Summary

The linked stories in Mama Said are set in Louisville, Kentucky, a city with a rich history steeped in tobacco, bourbon, and gambling, indulgences that can quickly become gripping and destructive vices. Set amid the tail end of the crack epidemic and the rise of the opioid crisis, Mama Said evokes Black family life in all its complexity, following JayLynn, along with her cousins Zaria and Angel, as they come of age struggling against their mothers’ drug addictions.

JayLynn heads to college intent on gaining distance from her depressed mother, only to learn that her mother’s illness has reached a terrifying peak. She fears the chaos and instability of her extended family will prove too much for her boyfriend, whose idyllic family feels worlds, not miles, apart from her own. When bats invade Zaria’s new home, she is forced to determine how much she is willing to sacrifice to be a good mother. Angel rebels on Derby night, risking her safety to connect with her absent mother and the wild ways that consumed her.

Mama Said separates from stereotypes of Black families, presenting instead the joy, humor, and love that coexist with the trauma of drug abuse within communities. Kristen Gentry’s stories showcase the wide-reaching repercussions of addiction and the ties that forever bind daughters to their mothers, flaws and all.

Contents

Mama Said
A New World
A Satisfying Meal
A Sort of Winning
Origin Story
A Good Education
Grown Folks’ Business
Introduction
To Have and to Hold
Animal Kingdom
In Her Image
Everything You Could Ever Want

Acknowledgments

Author

Kristen Gentry received her MFA from Indiana University. Her award-winning fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Jabberwock Review, and other journals. She is a VONA and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference alumna, as well as a member of the inaugural Poets & Writers publicity incubator cohort for debut authors. Her passion is helping Black women and girls share their stories—the ones they’ve lived and the ones they create. She lives and writes in Louisville, Kentucky. Learn more at kristengentry.com.

Reviews

“A celebration of Black family life that will make you laugh and cry in equal measure.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“The collection will reshape what you think about the region and the people that inhabit it.”
—Debutiful

“Surprising and revelatory. Mama Said is funny and smart, with many wonderful images, arresting descriptions, and well-developed characters with rich interior lives. I love this book.”
—Stephanie Powell Watts, author of No One Is Coming to Save Us

“This book has staying power. Mama Said is a collection of brilliant stories that are of Kentucky, of Louisville, of Black communities throughout the United States. They are rooted in geographic specificity yet expand to far-reaching bounds of culture, family, and belonging. The characters and their struggles and triumphs will vibrate within your heart and mind long after the last pages are turned.”
—Crystal Wilkinson, former poet laureate of Kentucky and author of Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts

“Mama Said is a tough yet tender glimpse into a complex community in a city full of strife and love. The characters contain a depth not often seen in a collection of stories, and readers are sure to be thinking about their lives and relationships long after finishing the last (tear-jerking!) page.”
—Maggie Henriksen, Carmichael’s Bookstore

Summary

From a distance, Matthieu Chapman’s life and accomplishments serve as an example of racial progress in America: the first in his family to go to college, he earns two master’s degrees and a doctorate and then becomes a professor of theater. Despite his personal and academic success, however, the specter of antiblackness continues to haunt his every moment and interaction.

Told through fragments, facets, shards, slivers, splinters, and absences, Shattered places Chapman’s own story in dialogue with US history and structural analysis of race to relay the experience of being very alive in a demonstrably antiblack society—laying bare the impact of the American way on black bodies, black psyches, and black lives. From the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the offices of higher education, from a Loyal White Knights flyer on his windshield to a play with black students written by a black playwright, Chapman’s life story embodies the resistance that occurs, the shattering, collapsing, and reconfiguring of being that happens in the collisions between conceptions of blackness. Shattered is a heartrending and thought-provoking challenge to narratives of racial progress and postracial America—an important reminder that systemic antiblack racism affects every black person regardless of what they achieve in spite of it.

Author

Matthieu Chapman is assistant professor of theater and head of theater studies at SUNY New Paltz. His writing has been published in Huffington Post and Pithead Chapel, among others. He holds degrees in theater and performance theory from San Diego State University, Mary Baldwin University, and University of California San Diego.

Reviews

“Every so often, a book comes along that changes the way we see, speak, and think about the world. Shattered is one of those books. Chapman’s relentless prose interweaves compelling narrative with groundbreaking critical race theory in an unflinching analysis of the day-to-day violence inflicted on black beings in an antiblack world. A must-read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of race relations in America and answers to why black liberation remains deferred.”
Frank B. Wilderson III, author of Afropessimism and Incognegro

“I’m writing this while I’m back home in West Virginia visiting my mama, and I wish my pre-writer/professor black ass coulda read Matthieu Chapman’s Shattered as a teen because it woulda helped me navigate this complicated mess of growing up black in WV. Now, it’ll help me navigate this complicated mess of growing up black in this world. This important book is for everyone, and I hope all the young folks and old heads in any geography get a chance to read it. Thanks, homie.”  
Steven Dunn, author of Potted Meat

Excerpt

Author’s Note

Afropessimism.

