University of Tennessee Press Blog

Salute to Women's History

Flannery O’Connor was born on the 25th of this month, eighty-three years ago. In a salute to her powerful literary legacy and the contribution of women to literature, the arts, history, and politics, UT Press is proud to spotlight our women’s studies list for the month of March. Save up to 40% on these titles and others during Women’s History Month. View the complete list of titles on sale.

Flannery O’Connor: A Life
Jean W. Cash
In this full-length biography of the writer, Jean W. Cash draws upon extensive interviews with O’Connor’s friends, relatives, teachers, and colleagues as well as on the writer’s voluminous correspondence to provide a sensitive, balanced portrait of a fascinating woman.

Inventing Black Women
African American Women Poets and Self-Representation, 1877–2000
Ajuan Maria Mance
Inventing Black Women fills important gaps in our understanding of how African American women poets have resisted those conventional notions of gender and race that limit the visibility of Black female subjects.

Eastern Band Cherokee Women: Cultural Persistence in Their Letters and Speeches
Virginia Moore Carney
A watershed event, this book unearths three centuries of previously unknown and largely ignored speeches, letters, and other writings from Eastern Band Cherokee women.

Professional Pursuits: Women and the American Arts and Crafts Movement
Catherine W. Zipf
Professional Pursuits chronicles a very significant, little-understood aspect of the development of Victorian capitalism: the integration of women into the professional workforce.

Celebrating African American History

Highway 61: Heart of the Delta
Randall Norris and Jean-Philippe Cyprès / Foreword by Morgan Freeman

A celebration of the Mississippi Delta in words and pictures, this volume brings to life this storied region of the South. Actor Morgan Freeman provides a foreword in which he recounts his personal history as a child in the Delta and discusses why he was pulled back to his ancestral home, despite its challenges.

A Spirit of Dialogue: Incarnations of Ogbanje, the Born-to-Die,
in African American Literature
Christopher N. Okonkwo

Christopher Okonkwo’s A Spirit of Dialogue adds to the slowly growing body of well-researched, thought-provoking explorations of Africa’s knowledge systems that go deeper than previously imagined in their ability to inform African descendants on both sides of the Atlantic.” -Anthonia Kalu, University of North Colorado

To Lift Up My Race: The Essential Writings of Samuel Robert Cassius
Edited by Edward J. Robinson

Born into slavery in 1853, Samuel Robert Cassius is a fascinating and instructive example of the first generation of freed slaves in the United States. This collection of writings by Cassius gives us the man—evangelist, educator, farmer, entrepreneur, postmaster, politician, and father of twenty-three—in a significant moment in the emergence of black culture and society between Reconstruction and the Great Depression.

A Godsend to His People: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Marshall Keeble
Edited by Edward J. Robinson

Marshall Keeble stands as one of the Church of Christ’s most influential and celebrated African American evangelists. He helped establish over two hundred churches and baptized approximately forty thousand individuals during his nearly seventy years of ministry. A Godsend to His People brings to light over forty years of Keeble’s writings.

Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics of Liberation: Backgrounds and Contexts
John C. Shields

Phillis Wheatley was the first African American to publish a book on any subject in America and only the second woman to do so. Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics of Liberation is a groundbreaking study of this important and most controversial writer.

New from Tennessee

The Papers of Andrew Jackson, Volume 7, 1829
Andrew Jackson
Edited by Daniel Feller, Harold D. Moser
Assistant editors: Laura-Eve Moss and Thomas CoensWith this seventh volume, The Papers of Andrew Jackson enters the heart of Jackson’s career: his tumultuous two terms as president of the United States.

A Death in the Family
A Restoration of the Author’s Text
The Works of James Agee, Vol. 1
Edited by Michael A. Lofaro
Associate General Editor: Hugh DavisPublished in 1957 to wide acclaim, James Agee’s A Death in the Family was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature. However, the novel had been so heavily edited that it little resembled the original manuscript. The inaugural title of the University of Tennessee Press’s scholarly edition of The Works of James Agee, this restored text of A Death in the Family is, in many ways, a new novel.

The Ramseys at Swan Pond
The Archaeology and History of an East Tennessee Farm
Charles H. Faulkner“The Ramseys at Swan Pond [demonstrates] that history can be thoroughly informed by careful archaeological investigation, and that archaeology can also be informed by detailed and carefully conducted historical research. This is one of the best examples of the blending of both disciplines into a single study that I have read.” —Patrick H. Garrow

Professional Pursuits
Women and the American Arts and Crafts Movement
Catherine W. ZipfThe American Arts and Crafts movement was a major factor in changing the status of women as professional workers. Professional Pursuits examines the participation of women in this significant design movement and the role they played in revolutionizing the position of women in the professional world.

