2012 Spring and Summer Catalog

Utah State University Press Books for Spring and Summer 2012

O r d e r i n g I n f o r m at i o n Join Us We don’t want to miss you in the future. Please visit www.USUPress.org and follow the “Join Our E-mail List” link to our Web form where you can chose from the following subject categories.

q All Subject Categories q Folklore and Oral History (Including Popular Culture) q Nature, Environment, and Place q Western and Utah History (Including Native American and Mormon) q Writing Studies (Rhetoric, Composition, and Creative Writing) q Swenson Poetry Award Series Join us on

Published by Utah State University Press An imprint of University Press of Colorado 5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Suite 206C Boulder, Colorado 80303 The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State College, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State College of Denver, Regis University, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, Utah State University, and Western State College of Colorado.

Ordering Information You can order USU Press books directly from the Press via phone, fax, or our secure online shopping cart system. Our books are also available through retail bookstores, either independent, chain, university, or online.

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toll free: 800-621-2736

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Pubnet@202-5280 We normally can fill orders within 48 hours, and we ship via UPS or FedEx (because they’re trackable), unless you specify some other method. Allow 3 to 12 working days for delivery, depending on your location.

On the cover: Color Block Face by Bernadette Elszy-Perez 2

www.USUPress.org • 800-621-2736

New Releases

Great Basin National Park

A Guidebook to the Park and Surrounding Area Click here for catalog page

Presumed Incompetent

for

S p r i n g /S u m m e r 2012

Coal in our Veins

A Personal Journey Click here for catalog page

The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia Click here for catalog page

Books, Bluster, and Bounty

Plural Wife

Local Politics and Intermountain West Carnegie Library Building Grants, 1898–1920 Click here for catalog page

composing(media) = composing(embodiment) bodies, technologies, writing, the teaching of writing Click here for catalog page

I Hope I Join the Band

Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric Click here for catalog page

Writing Centers and Exploring Feminist Rhetorical the New Racism Composition Studies Resilience Click here for catalog page Sites, issues, and perspectives Click here for catalog page

The Life Story of Mabel Finlayson Allred Click here for catalog page

A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change Click here for catalog page

www.USUPress.org • 800-621-2736

Leonard Arrington Lecture Series

Volumes 16 and 17 Click here for catalog page

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N at u r e , E n v i r o n m e n t ,

and

Place

NEW mmer u ng/S i r p S 2 201

4/14/12 $25.95, paper, 6x9 978-0-87421-840-4 332 pages

Great Basin National Park A Guide to the Park and Surrounding Area Gretchen M. Baker Click here to order

Great Basin National Park is in large part a high-alpine park, but it sits in one of America's driest, least populated, and most isolated deserts. That contrast is one facet of the diversity that characterizes this region. Within and outside the park are phenomenal landscape features, biotic wonders, unique environments, varied historic sites, and the local colors of isolated towns and ranches. Vast Snake and Spring Valleys, bracketing the national park, are also subjects of one of the West's most divisive environment contests, over what on the surface seems most absent but underground is abundant enough for sprawling Las Vegas to covet it—water.

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N at u r e , E n v i r o n m e n t ,

and

Place

Dec 2011 $39.95, paper, 6 x 9 978-0-87421-824-4 520 pages, color photos, maps

Woody Plants of Utah

A Field Guide with Identification Keys to Native and Naturalized Trees, Shrubs, Cacti, and Vines Renée Van Buren Janet G. Cooper Leila M. Shultz Kimball T. Harper Click here to order

A comprehensive guide that includes a vast range of species and plant communities and allows easy identification, using detailed descriptions, photographs, habitats and ranges, maps, and original keys that are based primarily on vegetative characteristics. The authors identify over 400 taxa of native or naturalized trees, shrubs, cacti, and vines. A field guide this inclusive especially suits an arid region such as Utah with a limited number of native trees but an amazing variety of shrubs.