Many find the name off-putting, depressing, defeatist—all reactions I had initially. But once I began to interrogate my own aversion to the label and began to truly engage with the nuances and diversity of thought within the field, I found things I had never experienced before.

Radical hope.
Radical creativity.
Radical self-determination.

Afropessimism is a field of theory that distinguishes antiblack racism from other forms of racism. As such, the problem of race for black people is not white supremacy—in which all nonwhite races suffer equally compared to whiteness—but rather the problem is antiblackness—in which all nonblacks maintain a structural position of human from which blacks are excluded. In other words, black people are nonhuman, and everyone else is human. The distinction is that under white supremacy, all nonwhite beings are positioned as subhuman—less than the full white subject—and therefore the suffering of nonwhite beings can be analogized. For example, with white supremacy, we can compare the suffering of the colonized Indian to the suffering of the immigrant Mexican. In Afropessimism, blackness is incompatible with the construction of the human, therefore blacks do not exist on the scale that would allow us to compare black suffering to human suffering. Afropessimism is not a critique of black people. Rather it is a critique of a world that needs black suffering and black death to maintain its own mental health.

Throughout this book, I use “black” in the lowercase. And only in the lowercase—even when starting a sentence. I used to oscillate between various constructions of “black” and “Black” to distinguish between a color and a Concept. “black”—black as night, black tar, coal-black. “Black”—Black people, Black being, Black death. But “Black” is not proper in this context because the concept of black in this book is not proper. This book is not about blackness that is sanitized and proper and resilient and hopeful. This book is about the blackness that survives despite its death, despite a world that continually kills us. This book is about blackness that, as La Marr Jurelle Bruce says, is “a critique of the proper . . . a blackness that is neither capitalized nor propertized via the protocols of Western grammar; a blackness that centers those who are typically regarded as lesser and lower cases.”1 It is a blackness that escapes what the world thinks of it and transcends any definitions I could give. I love the capital B, and I love those who use the capital B. But this book escapes designations of proper and improper. This book works beyond and between the anger and the rage and the joy and the love and the hope for a future and the hopelessness in the now. Nothing about this book is “proper,” most of all its exploration and expression of blackness.

This is not a book about black life or about living life as a black man. This is neither a book about being black nor about black being. This book is about the resistance that occurs, the shattering, collapsing, and reconfiguring of being that happens in the collisions between competing conceptions of blackness. This book is about the struggle between a free, unbridled, uncontainable blackness and the cage that the antiblack world has built for it.

This book is about living in a world of the dying.
This book is about being dead in the land of the living.
This book is about the tension between wholes and pieces in a world whose whole is built on my pieces.

As such, the story is in the whole, but the story is also in the pieces: fragments, facets, shards, slivers, splinters, absences.

• Fragments: Think of these as broader chapters that cover chunks of time.
• Facets: Each fragment contains multiple facets—the large pieces of a primarily linear narrative of my trials and tribulations in navigating the world of difference between my blackness and how the world perceives, engages, and violates my blackness. Each facet is required to see the whole. The facets in the narrative, while numbered beginning with one in each fragment, do not necessarily come in chronological order—the pieces never fall organized or neatly.
• Shards: Alongside the facets are various shards of story that have broken through time, space, and narrative to provide other experiences in my life that inform and enliven the facets.
• Slivers: Adjacent to the facets and shards are the smaller slivers of being that provide light, brief bits of history, and contexts through which to view the other pieces.
• Absences: But shattered objects are not defined solely by the pieces that scatter. The breaking produces negative spaces that define the separate parts of the former whole. These absences appear on the page as the unseeable that haunt and scandalize the whole.
• Splinter: And just when I thought I had collected all the pieces, I found that splinters remain missing. Tiny, nearly imperceptible spears of emotion and imagery that cannot be put into tidy paragraphs.

Absence
Status: The story you are reading is true.

This story is not about resistance and resilience in the face of white supremacy.
This story is not about overcoming obstacles and dismantling systemic racism.
The story is asking why black resistance and overcoming always seem to fall short of creating lasting change.
This story is asking how, despite the many political and social progresses of black people, we are still no closer to the mountaintop.
This story is questioning if we’ve been having the wrong conversations about how to change the world.
This story is about a world that needs antiblackness to function.
This story is about wandering the world of the living as a dead man.
This story is about surviving in death.
This story isn’t about changing that world.
This story is about destroying it.

