Tag Archives: Reading

The Nebraska Publications Clearinghouse receives documents every month from all Nebraska state agencies, including the University of Nebraska Press (UNP).  UNP books, as well as all Nebraska state documents, are available for checkout by libraries and librarians for their patrons.

Here are the UNP books the Clearinghouse received in January and February, 2026:

Nine Persimmons, by Kerry James Evans. Series: The Backwaters Prize in Poetry Honorable Mention.

In Nine Persimmons Kerry James Evans traces a geography both intimate and far-flung—Tuscaloosa and Biloxi, Charleston and New Orleans, the Cloisters above Washington Heights, a banana orchard in the Azores, a journey to Rome. The poems move with the gravity of pilgrimage, their compass set between wandering and witness, as they cross from ballfields and shipyards into the charged realms of myth and ritual. Evans’s gift lies in how the ordinary gathers its own divinity: persimmon seeds split to forecast winter, a grandmother’s weed-eater gospel, Camaro burnouts paired with tarot, psalms rising as pelicans wheel into sudden sky. In this light Nine Persimmons reveals how the most unassuming corners of existence sometimes hold the deepest truths.

A Question of Justice: Criminal Trials, Notorious Homicides, and Public Opinion in Twentieth-Century Mexico, by Elisa Speckman Guerra. Series: Confluencias.

Mexico is a country beset by violence and insecurity, with 98 percent of violent crimes unsolved and 94 percent of crimes unpunished. These staggering statistics illustrate the critical need to understand the history of Mexico’s penal law and justice system, from its evolution and development to its public image and effects on Mexican society.

In A Question of Justice Elisa Speckman Guerra elucidates Mexico’s penal law and justice system in the twentieth century from the disciplinary perspectives of both history and law. Looking at the critical period from 1929 to 1971, Speckman Guerra investigates the democratic rule of law and to what extent it was followed within the justice system, as well as judicial proceedings considering the role of gender, class, and race. For that reason, Speckman Guerra also delves into homicides involving very well-known victims, like the famous singer Guty Cárdenas, and notorious murderers, such as the Olympic medalist Humberto Mariles; the public image of police, judges, defendants, lawyers, and other actors involved in penal processes; and the representations of crime and justice in print and on film. This extensively researched study illuminates the evolution of Mexico’s penal laws, institutions of justice, and sensationalist media and violence, thereby addressing issues that are critically relevant today.

The Raymond D. Fogelson Papers: Essays on Ethnohistory, Ethnology, and Native American Studies, edited by Sergei A. Kan and Michael E. Harkin. Series: Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology.

Raymond D. Fogelson was a luminary theoretician in the interdisciplinary field of ethnohistory who advocated for Indigenous-centered theory and ethnographic writing in the field of Cherokee studies and ethnohistory. Fogelson’s unique methodology was to look for institutions that Cherokees and Native peoples themselves considered traditional and to carefully study them.

Fogelson taught in the anthropology department at the University of Chicago and trained leading ethnohistorians of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Dedicated to his graduate students, the corpus of his influential scholarship resides in journal articles, academic presentations, and public lectures. In this essential collection, Sergei Kan and Michael E. Harkin have assembled Fogelson’s pioneering articles as a resource for ethnohistorians in the twenty-first century.

They Are Dead and Yet They Live: Civil War Memories in a Polarized America, edited by John M. Kinder and Jennifer M. Murray. Series: Studies in War, Society, and the Military.

The death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in 2020 reignited a passionate nationwide debate over Confederate memorials and flags as symbols of white supremacy in our public landscape. Controversies about Confederate monuments, however, have overshadowed more consequential battles over Civil War memory taking place in American politics, popular culture, and civil society today.

Integrating the voices of Civil War historians, public historians, and scholars of contemporary America, They Are Dead and Yet They Live explores the use (and abuse) of Civil War memory in the modern era, from the Civil War Centennial and the civil rights era through the political turmoil of the present day. Moving the conversation of Civil War memory beyond Confederate monuments to crucial debates about the Civil War’s usefulness as a frame for understanding America’s recent struggles, these essays show how Civil War memory is as politically urgent and socially relevant today as it was a half century ago.

**Pictures and Synopses courtesy of University of Nebraska Press.

The Nebraska Publications Clearinghouse receives documents every month from all Nebraska state agencies, including the University of Nebraska Press (UNP).  UNP books, as well as all Nebraska state documents, are available for checkout by libraries and librarians for their patrons.

Here are the UNP books the Clearinghouse received in November and December, 2025:

Bakandamiya: an Elegy, by Saddiq Dzukogi. Series: African Poetry Book.

