New Releases - Spring 2017
Beauty and Attention
Liz Rosenberg, PhD ’97 (Lake Union Publishing, 2016)
Rosenberg’s latest novel explores the boundaries of choice for a young woman who rejects a conventional life in the 1950s, and the consequences include both freedom and entrapment. The story pays homage to The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. Rosenberg is a professor of English at Binghamton University and the author of more than 30 books for adults and young readers.
The Revolution Has Come
Robyn C. Spencer ’90 (Duke University Press, 2016)
Oakland, Calif., is where the Black Panther organization sprang to life and ultimately drew its last breath. Spencer’s book does more than chronicle the group’s history; it tears down myths and distortions. The author demonstrates how the Black Panthers embodied Black Power through international activism, interracial alliances, a commitment to address state violence and a fostering of self-determination in the city’s black communities. Spencer also discusses the experiences of women and their contributions to not only the Black Panthers organization but to the more global Black Power movement.
The News of the Day: A Novel
Marcia (Armstrong) Metzger ’76 (Amazon Digital Services, 2016)
Under the pen name S.G. Armstrong, Metzger’s historical novel chronicles the saga of the Eisenhower family of Topeka, Kan., based on stories she heard from her own family. Protagonists John and Mabel, and their two children, struggle to understand the rapidly changing world around them, through the tumultuous years of the Great War, Prohibition, the Depression and World War II.
Madwoman
Shara McCallum, PhD ’99 (Alice James Books, 2017)
McCallum’s fifth book of poetry is a collection of works that bridge the gaps in development from girl to young woman to mother. This transformation in body, mind and identity carries a number of big questions. Can you be girl, woman and mother all at the same time? Who shapes your identity? Who is in control of your life? How do we honor the changing of who we are? McCallum is director of the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, where she also holds the Margaret Hollinshead Ley Professorship in Poetry and Creative Writing. Recognition for her work includes a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress and a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship.
Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight
Dante Di Stefano ’01, MA ’04, MAT ’06, PhD ’15 (Brighthorse Books, 2016)
Love motivates the poems in Di Stefano’s debut collection. Some are about his father, a postal worker for more than 30 years who died from cancer. Others conjure up images of hardscrabble life in Binghamton, and of people and places that have come and gone over the years. Di Stefano’s work has appeared in a number of publications including Iron Horse Literary Review, New Orleans Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah and The Writer’s Chronicle. In 2016, he won the Manchester Poetry Prize, one of the premier poetry prizes in Great Britain.
Among Margins: Critical and Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics
Fox Frazier-Foley ’05 (University of Southern California Press, 2016)
Frazier-Foley edited this collection of essays about different aesthetic approaches to art, largely from wellknown voices in the arts community representing demographics that have been marginalized in academic conversations about art (e.g., people of color, LGBTQ, women, working-class people, disabled people). She has published two prize-winning collections of poetry, one of which was selected by Vermont Poet Laureate Chard deNiord as recipient of the Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award. Her third poetry collection is forthcoming from Hyacinth Girl Press.
The Analyst
Molly Peacock ’69, MA ’77 (W.W. Norton & Company, 2017)
Centered on the bond between a patient and her therapist, Peacock’s collection of interrelated lyric poems explores how this bond transforms after the therapist suffers a brain hemorrhage and survives, thus changing the dynamic of patient-caregiver. Peacock is the author of six collections of poetry, and her poems are included in The Oxford Book of American Poetry and appear in leading literary journals internationally.