to belong in a place—even after leaving it.”
Jeannie Vanasco, author of Things We Didn’t Talk about When I Was a Girl

“An exceptional example of both place-based and experimental writing. My own adolescence and all the times I felt like an outsider sprang to life reading these pages.”
Erica Trabold, author of Five Plots

Summary

2023 Colorado Book Award Winner, Literary Fiction

It’s almost a decade after the Great Recession, and in Colorado, St. Anthony Sausage has not recovered. Neither have its employees: a laid-off railway engineer, an exiled computer whiz, a young woman estranged from her infant daughter, an older man with cancer who lacks health care. As these low-wage workers interact under the supervision of the factory’s owner and his quietly rebellious daughter, they come to understand that in America’s postindustrial landscape, although they may help or comfort each other, they also have to do what’s best for themselves.

Over the course of these twelve interrelated stories, Rachel King gives life to diverse, complex, and authentic characters who are linked through the sausage factory and through their daily lives in a vividly rendered small town in Boulder County. The internal and external struggles of Bratwurst Haven’s population are immediately and intimately relatable and resonant: these people seek answers within the world they inhabit while questioning what it means to want more from their lives.

Contents

Railing
Visitation Day
A Friendship
A Deal
Poker Night
Childrearing
Murals
At the Lake
Strangers
Middle Age
Pavel
Bratwurst Haven

Author

Rachel King is the author of the novel People along the Sand. Her short stories have appeared in One Story, North American Review, Green Mountains Review, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Oregon and West Virginia University, she lives in her hometown of Portland, Oregon.

Reviews

“An excellent collection that’s likely to appeal to fans of Alice Munro and Tobias Wolff—or to anybody with a taste for emotionally resonant short fiction.”
Kirkus Reviews

“Often hovering on the cusp of some potential change, the characters in Bratwurst Haven’s beautifully written stories share a yearning for more—a better relationship or job or simply a chance to feel content. These all-too-relatable struggles make the stories not only engrossing but also an intriguing and tenderly rendered study of this flawed world we call home.”
Rajia Hassib, author of A Pure Heart

“In these twelve linked short stories, Rachel King captures the magic of the American mountain west and the people who call it home. Her characters take work in a sausage factory, pull shifts at a bar to fund their art, struggle with booze and pills, or end up with a haircut after losing at poker. They also care for one another, offering kindnesses both large and small. In Bratwurst Haven, King uncovers the complicated ways humans connect, and she gives it to us in prose that is as crystal clear as a bright Colorado day. It is a collection that builds with each story revealing more and more of the friendships and family that bind us all together—and that we cannot escape from, even when we try.”
Wendy J. Fox, author of What If We Were Somewhere Else and If the Ice Had Held

“Bratwurst Haven is an endearing composite portrait of a working class community in transition.”
Foreword Reviews

Summary

In the space of one weekend in Morgantown, West Virginia, private investigator Big Jim Foote finds himself at the center of two murder investigations. Suspected of one killing at a local festival, he locates the body of a missing person immediately after. The cops are watching him, and Big Jim has a secret he dares not reveal: he is a bigfoot living in plain sight, charged with keeping his people in the surrounding hills from being discovered. To protect the bigfoot secret, he must solve both murders—and convince himself it wasn’t a bigfoot who pulled the trigger.

Through the course of his investigations, Big Jim is helped by unique and well-rendered characters and friends in both his bigfoot and human communities. Readers are introduced to Appalachian mountain folk and traditional culture in new ways, even while Big Jim experiences the impact of the opioid epidemic on his own bigfoot kin. By centering a mythical creature as the unlikely protagonist in this enchanting literary murder mystery, Foote offers a winsome redefinition of a cryptid “monster” and breathes new life into the PI genre.

Author

Tom Bredehoft lives in Morgantown, West Virginia. In an earlier life, he was an English professor specializing in medieval literature.

Reviews

“A tale about humanity wrapped in the garment of an excellent hard-boiled thriller. Part mystery, part fable but all original, Jim Foote is sure to be one of your favorite literary detectives—cryptid or otherwise.”
Jordan Farmer, author of The Poison Flood and The Pallbearer

“The first thing to say about Foote is that it is a strange and seemingly untenable hybrid of bigfoot fantasy and detective novel noir; the second is that its matter-of-fact voice and deeply authentic setting in the hollows of West Virginia render every part of the story perfectly real and entirely (marvelously) ordinary. This is a novel that uses moonshine heritage to delve into the modern opioid epidemic, and a novel that asks about the meaning of ‘otherness’ while reminding us what it means to be human. I fell into this book and loved it from the first page.”
Molly Gloss, author of Wild Life and The Heart of Horses