Covering more than five hundred years of cultural transformation, Bakandamiya: An Elegy is a book-length epic poem set in northern Nigeria. The poem moves from passages of mythic power to elegant lyricism with remarkable skill, subverting the legend of Bayajidda, a prince from Baghdad whose arrival reshaped the outlook of the Hausas, a Native ethnic group in West Africa. Told in part from a Bori spirit’s point of view and in part through personal lyrics, part prayer and part praise song, Bakandamiya decries the loss of culture and spirituality due to colonization from both the West and the East. Even as it subverts myths and popular beliefs and addresses some of the events that led to the Nigerian civil war, it tackles the lingering question of nationhood.

In this work of lyric and poetic ambition, Saddiq Dzukogi blends the personal with the mythical, expanding the griot tradition of Bakandamiya, a poetic form from northern Nigeria popularized by Mamman Shata. Here the form travels from orature to contemporary poetics for the first time, taking its place at the vanguard of contemporary poetry.

Born to Explore: John Casani’s Grand Tour of the Solar System, by Jay Gallentine. Series: Outward Odyssey : A People’s History of Spaceflight.

Once, there were giants in the heavens: billion-dollar machines of wonder and science that flew to the outermost planets and told us what secrets had been lying in wait. In charge of the people and processes behind these missions was a humble father of five who did the job not for money or prestige but simply because it represented a challenge like no other. That man was John Casani. The full story of his unparalleled life and career is told here for the first time.

Young Casani was obsessed with the mechanical world yet lacked direction in life. After restarting college for an engineering degree, he then whimsically road-tripped to California in the late 1950s and was hired, almost by accident, at Pasadena’s secretive Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Beginning as a workaday technician, Casani rose through JPL’s ranks to senior management—while battling politics, funding, physics, and occasionally colleagues. With inborn skill and uncommon methods he kept his troops focused on success. Casani ran nine-figure space missions off the index cards in his shirt pocket, once employed a live goat to press people into action, and even sent messages to aliens in space.

Born to Explore examines a transitional period of space history, when planetary exploration faced threats from an adversarial space shuttle program that consumed the lion’s share of NASA funding. Recounted by Jay Gallentine, Casani’s life story unfolds in conjunction with the tribulations of the Galileo mission to Jupiter—a twisting case study of what can go wrong even with the best intentions and the best minds in the world at work.

The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1888-1891, volume 2, edited by Michael Anesko, Greg W. Zacharias, and Katie Sommer. Series: The Complete Letters of Henry James.

The second volume in The Complete Letters of Henry James: 1888–1891 contains 131 letters, of which 80 are published for the first time, written from April 23, 1890, to January 3, 1891. These letters continue to mark Henry James’s ongoing efforts to care for his chronically ill sister, develop his work, strengthen his professional status, and build friendships. They also trace James’s efforts to write for the theater up to the afternoon before the first performance of The American.

Conflict and Correspondence : Belonging and Urban Community in Guadalajara, Mexico, 1939-1947, by Jason H. Dormady. Series: Confluencias.

In the decades following the 1910 Mexican Revolution, Guadalajara faced immense demographic and economic transformation, stunning both longtime residents and new arrivals. The city’s population nearly tripled from 1920 to 1950, and the resultant population boom strained government resources and challenged living standards for all.

In Conflict and Correspondence Jason H. Dormady examines the critical transition period when Guadalajara lost control of urban growth after 1939 and when the newly empowered state and federal governments began to exercise immense control over the development of the city in 1947. As the city changed around them, residents used petitions and letters to municipal officials to help address their feelings of alienation, isolation, and separation from the community around them. Petitions took the form of sensate, moral, recreational, spiritual, and gendered arguments about creating livable communities and avoiding the disorientation experienced by urban transformation. In the context of infrastructure failures, tight housing markets, and a dramatic aesthetic transition, petitions on these topics reinforced to residents—and, they hoped, city officials—their belonging to the community. Resident petitions reveal how everyday people lived the consequences of the 1910 revolution as they advocated for shaping space and building place in midcentury Guadalajara.

Guns, Furs, & Gold : an American West History of Indigenous People’s and Explorers, by Larry E. Morris. Series: Bison Books.

IGuns, Furs, and Gold offers a riveting narrative of the American West by exploring the interactions of the Arikaras, Crows, Cheyennes, and Arapahos with each other and with Euro-American traders, explorers, and settlers from 1804, when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark embarked on their voyage of discovery, to 1864, when the U.S. Army attacked both Confederate forces in the South and Native nations in the West.

Larry E. Morris recounts the nineteenth-century experience of these four tribes by detailing their interactions with four legendary survivors of a fight with the Arikaras in 1823. These renowned figures include the remarkable trailblazer blazer Jedediah Smith, the unparalleled interpreter Edward Rose, the premier guide and Indian agent Thomas Fitzpatrick, and the grizzly-bear-mauling survivor Hugh Glass. Their careers illuminate the fate of four Indian nations, revealing how—despite the best efforts of several explorers to treat the Indigenous peoples respectfully—the guns, furs, disease, and gold rushes of the interlopers put the Indians’ way of life, their lands, and their very lives at grave risk. The sixty-year period comes to a close when more than 150 Plains Indians, most of them women, children, and elderly, were ambushed and slaughtered by Colonel John Chivington’s Third Colorado Cavalry on the banks of Sand Creek.