Woody Plants of Utah employs identification keys that help users recognize plants by choosing vegetative characteristics from paired alternatives, thereby following a process of elimination like a game of twenty questions. Specific plant descriptions, illustrated with photos and maps, can be used with the keys or separately to pinpoint species, and they provide additional botanical and environmental information on Utah plant communities.

“The authors have done a good job writing for amateur botanists and professionals as well. The book is packed with information about Utah’s fantastic flora. The etymology of scientific names added value and the glossary read well. The taxonomy is current.”

—Noel H. Holmgren, Senior Curator of Botany, Emeritus, New

York Botanical Garden and Coauthor of Intermountain Flora: Vascular

Plants of the Intermountain West www.USUPress.org • 800-621-2736

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Regional

and

U ta h H i s t o r y

NEW mmer u ng/S i r p S 2 201

5/20/12 $29.95, paper, 6x9 978-0-87421-863-3 248 pages

Coal in our Veins A Personal Journey Erin Ann Thomas Click here to order

In Coal in Our Veins, Erin Thomas employs historical research, autobiography, and journalism to intertwine the history of coal, her ancestors' lives mining coal, and the societal and environmental impacts of the United States' dependency on coal as an energy source. In the first part of her book, she visits Wales, native ground of British coal mining and of her emigrant ancestors. The Thomases' move to the coal region of Utah—where they witnessed the Winter Quarters and Castle Gate mine explosions, two of the worst mining disasters in American history—and the history of coal development in Utah form the second part.

Then Thomas investigates coal mining and communities in West Virginia, near her East Coast home, looking at the Sago Mine collapse and more widespread impacts of mining, including population displacement, mountain top removal, coal dust dispersal, and stream pollution, flooding, and decimation.

The book's final part moves from Washington D.C.—and an examination of coal, CO2, and national energy policy—back to Utah, for a tour of a coal mine, and a consideration of the Crandall Canyon mine cave-in, back to Wales and the closing of the oldest operating deep mine in the world and then to a look at energy alternatives, especially wind power, in West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

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Regional

and

U ta h H i s t o r y

NEW mmer u ng/S i r p S 2 201

4/30/12 $27.95, hardcover, 6x9 978-0-87421-842-8 208 pages

Books, Bluster, Bounty

Local Politics and Intermountain West Carnegie Library Building Grants, 1898-1920 Susan H. Swetnam Click here to order

Books, Bluster, and Bounty examines a cross-section of Carnegie library applications to determine how local support was mustered for cultural institutions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century West. This comparative study considers the entire region between the Rockies and the Cascades/ Sierras, including all of Idaho, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona; western Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado; eastern Oregon and Washington; and small parts of California and New Mexico.

The author's purpose is to address not only the how of the process but also the variable why. Although virtually all citizens and communities in the West who sought Carnegie libraries expected tangible benefits for themselves that were only tangentially related to books, what they specifically wanted varied in correlation with the diverse nature of western communities. By looking at the detailed records of the Carnegie library campaigns, the author is able to provide an alternative lens through which to perceive and map the social-cultural makeup and town building of western communities at the turn of the century.

www.USUPress.org • 800-621-2736

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Western History

Sept 2011 $37.95, cloth, 6⅛x9¼ 978-0-87421-814-5 488 pages

“A much needed history of, that will appeal to scholars of radicalism, political history, religion, and the West. The ways the authors deal with Socialist culture, radical space, and the Socialists’ relationship to religion make this a truly original book.”

—John P. Enyeart, author of The Quest for “Just and Pure Law”: Rocky Mountain Workers and American Social Democracy, 1870-1924

A History of Utah Radicalism

Startling, Socialistic, and Decidedly Revolutionary John S. McCormick John R. Sillito Click here to order

Utah, now one of the most conservative states, has a long tradition of radicalism. Early Mormons set a precedent with the United Order and other experiments with a socialistic economy. The tradition continued into the recent past with New Left, anti-apartheid, and other radicals. Throughout history, Utah radicalism usually reflected national and international developments. Recounting its long history, McCormick and Sillito focus especially on the Socialist Party of America, which reached a peak of political influence in the first two decades of the twentieth century—in Utah and across the nation.

