About Us

Gary Lemons

Liberation for the Oppressed, 2022

Considering the violent and deadly experiences of racism in the United States during this contemporary moment, there remains a critical need for demonstrative dialogues for social justice. Progressive anti-racist allies-across differences of race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability-must continue to join together to enact strategies devoted to the eradication of racism. Ways to advocate life survival for Black Indigenous People of Color in the U.S. must be actively engaged. Particularly related to the emotional and physical trauma BIPOC communities are currently experiencing in this day and time, there must be a renewed call for the vision of a "beloved community." It must be envisioned by a unified, collective body of people committed to liberation for all the oppressed. In this day and time, anti-racist solidarity means that these individuals must take on challenging conversations about ways systemic and institutionalized racism continues to be perpetuated.

The mission for Liberation for the Oppressed is boldly to affirm the lives and voices of its contributors. They literally put their lives on the line writing about traumatic experiences each of them has or would face in what it means "to 'talk race'." Becoming critically aware of the self-deadening effects of internalized racism, each of them map the course of their personal, political, and professional journey toward self-recovery. Becoming critically aware of the complicity with racism by not speaking out about its traumatic implications, each of them critically employs personal narrative to speak out in loving resistance to racist colonization.

Lisa Melonçon

and Catherine Molloy, editors. Strategic Interventions in Mental Health Rhetoric, 2022

Offering rhetorically informed strategic interventions, this innovative collection moves beyond critiques of mental health issues, problems, and care. With sections that focus on methodological, cultural and legal, and pedagogical interventions, readers will find an engaging discussion of a discrete mental health phenomenon as well as a clear interventional takeaway in each chapter.

Lisa Melonçon

and Joanna Schreiber. Assembling critical components: A Framework for Sustaining Technical and Professional Communication, 2022

How do you explain technical and professional communication? The field has long tried to answer this question, with limited success. Because the field is constantly evolving alongside social, technological, and communication changes, it remains difficult to explain. Assembling Critical Components presents TPC as a collective identity and provides a framework for situating critical components of the field. This collection includes chapters reflecting on topics such as accessibility, professional communication, regulatory writing, socio-technical situation, procedural knowledge, applied rhetoric, and ethics. These topics are contextualized by entries presenting field-wide data on topics including influential texts, key terms, and teaching practices over time. Assembling Critical Components provides students, teachers, researchers, program administrators, and industry professionals a tangible yet flexible approach to explaining TPC.

Susan Mooney

The Making and Mirroring of the Masculine Subjectivities: Gender, Affect, and Ethics in Modern World Narratives, 2022

This book shows how diverse, critical modern world narratives in prose fiction and film emphasize masculine subjectivities through affects and ethics. Highlighting diverse affects and mental states in subjective voices and modes, modern narratives reveal men as feeling, intersubjective beings, and not as detached masters of master narratives. Modern novels and films suggest that masculine subjectivities originate paradoxically from a combination of copying and negation, surplus and lack, sameness and alterity: among fathers and sons, siblings and others. In this comparative study of more than 30 diverse world narratives, Mooney deftly uses psychoanalytic thought, narrative theories of first- and third-person narrators, and Levinasian and feminist ethics of care, creativity, honor, and proximity. We gain a nuanced picture of diverse postpaternal postgentlemen emerging out of older character structures of the knight and gentleman.

Heather Sellers

Field Notes from the Flood Zone, 2022

From the frontlines of climate catastrophe, a poet watches the sea approach her doorstep.

Born and raised in Florida, Heather Sellers grew up in an extraordinarily difficult home. The natural world provided a life-giving respite from domestic violence. She found, in the tropical flora and fauna, great beauty and meaningful connection. She made her way by trying to learn the name of every flower, every insect, every fish and shell and tree she encountered.

That world no longer exists.

In this collection of poems, Sellers laments its loss, while observing, over the course of a year, daily life of the people and other animals around her, on her street, and in her low-lying coastal town, where new high rises soar into the sky as the storm clouds gather with increasing intensity and the future of the community―and seemingly life as we know it―becomes more and more uncertain.

Sprung from her daily observation journals, haunted by ghosts from the past, Field Notes from the Flood Zone is a double love letter: to a beautiful and fragile landscape, and to the vulnerable young girl who grew up in that world. It is an elegy for the two great shaping forces in a life, heartbreaking family struggle and a collective lost treasure, our stunning, singular, desecrated Florida, and all its remnant beauty.