The Gift of Reading

Books are wonderful gifts! This holiday season give the gift of great reading to the book lovers on your list.

Winter Lightning: A Guide to the Battle of Stones River
Matt Spruill and Lee Spruill

A sequential series of twenty-one “stops” through the Stones River battlefield over the exact routes used by both Union and Confederate armies, with details on key points. The guide divides the battle into three segments: the west flank, the center, and the east flank.

The Warrior’s Path: Reflections along an Ancient Route
Casey Clabough

Autumn Spring
Sam Pickering

“No one creates so many memorable, saucy aphorisms-piquant, bitter-sweet, arousing.” —Pat C. Hoy II, New York University

Some Day I May Find Honest Work
Sam Venable

Tennessee humorist Sam Venable has been tickling funny bones in print for more than twenty-five years. Someday I May Find Honest Work is a collection of 125 of his columns, many of which originally appeared in the Knoxville News Sentinel. In these warm and witty pieces, Venable pokes good-natured fun at everything from fast food to government folly, from high-tech confusion to the perils of aging.

Run in the Fam’ly: A Novel
John J. McLaughlin

“Mr. McLaughlin employs his mastery of vernacular speech, his understanding of the street cultures of Chicago and Oakland , and his deeply human understanding. . . . Run in the Fam’ly is an exceptional work of fiction.” —James Alan McPherson, author of Elbow Room, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Scenes from Tennessee Living

Four fabulous gifts for the adventurer, Civil War buff, or anyone who appreciates Appalachian history and culture!

The Warrior’s Path: Reflections along an Ancient Route
Casey Clabough

Casey Clabough hiked more than five hundred miles of the Warrior’s Path from Maryland to Tennessee. This story of Clabough’s journey is also a meditation upon the extraordinary people and events that have populated the thoroughfare over the course of several centuries. Clabough conjures and evokes countless historical images: from sketches of the grand French-Indian and Revolutionary struggles to the hardscrabble circumstances of his own Appalachian ancestors.

Winter Lightening: A Guide to the Battle of Stones River
Matt Spruill and Lee Spruill

Natural Histories: Stories from the Tennessee Valley
Stephen Lyn Bales / Foreword by Sam Venable
Outdoor Tennessee Series

What pivotal role did the hedge plant Osage orange played in a key Civil War battle? Why was the tiny snail darter fish involved in a political firestorm? Lyn Bales illuminates in surprising ways the complicated and often vexed relationships between humans and their natural-world neighbors in Natural Histories.

The Encyclopedia of Appalachia
Edited by Rudy Abramson and Jean Haskell

Thousands have given this rich, one-stop resource about Appalachia a home on their bookshelf. Is it on yours?

The Legacy of Peter Taylor

2006 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel
Run in the Fam’ly: A Novel

John J. McLaughlin / Hardcover / 304 pages

Peter Taylor is one of the South’s most celebrated writers—the author of acclaimed short stories, plays, and the novels A Summons to Memphis and In the Tennessee Country. The Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, cosponsored by the Knoxville Writers’ Guild and the University of Tennessee Press, honors the memory and work of Peter Taylor by bringing to light new works of high literary quality. The newest addition to the distinguished list of recipients is John J. McLaughlin for his novel, Run in the Fam’ly. Six additional books have received this honor: Blood Kin by Mark Powell (2005), Fire on Mount Maggiore by John Parras (2004), Minyan: Ten Jewish Men in a World That Is Heartbroken by Eliezer Sobel (2003), Blue by Sarah Van Arsdale (2002), A House All Stilled by A. G. Harmon (2001), and The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts by DeWitt Henry (2001).

Celebrating Humor and Humanity

Icons Sam Pickering and Sam Venable have long entertained their reading audiences with witty and humorous observations about day-to-day living. Both men have released a new book this season; Pickering’s Autumn Spring and Venable’s Someday I May Find Honest Work are now available in bookstores, online bookstores, and at utpress.org.

Autumn Spring
Sam Pickering / Paperback / 152 pages / More info or read excerpt
“No one creates so many memorable, saucy aphorisms-piquant, bitter-sweet, arousing.” -Pat C. Hoy II, New York University
Sam Pickering’s essays are funny and wise-and always intoxicating, eggnog to warm glazed winter nights and juleps to cool sweltering summer days. He wanders Connecticut, Canada, and the South, seeding his old farm in Nova Scotia with words and scattering paragraphs in and about classrooms at the University of Connecticut.