The Naming, by Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto. Series: African Poetry Book.

The Naming explores the movements, excesses, and extremes of existing as a postmodern individual, connecting these experiences to ancestry. The poems in this collection examine the various ways one remains tied to their ancestors by reimagining memories, history, homesteads, migration, and the intersections of the past, present, and possible futures. Through this exploration, the collection seeks to rebuild a world that doesn’t merely replicate realities but reinvents, enshrines, and restories them.

Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto’s poems offer a vital contribution to African cultural studies through their focus on Igbo heritage and ancestry.

Playing to the End : Elder Black Men, Placemaking, and Dominoes in Denver by Steve Bialostok. Series: Anthropology of Contemporary North America.

In Playing to the End, Steve Bialostok immerses readers in the vibrant world of the card room at Denver’s Hiawatha Davis Jr. Recreation Center, where a group of older Black men gather to play dominoes, exchange playful banter known as “talking shit,” and cultivate a space of belonging. More than just a game, their gatherings are acts of Black placemaking—resisting cultural erasure, gentrification, and societal marginalization while fostering joy, resilience, and community.

Through five years of ethnographic study, Bialostok reveals how these men transform the card room into a sanctuary of identity and defiance, where humor and camaraderie become tools of self-determination. As they navigate the pressures of a changing neighborhood, their interactions affirm the power of play, talk, and collective memory in sustaining Black spaces. Playing to the End is a compelling testament to the significance of these gatherings and the ongoing struggle for autonomy, cultural affirmation, and social connection in an inequitable world.

Pleasure, Play, and Politics: a History of Humor in U.S. Feminism, by Kirsten Leng. Series: Expanding Frontiers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

Pleasure, Play, and Politics is the first book to examine the roles humor played in U.S. feminism during the late twentieth century. Based on extensive archival research, it brings to light the stunning, moving, and frankly hilarious ways feminists have used satire, irony, and spectacle as they worked to build a better world. The story it tells includes activism and music, political mobilization and cartooning, stand-up comedy and demands for change.

Kirsten Leng explores the ways culture and politics feed one another and shows how humor contributed to movement-building by changing hearts and minds, creating and maintaining a sense of community beyond a single issue, and sustaining activists over the long haul. The fascinating individuals, groups, and objects examined here—including the sex workers’ rights group COYOTE, the Guerrilla Girls, Florynce Kennedy, and the Lesbian Avengers—don’t just provide entertaining anecdotes or unsettle lazy assumptions that feminists are perennially dour and censorious: they offer a lesson or two for contemporary feminists and social justice activists. Taken together, they remind us that laughter can move us, that humor and anger can coexist, and that play and pleasure have a place in struggle.

The Postcolonial Bildungsroman and the Character of Place, edited by Arnab Dutta Roy, Paul Ugor, and Simone Maria Puleo. Series: Frontiers of Narrative.

In recent decades authors from across the world have adopted and adapted the bildungsroman literary genre to reflect on coming of age in postcolonial spaces and places. The Postcolonial Bildungsroman and the Character of Place emphasizes matters of space, place, and environment—concepts intrinsically linked to the bildungsroman’s processes of meaning-making and critique.

From Latin America to South Asia to Africa, the contributors focus on three distinct but interrelated themes: ecology, cultural geography, and mediascapes. They consider aesthetic formations that address the themes of spatiality, youth, individual and collective experiences of social stagnation or growth, the unique challenges faced by certain global subjects on account of the places they inhabit, and whether or not futurity is guaranteed for them. This unique collection delves into myriad features of the postcolonial bildungsroman, enlarging our theoretical understanding of the genre as well as of media and literature in the postcolonial world.

Winged Witnesses, by Chisom Okafor. Series: African Poetry Book.

The voices in these poems have witnessed the microhistories of the atypical body, the unusual body, the enjambed body, the chronically ill body trying to navigate space and time, love and displacement. The poems are a force field for questions that are at once intense and gripping: When we embody life through disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent body-minds, how do we grapple with love, time, and consciousness? How does the chronically ill body navigate the monstrosities of trauma and displacement? The poems not only play around with the idea of body-minds but also center on embodiment as touchstones of description. They are alive to history and the way poetry’s memorial practices animate the raw intimacy between the seen and unseen.

The people who populate Chisom Okafor’s Winged Witnesses are broken by numerous afflictions and darknesses, but there is a common companionship that binds them, as in a loop. Their voices call out in the wild and their jaded feet drag through lonely pathways, where wild birds dust-bathe by the wayside. There is trauma in these poems, but also light and salvation, and everything that comes between.

**Pictures and Synopses courtesy of University of Nebraska Press.