At least 115 Socialists in over two dozen Utah towns and cities were elected to office in that period, and on seven occasions they controlled governments of five different municipalities. This is a little-known story worth a closer look.

Histories of Socialism in the United States have tended to forsake attention to details, to specific, local cases and situations, in favor of broader overviews of the movement. By looking closely at Utah’s experience, this book helps unravel how American Socialism briefly flowered and rapidly withered in the early twentieth century. It also broadens conventional understanding of Utah history.

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U ta h

13 Vol.

and

Mormon History

NEW mmer u ng/S Spri 012 2

5/20/12 $32.95, hardcover, 6x9 978-0-87421-874-9 216 pages

Plural Wife

The Life Story of Mabel Finlayson Allred Martha Sonntag Bradley Click here to order

This autobiography is slated as volume 13 in USU Press's Life Writings of Frontier Women series. The frontiers that Mabel Finlayson Allred experienced were social and religious more than geographical, but it could be fairly said that she lived much of her life on the edge—on the borders of the religion in which she believed, of the social propriety agreed on by most of her fellow citizens, of the law that threatened her and her family, and of the domestic tranquility, economic and otherwise, that she clearly longed for.

Mabel Finlayson was one of the several wives of Rulon Allred, who was leader of the Apostolic United Brethren and was murdered in 1977 on the orders of the leader of a different sect. Allred's group and the FLDS, recently led by Warren Jeffs, are the two largest organized groups of those fundamentalist Mormons who, since about the 1930s, have practiced polygyny, or polygamy, as separatists from the mainstream Latter-day Saints Church. In a remarkably cheerful voice, Mabel Allred gives an insider's look at the growth of, and her life in, the fundamentalist polygamist movement.

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Western History

Oct 2011 $36.95, cloth, 6x9 978-0-87421-809-1 360 pages, color illustrations

“Thoughtful, provocative, and important. Go East, Young Man is definitely a valuable contribution to scholarship on the American West, as well as to the fields of historical geography and popular culture. It has the potential to become a very important book.”

—David M. Wrobel, author of Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West

Go East, Young Man

Imagining the American West as the Orient Richard V. Francaviglia Click here to order

Perceiving pyramids and promised lands in the desert, Bedouins on the plains, or Mount Fujis above the forest, Americans often shuffled Near and Far Eastern images and identities into those they imposed on their own West. In their growing acquaintance with the new world of the West, Euro-Americans turned not just to the old world but to what they perceived as its most exotic and dramatic parts—the imagined world they knew as the Orient.

“Francaviglia questions our perceptions about what is West, what is East, and how folks deal with and rationalize the new and unknown. He calls into question the whole concept of what is new and what is truly unknown. His book will instigate discussion and debate among scholars, students, and the well-educated public. To be the instigator of such a discussion and debate is one of the highest compliments I can offer.”

—Gary J. Hausladen, editor of Western Places, American Myths: How We Think About The West

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N at i v e A m e r i c a n H i s t o r y

Oct 2011 $32.95, cloth, 5½x8½ 978-0-87421-853-4 208 pages

“Youngdahl’s book explores fascinating and virtually unexcavated historical and cultural terrain. Curious about religiosity and cultural practices, Youngdahl has woven an unusual narrative which takes us deep into both the past and the present of the Navajo.”

—William Deverell, author of Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910

Working on the Railroad, Walking in Beauty Navajos, Hózh=, and Track Work Jay Youngdahl Click here to order

For over one hundred years, Navajos have gone to work in significant numbers on Southwestern railroads. As they took on the arduous work of laying and anchoring tracks, they turned to traditional religion to anchor their lives.