Phillip Sipiora 

Ida Lupino, 2021

Ida Lupino, Filmmaker begins with an exploration of biographical studies and analytical treatments of Lupino’s film and television work as director, moving forward to assess her career in film and television with particular attention given to her role(s) within the cultural milieu(s) of her time, particularly the representation of women in cinema.

Each chapter includes a close analysis of the film or television work with insights drawn from film history and cultural/gender studies to demonstrate that Lupino was a significant directorial figure in the development of film, especially in the late 1940s and early 1950s—and in television extending well into the 1960s. Lupino left her imprint on filmmaking and her canon of film and television work continue to influence Hollywood movie making.

Heather Sellers

The Present State of the Garden, 2021

The Present State of the Garden (October, 2021, Lynx House Press) is a memoir in poetry, telling the story of growing up in Florida, coming to terms with the loss of an Edenic landscape, and an elegy for the end of a marriage.

Jay Hopler

Still Life, 2021

Confronted with a terminal-cancer diagnosis, Jay Hopler, author of the National Book Award finalist The Abridged History of Rainfall, got to work. The result is Still Life, a collection of poems that are heartbreaking, terrifying, and deeply, darkly hilarious. In an attempt to find meaning in a life ending right before his eyes, Hopler squares-off against monsters real and imagined,
personal and historical, and tries not to flinch. This work is no elegy; it’s a testament to courage, love, compassion, and the fierceness of the human heart. It’s a playfully serious fulfillment of what Arseny Tarkovsky called the fundamental purpose of art: a way to prepare for death, be it
far in the future or very near at hand.

Thomas Hallock

A Road Course in Early American Literature: Travel and Teaching from Atzlán to Amherst, 2021

A Road Course in Early American Literature: Travel and Teaching from Atzlán to Amherst explores a two-part question: what does travel teach us about literature, and how can reading guide us to a deeper understanding of place and identity? Thomas Hallock charts a teacher’s journey to answering these questions, framing personal experiences around the continued need for a survey course covering early American literature up to the mid-nineteenth century.

Julia Koets

PINE, 2021.

Pine maps a secret relationship between two women in the South, where certain kinds of desire—queer desire, in particular—have historically been hidden and feared. Creating new landscapes of identity by reimagining form, modifying villanelles, sonnets, elegies, thank-you notes, and dictionary entries, Pine’s imagistic and metaphorical associations between the body and the natural world form a queer ecology of longing and loss.

Norbert Elliot

Talking Back, 2020

In Talking Back, a veritable Who’s Who of writing studies scholars deliberate on intellectual traditions, current practices, and important directions for the future. In response, junior and mid-career scholars reflect on each chapter with thoughtful and measured moves forward into the contemporary environment of research, teaching, and service. Each of the prestigious chapter authors in the volume has three traits in common: a sense of responsibility for advancing the profession, a passion for programs of research dedicated to advancing opportunities for others, and a reflective sense of their work accompanied by humility for their contributions. As a documentary, Talking Back is the first history of writing studies in autobiography.

Nathan R. Johnson

Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age, 2020

In Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age, Nathan R. Johnson charts turning points where concepts of memory became durable in new computational technologies and modern memory infrastructures took hold. He works through both familiar and esoteric memory technologies—from the card catalog to the book cart to Zatocoding and keyword indexing—as he delineates histories of librarianship and information science and provides a working vocabulary for understanding rhetoric’s role in contemporary memory practices.

Steve Jones

Cell Tower, 2020

Cropping up everywhere, whether steel latticework or tapered monopoles, encrusted with fiberglass antennas, cell towers raise up high into the air the communications equipment that channels our calls, texts, and downloads. For security reasons, their locations are never advertised. But it's our romantic notions of connectivity that hide them in plain sight. We want the network to be invisible, ethereal, and ubiquitous. The cell tower stands as a challenge to these desires.

Lisa Melonçon

Rhetoric of Health and Medicine As/Is: Theories and approaches for the field, 2020

Rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) has emerged as a distinct area of inquiry within rhetorical studies. It is one that embraces multiple disciplinary orientations that examines discourses and practices in a diverse range of contexts. This wide-ranging collection of attempts to address the dual orientation of what RHM offers by considering RHM as a theoretical construct guiding research and thinking alongside the conceptual parameters that constitute what RHM is. Both perspectives are central to establishing RHM’s understanding of how knowledge about the body is conceived and conveyed and the strategies by which healthcare professionals, industry agents, governmental representatives, and consumers are engaged in shaping the healthy and diseased body in a variety of social contexts.