“Family, folklore, and mountain folk culture all play starring roles in this cryptozoological conundrum that delights and entertains at every twist of the trail.”
Southern Review of Books

“A pleasure to read. . . . The West Virginia otherworld Bredehoft patiently builds in this compact, 224-page whodunit is a delightfully odd noir mélange.” 
West Virginia Humanities Council Broad Side 

Summary

In a book written by and for college teachers, Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy provide tips and advice on how to make all students feel welcome and included. They begin with a framework describing why explicit attention to structure enhances inclusiveness in both course design and interactions with and between students. Inclusive Teaching then provides practical ways to include more voices in a series of contexts: when giving instructions for group work and class activities, holding office hours, communicating with students, and more. The authors finish with an opportunity for the reader to reflect on what evidence to include in a teaching dossier that demonstrates inclusive practices.

The work of two highly regarded specialists who have delivered over a hundred workshops on inclusive pedagogy and who contribute frequently to public conversations on the topic, Inclusive Teaching distills state-of-the-art guidance on addressing privilege and implicit bias in the college classroom. It seeks to provide a framework for individuals and communities to ask, Who is being left behind and what can teachers do to add more structure?
 

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Contents

Preface 

Chapter 1: Inclusive Teaching as a Mindset

Chapter 2: The Value of Structure

Chapter 3: Designing Your Course and Syllabus with an Inclusive Mindset

Chapter 4: Launching Your Course

Chapter 5: Classroom Environment and Interactions

Chapter 6: Inclusive Practices Outside the Classroom

Chapter 7: Reflecting and Documenting

Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index

Authors

Kelly A. Hogan and Viji Sathy are award-winning instructors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a passion for student success, equity, and inclusion in the classroom. Both are leading the campus in curriculum reforms, bringing inclusive course design and pedagogy to all disciplines.

Reviews

“An important and necessary contribution to the conversation about teaching that is happening now, both postpandemic and in the wake of ongoing protests about racism in our society. The overall tone is one of compassion and deep understanding of what teaching entails and how to make it better for both instructor and student.”
Cyndi Kernahan, author of Teaching about Race and Racism in the College Classroom

“Compelling and critical. Given the urgent need to promote justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in our communities, the book is a must-read for all who are in a position to better support inclusive teaching inside and outside the classroom.”
Science

“Powerful and welcome. . . . There are a lot of pragmatic strategies to implement—something for faculty at every level of teaching expertise.”
Regan A. R. Gurung, coauthor of Thriving in Academia: Building a Career at a Teaching-Focused Institution

Summary

Picture a Professor is a collection of evidence-based insights and intersectional teaching strategies crafted by and for college instructors. It aims to inspire transformative student learning while challenging stereotypes about what a professor looks like.

Representing a variety of scholarly disciplines, the volume’s contributing authors offer practical advice for effectively navigating student preconceptions about embodied identity and academic expertise. Each contributor recognizes the pervasiveness of racialized, gendered, and other biases about professors and recommends specific ways to respond to and interrupt such preconceptions—helping students, teachers, and others reenvision what we think of when we picture a professor.

Educators at every stage of their career will find affirming acknowledgment of the ways systemic inequities affect college teaching conditions, as well as actionable advice about facilitating student learning with innovative course design, classroom activities, assessment techniques, and more.
 

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Contents

Introduction: Embodied Identity, Empowering Pedagogy, and Transformative Learning
Jessamyn Neuhaus

Part One
The First Day: Strategies for Starting Strong

1. How Blind Professors Win the First Day: Setting Ourselves Up for Success
Sheri Wells-Jensen, Emily K. Michael, and Mona Minkara

2. Critical Reflexivity as a Tool for Students Learning to Recognize Biases: A First Day of Class Conversation on What a Professor Looks Like
Jesica Siham Fernández

3. Commonalities and Research: A One-Two Punch to Combat STEM Fears and Biases on the First Day of Class
Kelly E. Theisen

4. Where’s the Professor? First-Day Active Learning for Navigating Students’ Perceptions of Young Professors
Reba Wissner

Part Two
Making Connections: Strategies for Building Trust and Rapport with Students

5. Using Experiential Learning to Humanize Course Content and Connect with Students
Breanna Boppre

6. Collaborative Rubric Creation as a Queer, Transgender Professor’s Tactic for Building Trust in the Classroom
Fen Kennedy

7. Reflect to Deflect: Using Metacognitive Activities to Address Student Perceptions of Instructor Competence and Caring
Melissa Eblen-Zayas

8. From Absentminded Professor to Epistemic Collaborator: Reframing Academic Expertise through Vulnerability and Metacognition
Rebecca Scott