Some Day I May Find Honest Work
Sam Venable / Paperback / 232 pages / More info or read excerpt
In these warm and witty pieces, Venable pokes good-natured fun at everything from fast food to government folly, from high-tech confusion to the perils of aging, from the eternal strife between the sexes to daily life in East Tennessee.

The Changing Face of Religion in the South

Exiled
Voices of the Southern Baptist Convention Holy War
Edited by Carl Kell
With an Introduction by Samuel S. Hill
Now in Paperback
ISBN 978-1-57233-590-4, $22.50″These personal narratives of distinguished Baptists illustrate the adverse consequences of exclusive fundamentalism, and the need for unity among traditional Baptists.” -Jimmy Carter“This book is an excellent example of just how fragile religion and religiosity are and how harmony can turn to animosity over trivia.” -Will D. Campbell Read an excerpt (pdf)

Religion in the Contemporary South
Changes, Continuities, and Contexts
Edited by Corrie E. Norman and Don S. Armentrout
With an Introduction by Samuel S. Hill
Paperback 978-1-57233-361-8, $21.95Religion in the Contemporary South is a guide to the “new” southern
religions—more diverse, sometimes controversial, but as vital to the region
as ever. In his essay, “A Crumbling Empire,” Bill J. Leonard talks about the future of the Baptist denomination. In “Our Lady of Guadeloupe Visits the Confederate Memorial,” Thomas Tweed notes the growth of Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim traditions in the South. Susan Ridgely Bales examines the state of southern Catholicism in “Sweet Tea and Rosary Beads,” and in “Quiet Revolutionaries,” D. Jonathan Grieser, Corrie E. Norman, and Don S. Armentrout discuss the ways in which women priests in the Southern Episcopal Church construct their lives and callings.Read an excerpt (pdf)

Signs, Cures, and Witchery
German Appalachian Folklore
Gerald C. Milnes
Cloth 978-1-57233-577-6, $35 / Available soon on DVDBased in part on the author’s extensive collection of oral histories from the remote highlands of West Virginia, Signs, Cures, and Witchery: German Appalachian Folklore describes these various occult practices, symbols, and beliefs; how they evolved within New World religious contexts; how they arrived on the Appalachian frontier; and the prospects of those beliefs continuing in the contemporary world.Click here for a Video Podcast

The Encyclopedia of Appalachia (Religion Section)
Edited by Ruby Abramson and Jean HaskellThe Encyclopedia of Appalachia’s section on religion provides a broad view
of faith and practices in the region—ranging from specific denominations and ethnic traditions to religious institutions, prominent religious figures,
and more.“The Encyclopedia of Appalachia lays out for everyone else what we who grew up there have always known. Appalachia is a rich and beautiful land steeped in tradition and open to change. It is home to countless storytellers and stories without end. Both its lushness and its rockiness teach us to make our way in the world, but Appalachia never leaves us.”
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.View Sample Entries

View other UT Press titles relating to religion.

Explore the World of Architecture with UT Press

From majestic masonic temples to the captivating carpentry of New England’s Stearns brothers, the University of Tennessee Press has published a number of titles relating to architecture. Get to know our architecture list by reviewing the links below:

	Masonic Temples Freemasonry, Ritual Architecture, and Masculine Archetypes William D. Moore Masonic Temples introduces readers to the structures American Freemasons erected over the sixty-year period from 1870 to 1930. Read more..
	Building Environments Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, X Kenneth A. Breisch and Alison K. Hoagland These seventeen essays provide a road map of the various paths of architectural inquiry, illustrating how expansive and interdisciplinary this research quest can and should be. Read more.. View Other Titles in the Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture Series
	Invitation to Vernacular Architecture A Guide to the Study of Ordinary Buildings and Landscapes Thomas Carter and Elizabeth Collins Cromley A comprehensive introduction to the field, Invitation to Vernacular Architecture walks readers through the process of examining and documenting a building. Read more..
	Cheap and Tasteful Dwellings Design Competitions and the Convenient Interior, 1879–1909 Jan Jennings Cheap and Tasteful Dwellings thoroughly explores the results of Carpentry and Building magazine’s design competitions, conducted over a thirty-year period from 1879 to 1909. Read more..
	Two Carpenters Architecture and Building in Early New England, 1799–1859 J. Ritchie Garrison This innovative study examines the lives of two New England carpenters, Calvin and George Stearns, in the first half of the nineteenth century. Read more..

Journeyman’s Road Launches at Book Expo

Sterling and Adam

“Satan and Adam” at Journeyman’s Road book launch party, Terra Blues, New York, Book Expo America 2007. Bluesmen Sterling “Mister Satan” Magee (l) and Adam Gussow (r), author of Journeyman’s Road: Modern Blues Lives from Faulkner’s Mississippi to Post-9/11 New York.

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