Fragment 1

Facet: 1
Age: 11
Place: Uniontown, PA
Status: Dying

I had never actually heard the word in person. Sure, I had heard the word’s distant cousin, whose razor blade edges had been dulled by the softening of the hard r sound into “nigga,” on albums from the Wu-Tang Clan and Dr. Dre. But even in those cases, the force of the word was always mediated through layers of hi-fi and audiotape.

But here, in the flesh, the word was too real. The word became tangible. The hard r re-sharpened the blade. The blade grew wings, eyes, a mouth—the razors becoming talons on a monster that cut through the room toward me with velocity and violence. It caught my chest and ripped through my flesh, leaving a wound in my soul that would never and could never heal. A taste overcame my mouth: a blend of sour rancidness and ferric metal—a mix of bile and blood that rose from deep in the pit of my stomach.

It was the taste of hate.

Up until that moment, I didn’t know that hate had a taste.

Summary

A critic once wrote that Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was about two things: Yugoslavia and everything else. Something similar might be said about Clear Creek. In this boundary-defying work, Erik Reece spends a year beside the stream in his rural Kentucky homeplace, tracking the movements of the seasons, the animals, and the thoughts passing through his mind.

Clear Creek is a series of vignettes that calls us out of our frenzied, digitized world to a slower, more contemplative way of being. Reece’s subjects range from solitude and solidarity to the intricacies of forest communities, and from the genius of songwriter Tom T. Hall to reforestation projects on abandoned strip mines. A work of close observation and carefully grounded insights, Clear Creek articulates a nature-based philosophy for pondering humanity’s current plight.

Author

Erik Reece is the author of five books of nonfiction, including Utopia Drive and Lost Mountain, which won Columbia University’s John B. Oakes Award for Environmental Journalism. He teaches writing and literature at the University of Kentucky.

Reviews

“Reece’s reflections on inner landscapes compared to outer landscapes and on the active life versus the contemplative life are compelling, as are his profound reflections on humanity’s place in the natural world.”
Foreword Reviews 

“Erik Reece is an important writer, and his deeply observed and well-researched natural history pulses back and forth with ideas. We need more books like this out in the world, books that give us hints for how to be in a time of crisis.”
David Gessner, author of Leave It as It Is: A Journey through Theodore Roosevelt’s American Wilderness

“A wise, rambling book that is equal parts memoir, natural history, and philosophical investigation. Erik Reece leads that rarest and most important of things, an examined life. Readers of Barry Lopez and Wendell Berry will find much to admire here.”
Joe Wilkins, author of Fall Back Down When I Die

“In Clear Creek, Erik Reece distinguishes between indoor philosophy and outdoor philosophy, as I myself distinguish between indoor books and outdoor books. Since Reece has bounced his ideas off stars and clouds, sunfish and jewelweed, herons, caterpillars, campfire flames, and his wild friends Whitman, Thoreau, and Epicurus, his book is altogether an outdoor book, full of starry, grassy, fiery ideas, and is itself a wild and wise new friend.”
Amy Leach, author of The Everybody Ensemble

Summary

Winner, 2025 Tennessee Book Award, Fiction

Told through alternating perspectives, God of River Mud chronicles the lives of Berna Minor, her husband, their four children, and Berna’s secret lover.

To escape a life of poverty and abuse, Berna Cannaday marries Zechariah Minor, a fundamentalist Baptist preacher, and commits herself to his faith, trying to make it her own. After Zechariah takes a church beside the Elk River in rural Clay, West Virginia, Berna falls in love with someone from their congregation—Jordan, a woman who has known since childhood that he was meant to be a man. Berna keeps her secret hidden as she struggles to be the wife and mother she believes God wants her to be. Berna and Zechariah’s children struggle as well, trying to reconcile the theology they are taught at home with the fast-changing world around them. And Jordan struggles to find a community and a life that allow him both to be safely and fully himself, as Jay, and to be loved for who he is.

As the decades and stories unfold, traditional evangelical Bible culture and the values of rural Appalachia clash against innate desires, LGBTQ identity, and gender orientation. Sympathies develop—sometimes unexpectedly—as the characters begin to reconcile their faith and their love. God of River Mud delves into the quandary of those marginalized and dehumanized within a religious patriarchy and grapples with the universal issues of identity, faith, love, and belonging.

