Read a Book by a UNCG Professor This Summer

The Global Ethiopian Diaspora: Migrations, Connections, and Belongings

Edited by Shimelis Bonsa Gulema, Hewan Girma (UNCG) and Mulugeta F. Dinbabo
Boydell & Brewer, 2024

Ethiopia is one of the largest African sources of transnational migrants, with an estimated two to three million Ethiopians living outside of the home country. This edited collection provides a critical examination of the temporal, spatial, and thematic dimensions of Ethiopian migration, mapping out its scale, scope, and destinations. Read more.

Odds and Ends: Unusual Choices in Palmyrene Funerary Iconography

Edited by Maura Heyn (UNCG) and Rubina Raja
Brepols Publishers, 2023

The funerary art that was produced in Roman Palmyra, a caravan city in the Syrian steppe desert, is rightly world-renowned. This volume, which draws on the vast materials gathered under the auspices of the Palmyra Portrait Project directed by Professor Rubina Raja, explores the ‘oddities’ raised by the Palmyrene corpus. Read more.

Inclusive Aims: Rhetoric’s Role in Reproductive Justice

Edited by Drs. Heather Brook Adams and Nancy Myers
Parlor Press, 2024

Heather Brook Adams, Nancy Myers, and contributors engage with fraught reproductive realities — past, present, and future — and offer analysis and advice for coalitional alliance and strategy building. Through its varied chapters, this collection demonstrates how rhetorics of reproductive politics function as a means by which various injustices are illuminated and addressed. Read more.

Just Kids: Youth Activism and Rhetorical Agency

By Risa Applegarth
Ohio State University Press, 2023

Although children have prompted and participated in numerous acts of protest and advocacy, their words and labors are more likely to be dismissed than discussed as serious activism. In Just Kids, Risa Applegarth investigates youth-organized activism from the 1990s to the present, asking how young people have leveraged age as a rhetorical resource, despite material and rhetorical barriers that limit their access to traditional forms of electoral power. Read more.

What the Light Leaves Hidden

By Terry Kennedy
Unicorn Press, 2023

“What the Light Leaves Hidden is a powerful poetic litany that demonstrates what it means to be fragile and wounded inside of the immediacy to be vital and loved. Terry Kennedy’s elegy evokes invocation and benediction where tenderness permeates every page, reminding us that we are all made vulnerable by simply being alive.”
— Jaki Shelton Green, North Carolina Poet Laureate and author of Conjure Blues Read more.

Three Collections of Poetry and an Edited Recovery Collection

By Karen Kilcup

Kilcup published four books in the past year! Her three collections of poetry include:

• Black Nebula (Grey Book Press, 2023): Featuring “compressed, idiosyncratic poems of praise, rooted in the everyday, and rich with images of nature, disarm with their originality.” Read more.
• Red Appetite (Evening Street Press, 2023) Winner of the 2022 Helen Kay Chapbook Contest, Red Appetite is a taxonomy of the joy and quirks of animals that live around us. Read more.
• The Art of Restoration (Winter Goose Publishing, 2024): Written across four decades, The Art of Restoration elicits multiple voices that trace a trajectory from a complex childhood “Living in a Split” to empowered, even erotic, old age. Read more.

In addition, Kilcup co-edited a recovery collection:

• The Selected Works of Ora Eddleman Reed: Author, Editor, and Activist for Cherokee Rights (University of Nebraska Press, 2024): Revives the writings of Ora Eddleman Reed, an important author, publisher, and activist for Cherokee rights. Read more.

Nonbinary Bird of Paradise

By Emilia Phillips
University of Akron Press, 2024

Emilia Phillips’ fifth poetry collection “shakes its tail feathers, reveling in a body that cannot be contained in gender binaries.” Publisher’s Weekly states, “Phillips’s skillful revising of ancient myths of self and body inventively widen the meaning and scope of paradise.” Read more.

The Dong World and Imperial China’s Southwest Silk Road: Trade, Security, and State Formation

By James A. Anderson
University of Washington Press, 2024

This book investigates the principalities, chiefdoms, and market nodes that emerged and flourished in the network of routes that passed through what Anderson calls the “Dong world,” a collection of Tai-speaking polities in upland valleys. “This groundbreaking book demonstrates that inhabitants of the ‘Dong World’ were crucial intermediaries of trade along the Southwestern Silk Road. – Kathlene Baldanza, author of Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia Read more.

Home Front Battles: World War II Mobilization and Race in the Deep South

By Charles Bolton
Oxford University Press, 2024

Home Front Battles examines the many effects of World War II economic and military mobilization on the Deep South, including the federal government’s attempts to solve some of the social problems that arose from a massive influx of migrants who were unfamiliar with a new world of work. “Homefront Battles is the best book ever written about life in the South during World War II.” — William Sturkey, Author of Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White Read more.

Beyond Piggly Wiggly: Inventing the American Self-Service Store

By Lisa C. Tolbert
University of Georgia Press, 2023

Beyond Piggly Wiggly reveals the importance of Piggly Wiggly in the invention of self-service and goes beyond the history of a single firm to explore the role of small business entrepreneurs who invented the first self-service stores in a grassroots social process. For her expertise, Tolbert was featured on the History channel show, “The Food That Built America” — an episode focusing on genius innovations in the modern supermarket. Read more.

Community-Engaged Interior Design: An Illustrated Guide

By Travis Lee Hicks
Routledge, 2024

This step-by-step guide takes the reader through each stage of the design process, from concept to completion, exploring practical methods of how to engage the community throughout interior architecture and design projects. Hicks distills years of experience teaching community-engaged design within this volume, arguing that all design should be accomplished through a process of engagement, be it with community members, clients, or end users. Read more.

The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art

By Ann Millett-Gallant
Springer, 2024

This textbook provides an essential update to the fields of disability studies and art history; examines contemporary disabled artists, offering an important reflection of advancement in the field; and brings embodied experience & arts practice to bear on analysis of disability in contemporary work. Read more.