Jay Youngdahl, an attorney who has represented Navajo workers in claims with their railroad employers since 1992 and who more recently earned a master’s in divinity from Harvard, has used oral history and archival research to write a cultural history of Navajos’ work on the railroad and the roles their religious traditions play in their lives of hard labor away from home.

“A valuable account of how the Navajo involvement in railroad labor and underlying cultural values interface. It is the sensitivity to that cultural identity that gives the work a special edge and at the same time a broad appeal. It is extremely well written and well organized. Jay Youngdahl tells a good story while applying high standards of scholarship along with an underlying humanism.”

—Paul Zolbrod, author/translator of Diné Bahané: The Navajo Creation Story

www.USUPress.org • 800-621-2736

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Folklore

Oct 2011 $26.95, hardcover, 6x9 978-0-87421-844-2 344 pages

“A student-oriented entry to the study of folklore . . . Rich with examples from the field and the classroom . . . Helps students to see that folklore is really about understanding people.”

—Jacqueline S. Thursby, Journal of American Folklore

Living Folklore (Second Edition) An Introduction to the Study of People and Their Traditions Martha C. Sims Martine Stephens Click here to order

This revised edition incorporates new examples, research, and theory along with added discussion of digital and online folklore.

Living Folklore is a comprehensive, straightforward introduction to folklore as it is lived, shared, and practiced in contemporary settings. Drawing on examples from diverse American groups and experiences, this text gives the student a strong foundation—from the field’s history and major terms to theories and interpretive approaches.

Living Folklore moves beyond genres and classifications and encourages students who are new to the field to see the study of folklore as a unique approach to understanding people, communities, and day-to-day artistic communication.

“Students are going to love this book: the examples will stimulate their interest in other cultures, and the approaches to the study of folklore will open up new meanings in their own lives.

“The authors draw upon their extensive teaching experience and in-depth scholarly research to produce a textbook that sets a new standard for introductory folklore courses.”

—Patrick B. Mullen

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Folklore

Oct 2011 $24.95, paper, 6x9 978-0-87421-859-6 264 pages

“A fresh, innovative, and necessary contribution. Teachers need to contemplate the reasoned advice threaded throughout the chapters of this compendium of essays, that ‘out-of-school experience is the great unspoken curriculum.’”

—Patricia Shehan Campbell, coauthor of Multicultural Perspectives in Music Education

Through the Schoolhouse Door

Folklore, Community, Curriculum Paddy Bowman Lynne Hamer Click here to order

The creative traditions and expressive culture of students’ families, neighborhoods, towns, religious communities, and peer groups provide opportunities to extend classrooms, sustain learning beyond school buildings, and better connect students and schools with their communities. Folklorists and educators have long worked together to expand curricula through engagement with local knowledge and informal cultural arts—folk arts in education is a familiar rubric for these programs—but the unrealized potential here, for both the folklore scholar and the teacher, is large. The value folklorists “place on the local, the vernacular, and the aesthetics of daily life does not reverberate” throughout public education, even though, in the words of Paddy Bowman and Lynne Hamer, “connecting young people to family and community members and helping them to develop self-identity are vital to civic well-being and to school success.”

Through the Schoolhouse Door offers a collection of experiences from exemplary school programs and the analysis of an expert group of folklorists and educators who are dedicated not only to getting students out the door and into their communities to learn about the folk culture all around them but also to honoring the culture teachers and students bring to the classroom. www.USUPress.org • 800-621-2736

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Folklore, Mormon Studies

Oct 2011 $39.95, cloth, 6⅛x9¼ 978-0-87421-817-6 460 pages

“In Still, the Small Voice, Tom Mould offers a strikingly innovative perspective on the classic religious problem of how the deeply individual and interior experience of personal revelation may be made social and public. Mould’s book is a singular contribution not only to Mormon studies, but to religious studies, folklore, and performance studies more generally.”