Heather Sellers

The Practice of Creative Writing, 4th Ed., 2020

Completely updated for use in online and face to face classrooms, with a 170-page Instructor's Manual accompanying the text, The Practice of Creative Writing introduces the seven core strategies writers work with as they create rich, fresh, layered work in any genre. Webinars, author videos, and sample syllabi are all available, along with interviews with the writers featured in the text.

Lisa S. Starks

Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Theatre, 2020

Did you know that Ovid was a multifaceted icon of lovesickness, endless change, libertinism, emotional torment, and violence in early modern England? This is the first collection to use adaptation studies in connection with other contemporary theoretical approaches in analyzing early modern transformations of Ovid. It provides innovative perspectives on the “Ovids” that haunted the early modern stage, while exploring intersections between adaptation theory and gender/queer/trans studies, ecofeminism, hauntology, transmediality, rhizomatics, and more. This book examines the multidimensional, ubiquitous role that Ovid and Ovidian adaptations played in English Renaissance drama and theatrical performance.

Charles Adams

The Arkansas Regulators, 2019

The Arkansas Regulators is a rousing tale of frontier adventure, first published in German in 1846, but virtually lost to English readers for well over a century. Written in the tradition of James Fenimore Cooper, but offering a much darker and more violent image of the American frontier, this was the first novel produced by Friedrich Gerstäcker, who would go on to become one of Germany’s most famous and prolific authors. A crucial piece of a nineteenth-century transatlantic literary tradition, this long-awaited translation and scholarly edition of the novel offers a startling revision of the frontier myth from a European perspective.

Norbert Elliot

Early Holistic Scoring of Writing: A Theory, a History, a Reflection, 2019

Early Holistic Scoring of Writing addresses the history of holistic essay assessment in the United Kingdom and the United States from the mid-1930s to the mid-1980s—and newly conceptualizes holistic scoring by philosophically and reflectively reinterpreting the genre’s origin, development, and significance.

Emily Jones

Right Romance: Heroic Subjectivity and Elect Community in Seventeenth-Century England, 2019

Right Romance examines the intersections of romance, religion, and politics in England between 1588 and 1688 to show how writers during this politically turbulent time used the genre of romance to construct diverse ideological communities for themselves. The book argues for a recontextualized understanding of romance as a multigeneric narrative structure or strategy rather than a prose genre and rejects the common assumption that romance was a short-lived mode most commonly associated with royalist politics. Puritan republicans likewise found in romance strength, solace, and grounds for political resistance.

Julia Koets

The Rib Joint: A Memoir in Essays, 2019

In this collection of linked, lyrical essays, Julia Koets writes, “When you date in secret, the pressure is different. You’re weightless. You’re stuck in between jumping and landing. You exist in midair. Your bones start to thin.” After college, when Julia and her best friend Kate wait tables at a rib joint in Julia’s hometown in South Carolina, they are forced to face the price of the secrets they’ve kept—from their families, each other, and themselves. From astronaut Sally Ride’s obituary, to a UFO Welcome Center, to a shark tooth collection, to DC Comic’s Gay Ghost, this memoir-in-essays draws from mythology, religion, popular culture, and personal experience to examine how coming out is not a one-time act. The Rib Joint explores how fear and loss can inhabit our bodies and, contrastingly, how naming our desire allows us to feel the heart beating in our chest.

Quynh Nhu Le

Unsettled Solidarities, 2019

Unsettled Solidarities examines contemporary Asian and Indigenous crossings within different settler states in the Américas. Quynh Nhu Le looks at literary works by both groups alongside public apologies, interviews, and hemispheric race theories to trace cross-community tensions and possibilities for solidarities amidst the uneven imposition of racialization and settler colonization.

Pairing hemispheric Asian American and Indigenous authors, Le reveals how settler colonialism persists through the liberal ideological structuring or incorporation of critical and political resistance. She illuminates the tense collisions of Asian and Indigenous movements from the heroic/warrior traditions, reparations and redress, and transnational/cross-racial mobilization against global capital to mixed-race narratives.

Reading these tensions as formed through the unstable grammatical and emotional economies of liberalism, Le frames settler colonialism as a process that is invoked and yet ruptured by Asian and Indigenous peoples. In analyzing Asian/Indigenous crossings in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil, Unsettled Solidarities conveys the logics and instabilities that connect these settler empires.