Contents

Book One
Who Puts His Hand to the Plow
The Flesh Lusteth against  the Spirit
If the Son Hath Set You Free
Better to Marry Than to Burn
Old Things Are Passed Away
And the Spirit against the Flesh

Book Two
Behold All Things Are Become New
The Rod of Correction
Jordan River
A Prophet of the Most High
Whose Heart Is Snares and Nets
When You Pass through the Waters
They That Mourn
Ask and It Shall Be Given You

Book Three
Work Out Your Own Salvation
The Spirit, and the Water, and the Blood
As a Good Soldier
If a Man Devour You
The Household of God
In Due Season
At the Voice of the Bird
Yet the Sea Is Not Full

Acknowledgments

Author

Vic Sizemore is the author of the essay collection Goodbye, My Tribe: An Evangelical Exodus and the short story collection I Love You I’m Leaving. His writing has been published in StoryQuarterly, North American Review, Southern Humanities Review, storySouth, PANK Magazine, and many other journals.

Reviews

“A story of rural queerness that captures evangelicalism’s hold and the way it contributes to the struggles that LGBTQ+ Appalachians face. These characters’ lived experiences are unlike those we often read about in urban settings, yet their collective narratives ring clear: we all deserve to be our true selves.”
Savannah Sipple, author of WWJD and Other Poems
 
“Utterly unique, authentic, and engrossing.”
Sandra Scofield, author of Beyond Deserving
 
“God of River Mud is both a love story and a powerful indictment of evangelical religion.”
Julia Franks, author of Over the Plain Houses and The Say So 

Summary

2023 Weatherford Award Finalist, Nonfiction

How can the craft of musical instrument making help reconnect people to place and reenchant work in Appalachia? How does the sonic search for musical tone change relationships with trees and forests? Following three craftspeople in the mountain forests of Appalachia through their processes of making instruments, Finding the Singing Spruce considers the meanings of work, place, and creative expression in drawing music from wood.

Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth explores the complexities and contradictions of instrument-making labor, which is deeply rooted in mountain forests and expressive traditions but also engaged with global processes of production and consumption. Using historical narratives and sensory ethnography, among other approaches, he finds that the craft of lutherie speaks to the past, present, and future of the region’s work and nature.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: “It Will Get in Your Blood”
1. West Virginia’s Musical Instrument Makers
2. Craft at Home in the Mountain Forest
3. A Red Spruce Guitar
4. Bringing Cremona Violins to Lobelia
5. Tonewood from the Old World and the New
Conclusion: Succession in Craft and Forest

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Author

Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth teaches folklore studies at the Ohio State University.

Reviews

“Finding the Singing Spruce is a nuanced academic contribution to both human and environmental Appalachian studies—but it is also a collection of accessible stories about people, places, and instruments. Waugh-Quasebarth’s experiences, ideas, and work will interest West Virginians, instrument makers, musicians, scholars from various fields of music and culture, and aficionados alike.”
—Aaron Allen, coeditor of Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature

"An exemplary study for folklorists and anthropologists [which] also invites the general public into the complex world of instrument making."
—Mary Linscheid, West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies

Summary

Young people will bear the brunt of the impacts of present and emerging crises occurring at all scales, from the national to the global. This volume brings together scholars and activists from various backgrounds to analyze youth interactions with law and politics, focusing specifically on the US legal landscape. It uses the lens of youth geographies to consider how legal and political systems shape our spaces, and provides leading-edge perspectives through case studies of child labor, compulsory education, asylum claims, criminalization of youth, youth activism, and more.

Of special interest in this volume is the tension between young people as both objects of law and policy and creative agents of change. Despite being directly affected by law and policy, young people are denied access to many legally sanctioned paths to shape them. Yet youth find ways to work within and mold the social, political, and legal spheres and set the stage for alternative futures.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Gloria Howerton and Leanne Purdum

Part 1: Attempts to Categorize and Manage Youth
1. Working and Schooling: A Critical Geography of Child Labor and Compulsory Education Laws in the Early Twentieth-Century United States
Meghan Cope

2. Protecting Youth: The Dismantling of Youth as a “Particular Social Group” in Contemporary Asylum Law
Kristina M. Campbell

3. “Met with the Full Prosecutorial Powers”: Zero-Tolerance Family Separations, Advocacy, and the Exceptionalism of the Child Asylum Seeker
Leanne Purdum

4. Understanding New York’s Opt-Out Movement: How School Segregation Shaped the Nation’s Largest Resistance to Standardized Testing
Olivia Ildefonso

Part 2: Youth Resistance and Resilience
5. The Coming of the Superpredators: Race, Policing, and Resistance to the Criminalization of Youth
Marsha Weissman, Glenn Rodriguez, and Evan Weissman

6. BreakOUT!: Queer and Trans of Color Activism in New Orleans
Krista L. Benson

7. Black Youth Resistance to Policies, Practices, and Dominant Narratives of the St. Louis Voluntary Desegregation Plan
Jerome E. Morris and Wanda F. McGowan

8. The Tribunal of the Future: Youth, Responsibility, and Temporal Justice in US Climate Change Litigation
Mark Ortiz

Contributors
Index

Editors

Gloria Howerton is an assistant professor in the department of geography and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. Leanne Purdum is a visiting assistant professor in the law, politics, and society program at Drake University.