9. Black Man in a Strange Land: Using Principles of Psychology and Behavior Science to Thrive in the Classroom
Erik Simmons

Part Three
Anti-Racist Pedagogies: Strategies for Increasing Equity

10. Beyond Making Statements: The Reflective Practice of Becoming an Anti-Racist Educator
M. Gabriela Torres

11. Rippling the Patterns of Power: Enacting Anti-Racist Pedagogy with Students as Co-teachers
Chanelle Wilson and Alison Cook-Sather

12. Beyond “Good Writing”: Enacting Anti-Racist Policies in Academic Writing
Jacinta Yanders and Ashley JoEtta

Part Four
Teaching with Our Whole Selves: Strategies for Instructional Authenticity and Pedagogical/Professional Success

13. The Superpowers of Visual Ambiguity: Transfiguring My Experience of Colorism and Multiheritage Identity for Educational Good
Donna Mejia

14. Sharing Our Stories to Build Community, Highlight Bias, and Address Challenges to Authority
Sarah Mayes-Tang

15. Teaching Up: Bringing My Blackness into the Classroom
Celeste Atkins

16. Empowered Strategies for Women Faculty of Color Navigating Teaching Inequities in Higher Ed
Chavella T. Pittman

Index

Editor

Jessamyn Neuhaus is a professor of history and Center for Teaching Excellence director at SUNY Plattsburgh. Recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence, she is the author of two historical monographs, numerous articles, and Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers.

Reviews

“Does a service to all who would prefer a different path, offering realistic strategies to engage students in undermining scholarly stereotypes.”
Science

“Raising awareness of challenges diverse instructors can face when teaching in higher ed classrooms and sharing empowering and tested solutions are both much needed. Picture a Professor does both and more. Grounded in the experiences of scholars teaching in the classroom, the book is a valuable resource for instructors, administrators, those responsible for promotion and tenure decisions, and educational developers partnering with a diverse faculty. Much praise to Jessamyn Neuhaus and chapter authors for addressing the often undiscussed truth that not all instructors who teach are afforded the same privileges.”
Tracie Marcella Addy, coauthor of What Inclusive Instructors Do: Principles and Practices for Excellence in College Teaching

“In this collection, the authors weave scholarship, personal narratives, and practical teaching ideas into an intersectional call to action that, when reflectively implemented, will positively transform our college classrooms for years to come.”
Travis Thurston, coeditor of Resilient Pedagogy: Practical Teaching Strategies to Overcome Distance, Disruption, and Distraction

Summary

Every history of West Virginia’s creation in 1863 explains the event in similar ways: at the start of the Civil War, political, social, cultural, and economic differences with eastern Virginia motivated the northwestern counties to resist secession from the Union and seek their independence from the rest of the state. In The Fifth Border State, Scott A. MacKenzie offers the first new interpretation of the topic in over a century—one that corrects earlier histories’ tendency to minimize support for slavery in the state’s founding.

Employing previously unused sources and reexamining existing ones, MacKenzie argues that West Virginia experienced the Civil War in the same ways as the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. Like these northernmost slave states, northwestern Virginia supported the institution of slavery out of proportion to the actual presence of enslavement there. The people who became West Virginians built a new state first to protect slavery, but radical Unionists and escaping slaves forced emancipation on the statehood movement. MacKenzie shows how conservatives and radicals clashed over Black freedom, correcting many myths about West Virginia’s origins and making The Fifth Border State an important addition to the literature in Appalachian and Civil War history.

Contents

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgments

Introduction 

1. Northwestern Virginia’s Path towards Reconciliation, 1829–1851

2. Northwestern Virginia on the Defensive, 1851–1860 

3. Northwestern Virginia in the Secession Crisis, January to July 1861 

4. The Conservative Phase of the West Virginia Statehood Movement, August 1861 to February 1862

5. The Radical Phase of the West Virginia Statehood Movement, March 1862 to June 1863

6. West Virginia under Radical Rule, June 1863 to December 1869

Epilogue: West Virginia Redeemed, 1870–1872

Appendix A: An Appeal of the People of West Virginia to Congress, Suggesting for the Consideration of Members Material Facts

Appendix B: Report of the Minority to Lincoln’s Border State Emancipation Plan, July 15, 1862

Notes

Author

Scott A. MacKenzie received his education at the University of Manitoba, Queens College of the City University of New York, the University of Calgary, and Auburn University. He lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Reviews

"Thoughtfully researched and lucidly argued."
Civil War Monitor

“A refreshing new look at how West Virginia became a state. I can see The Fifth Border State appealing widely to scholars of the Civil War era.”
William Hal Gorby, West Virginia University