Jill McCracken

Learning with Women in Jail: Creating Community-Based Participatory Research, 2019

Learning with Women in Jail: Creating Community-Based Participatory Research provides a window into the actual practices of creating this research with marginalized communities, in particular women who have been incarcerated. This project, collaboratively created and written with participants, documents our methods and processes by foregrounding the ethical issues that are present and are often exacerbated when the participants occupy marginalized statuses. We provide suggestions for how to more fully engage in the research process and outline where our work and the work of others can fall short. We explore how our process measures up to our recommendations and offer readers insight into their own research methods and how they might impact co-researchers, participants, and the knowledge they can co-create. One of the book’s greatest strengths is the critical perspective it provides on Community-Based Participatory Research and its role in simultaneously creating and alleviating these ethical challenges.  

Jarod Roselló

Red Panda & Moon Bear, 2019

Red Panda & Moon Bear is a middle-grade graphic novel featuring two Cuban American siblings in magic hoodies who defend their neighborhood. Together, these brave siblings rescue lost cats, scold bullies, and solve problems, all before Mami and Papi get home. But lately...the mysteries have been extra mysterious. All of Red Panda and Moon Bear's incredible inventions and magic powers may not be enough to handle ghosts, evil monsters, alien invaders, and portals in space-time! It'll take all their imagination—and and some new friends—to uncover the secret cause behind all these mysteries before the whole world comes to an end! 

Laura Runge & Jessica Cook

The Circuit of Apollo: Eighteenth-Century Women’s Tributes to Women, 2019

The Circuit of Apollo is a book about early modern women’s networks traced through affirmations of respect, admiration, love, and sometimes competition. It emerges out of the desire to highlight what relationships among women in the long eighteenth century tell us about the emotional lives and the creative work of women. The essays collected here attest to the vital practice of commemorating women’s artistic and personal relationships and in doing so illuminate the complexity of female friendships and honor as well as the robust creativity and intellectual work contributed by women to early modern culture. The subjects of these essays cover nearly two hundred years of women’s lives from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The geographical diversity of people represented and the span of time covered underscores the consistency of the practice of women’s tributes to other women, even when it took the form of critical engagement. Essays trace the relationships between and among women such as Anne Finch, Mary, Lady Chudleigh, Jane Barker, Mary Barber, Eliza Haywood, Anna Barbauld, Anna Seward, Helen Maria Williams, and Ameila Opie, and closes with Betty Schellenberg’s thoughtful afterword on women in the archive and the continued relevance of our work.

Kristin Allukian

Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women's Literature: Thresholds in Women's Writing, 2018

Editors: Kristin J. Jacobson, Kristin Allukian, Rickie-Ann Legleitner, Leslie Allison

This book highlights the multiplicity of American women’s writing related to liminality and hybridity from its beginnings to the contemporary moment. Often informed by notions of crossing, intersectionality, transition, and transformation, these concepts as they appear in American women’s writing contest as well as perpetuate exclusionary practices involving class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sex, among other variables. As a whole, the collection demonstrates American women’s writing is “threshold writing,” or writing that occupies a liminal, hybrid space that both delimits borders and offers enticing openings.

Rita Ciresi

Second Wife, 2018

The housewives that populate Second Wife are estranged from themselves and others. They mourn lost children, plot revenge against their former husbands, lust after the bag boy at the grocery store, seek marital advice from a psychic, and regret the emptiness of an affair. In this collection of linked flash fiction, Flannery O'Connor Award-winning author Rita Ciresi offers a peek into the private thoughts of ordinary women with cutting precision.  Second Wife was winner of the Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award sponsored by The Florida Review.

Norbert Elliot

Writing Assessment, Social Justice, and the Advancement of Opportunity, 2018

This edited collection provides the first principled examination of social justice and the advancement of opportunity as the aim and consequence of writing assessment. ... Written with the intention of making a restorative milestone in the history of writing assessment, Writing Assessment, Social Justice, and the Advancement of Opportunity generates new directions for the field of writing studies. This volume will be of interest to all stakeholders interested in the assessment of written communication and the role of literacy in society, including advisory boards, administrators, faculty, professional organizations, students, and the public.

Lisa Melonçon

Methodologies for the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine, 2018

This volume charts new methodological territories for rhetorical studies and the emerging field of the rhetoric of health and medicine. In offering an expanded behind-the-scenes view of rhetorical methodologies, it advances the larger goal of differentiating the rhetoric of health and medicine as a distinct but pragmatically multifarious area of study, while providing rhetoricians and allied scholars new ways to approach and explain their research.