Reviews

“This volume is one of the only of its kind, and its engagement with geography, the law, and policy—while reframing children and childhood—stands to make many contributions and interventions in the field.”
Nicole Nguyen, author of A Curriculum of Fear: Homeland Security in US Public Schools

Summary

“Hardly a day passes without reference to some scandal, fraud, intellectual or moral failure, or other ill associated with American academic institutions,” writes Sol Gittleman in his bracing new book, An Accidental Triumph. “If American higher education is such a failure, why are students and scholars from all over the world still so eager to secure a place in one of these institutions? Is American higher education a disaster or the envy of the world?”

Gittleman confronts this contradiction in this dynamic mix of history, analysis, and personal reflection. An Accidental Triumph tells the engaging story of how American higher education evolved from a patchwork of seminaries in the early nineteenth century into the world’s leader in research by the middle of the twentieth. Gittleman links this fascinating story to his own fifty-year academic career, which coincided with an explosive rise in enrollment, spurred by the GI Bill, and an unparalleled postwar boom in faculty hiring, prompted by massive new federal support for academic research from organizations such as the National Science Foundation.

Writing with authority, frankness, and unfailing wry good humor, Gittleman surveys the triumphs, tragedies, and tensions of the history of American higher education. Despite the relentless criticism, Gittleman finds good reason to remain optimistic about the future of teaching and research at the college and university level in the United States. 

Contents

To come

Author

Sol Gittleman is the Alice and Nathan Gantcher University Professor Emeritus at Tufts University, where he taught from 1964 until his retirement in 2015. He served as provost from 1981 to 2002 and has received many awards, fellowships, and honorary degrees for his teaching and service. He is the author of six books, including An Entrepreneurial University.

Reviews

“There’s no more important story to be told at this moment in America then why higher education matters. And there’s no more adept and engaging storyteller than Sol Gittleman.” 
Larry Tye, New York Times bestselling author of Satchel and Demagogue

“An Accidental Triumph, Sol Gittleman’s ­fast-paced, highly personal history of American higher education, reflects his many years of leadership at Tufts University and his ability to weave together the relevant literature, from scholarly work to journalistic commentary. All who know Gittleman will recognize his distinctive voice and strongly held views. And all who care about academia will benefit from his sharp insights and passion as an educator.”

Richard Freeland, author of Academia’s Golden Age: Universities in Massachusetts, 1945–1970 and former President of Northeastern University
 
“A brief, spirited, thoroughly engaging account of the evolution of American higher education from its earliest origins in the fledging seminaries of the colonies to its world pre-eminence in the 21st century. Sol Gittleman crafts his account on the basis of deep immersion in the literature on higher education, liberally laced with his own perspectives from a half century of experience as a faculty member and provost at Tufts University. He is both a cheerleader for American colleges and universities and a realist about the ways in which American higher education has opened itself to a raft of critiques about its efficacy and integrity. Well worth a careful read.”

Nancy Weiss Malkiel, author of “Keep the Damned Women Out”
: The Struggle for Coeducation and professor of history emeritus at Princeton University
 
“Sol Gittleman is a gifted scholar, professor, and academic leader whose graceful book tells the many stories of continuity and conflict in the long history of American higher education. His critical eye and good humor are an effective combination to provide insightful accounts of exclusion and inequities along with an American consensus in creating our remarkable colleges and universities.”
John Thelin, author of A History of American Higher Education and university research professor at the University of Kentucky 
 
“An Accidental Triumph has charm. Sol Gittleman is a great storyteller and his book carries a personal touch. He has genuine affection for the institutions of which he writes and in which he has lived his life, even as he is clear-eyed about its checkered past.” 

Peter J. Dougherty, former Director, Princeton University Press

“Sol Gittleman’s grasp of history, his interpretive skills, and his sense of humor—all on prominent display in An Accidental Triumph—have convinced me that no one is better suited to tell this provocative story.”
Daniel Okrent, author of Last Call and The Guarded Gate

“An extraordinary accomplishment.” 
Jonathan Wilson, author of The Red Balcony and Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate Emeritus at Tufts University