Ira Sukrungruang

Buddha's Dog & other Meditations, 2018

"Ira Sukrungruang's Buddha's Dog & other Meditations charts one man s journey toward emotional maturity, to a place of knowledge though not necessarily of comfort. These marvelous essays weather with heart and humor the tumultuous waters of cultural identity, body image, and mortality, to arrive at those bittersweet truths about our flawed yet spirited selves." -Rigoberto González

Nicole Discenza

Inhabited Spaces: Anglo-Saxon Constructions of Place, 2017

We tend to think of early medieval people as unsophisticated about geography because their understandings of space and place often differed from ours, yet theirs were no less complex. Anglo-Saxons conceived of themselves as living at the center of a cosmos that combined order and plenitude in a constant state of tension. In Inhabited Spaces, Nicole Guenther Discenza examines Anglo-Latin and Old English texts to shed light on early English understandings of space. They sought to shape the universe into knowable places, from where the earth stood in the cosmos, to the kingdoms of different peoples, and to the intimacy of the hall. Discenza argues that Anglo-Saxon works both construct orderly place and illuminate the limits of human spatial control.

Jay Hopler

The Abridged History of Rainfall, 2017

Jay Hopler's second collection, a mourning song for his father, is an elegy of uproar, a careening hymn to disaster and its aftermath. In lyric poems by turns droll and desolate, Hopler documents the struggle to live in the face of great loss, a task that sends him ranging through Florida's torrid subtropics, the mountains of the American West, the streets of Rome, and the Umbrian countryside. Vivid, dynamic, unrestrained: The Abridged History of Rainfall is a festival of glowing saints and fighting cocks, of firebombs and birdsong.

Meredith Johnson

Lean Technical Communication: Toward Sustainable Program Innovation, 2017

Lean Technical Communication: Toward Sustainable Program Innovation offers a theoretically and empirically-grounded model for growing and stewarding professional and technical communication programs under diverse conditions. Through case studies of disruptive innovations, this book presents a forward-looking, sustainable vision of program administration that negotiates short-term resource deficits with long-term resilience. It illustrates how to meet many of the newest challenges facing technical communication programs, such as building and maintaining change with limited resources, economic shortfalls, technology deficits, and expanding/reimagining the role of our programs in the 21st century university. Its insights benefit those involved in the development of undergraduate and graduate programs, including majors, service courses, minors, specializations, and certificates.

Gary L. Lemons

Caught up in the Spirit! Teaching for Womanist Liberation, 2017

Caught in the Spirit! Teaching for Womanist Liberation promotes the author’s work in the college classroom as a black male professor of womanism. First and foremost, this book illustrates the self-transformative power of Alice Walker’s concept of a “womanist.” Caught Up in the Spirit! also foregrounds powerful writings by students who have studied African American literature with the author.

John Lennon

Working-Class Literature(s): Historical and International Perspectives, 2017

The aim of this collection is to make possible the forging of a more robust, politically useful, and theoretically elaborate understanding of working-class literature(s). These essays map a substantial terrain: the history of working-class literature(s) in Russia/The Soviet Union, The USA, Finland, Sweden, The UK, and Mexico. Together they give a complex and comparative – albeit far from comprehensive – picture of working-class literature(s) from an international perspective, without losing sight of national specificities.

Because of the subject matter of the book, the co-editors have decided to make this an open-access publication. You can download for free the whole collection.

Ylce Irizarry

Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction: The Memory of Latinidad, 2016 

"Ylce Irizarry's Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction: The Memory of Latinidad is a nuanced and textured work that contributes to the growing field of comparative Latina/o literary studies. Framing this study is Irizarry's productive question: what happens when the notion of arrival loses its centrality as a narrative trope in Latina/o literary production?" -Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 

"Ylce Irizarry's Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction: The New Memory of Latinidad is a valuable contribution to US literary history more broadly and more specifically to Latinx literary history." -American Literary History

Steven Jones

Roberto Busa, S.J. And the Emergence of Humanities Computing: The Priest and the Punched Cards, 2016

It's the founding myth of humanities computing and digital humanities: In 1949, the Italian Jesuit scholar, Roberto Busa, S.J., persuaded IBM to offer technical and financial support for the mechanized creation of a massive lemmatized concordance to the works of St. Thomas Aquinas. Using Busa's own papers, recently accessioned in Milan, as well as IBM archives and other sources, Jones illuminates this DH origin story. He examines relationships between the layers of hardware, software, human agents, culture, and history, and answers the question of how specific technologies afford and even constrain cultural practices, including in this case the academic research agendas of humanities computing and, later, digital humanities.

Heather Sellers

The Practice of Creative Writing, 3rd Ed., 2016

A guide for writers that focuses on the process of writing, with an emphasis on hybrid, flash, and experimental forms. Comes with a brand new, extensive instructor's manual.