—Richard Bauman, author of Verbal Art as Performance

Still, the Small Voice

Narrative, Personal Revelation, and the Mormon Folk Tradition Tom Mould Click here to order

Still, the Small Voice is a folklorist’s examination of the everyday narratives Mormons share with each other concerning their personal encounters with the divine. Through close consideration of these narratives as shared with fellow church members and non-members alike, Tom Mould gets to the heart of Mormonism and provides a significant new ethnographic interpretation of Mormon religious culture and belief.

“Tom Mould is a remarkable scholar. He knows his Mormon sources better than many Mormon researchers, and he is fully conversant with trends in folklore scholarship. A number of us have published Mormon folklore studies, but no one has worked seriously with personal revelations and no one has taken the theoretical and methodological approach Tom takes. This is an excellent book—wonderfully researched, engagingly written. His work will make a substantial contribution to Mormon folklore studies, and to Mormon studies as well.”

—William A. Wilson, author of The Marrow of Human Experience

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U ta h

and

Mormon History

$7.95 978-0-87421-846-6

A Mountain of Paper The Extraordinary Diary of Leonard James Arrington Carl Arrington Susan Arrington-Madsen

$7.95 978-0-87421-884-8

Like the Hajis of Meccah and Jerusalem Orientalism and the Mormon Experience, 1820–1970 Richard V. Francaviglia

Click here to order

Click here to order

NEW mmer u ng/S i r p S 2 201

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H i g h e r E d u c at i o n L e a d e r s h i p

NEW mmer u ng/S i r p S 2 201

5/20/12 $49.95, hardcover, 8x10 978-0-87421-869-5 est. 446 pages

“Women in academia still face obstacles built up over centuries, but the contributors to Presumed Incompetent have taken a leap toward liberation. Their revelations will enrage you—and open minds and hearts.”

—Gloria Steinem

Presumed Incompetent

The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Acadmia Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs Yolanda Flores-Niemann Carmen G. González Angela P. Harris Click here to order

Presumed Incompetent is a pathbreaking account of the intersecting roles of race, gender, and class in the working lives of women faculty of color. Through personal narratives and qualitative empirical studies, more than 40 authors expose the daunting challenges faced by academic women of color as they navigate the often hostile terrain of higher education, including hiring, promotion, tenure, and relations with students, colleagues, and administrators. The narratives are filled with wit, wisdom, and concrete recommendations, and provide a window into the struggles of professional women in a racially stratified but increasingly multicultural America.

“Presumed Incompetent is undeniably a path-breaking book full of stories of resilience and survival. The editors of this magnificent collection attest to the power of storytelling and add to the testimonios of women in academia such as Telling to Live and Paths to Discovery. Each and every one of the authors survived and in telling their stories they offer hope and solace for young women scholars entering the academy.”

—Norma E. Cantú

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W r i t i n g S t u d i e s ; R h e t o r i c /C o m p o s i t i o n

NEW mmer u ng/S i r p S 2 201

5/1/12 $29.95, paper, 6x9 978-0-87421-878-7 248 pages

Feminist Rhetorical Resilience Elizabeth A. Flynn Patricia Sotirin Ann Brady Click here to order

Although it is well known in other fields, the concept of “resilience” has not been addressed explicitly by feminist rhetoricians. This collection develops it in readings of rhetorical situations across a range of social contexts and national cultures. Contributors demonstrate that resilience offers an important new conceptual frame for feminist rhetoric, with emphasis on agency, change, and hope in the daily lives of individuals or groups of individuals disempowered by social or material forces.

Collectively, these chapters create a robust conception of resilience as a complex rhetorical process, redeeming it from its popular association with individual heroism through an important focus on relationality, community, and an ethics of connection. Resilience, in this volume, is a specifically rhetorical response to complicated forces in individual lives. Through it, Feminist Rhetorical Resilience widens the interpretive space within which rhetoricians can work.

www.USUPress.org • 800-621-2736

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W r i t i n g S t u d i e s ; R h e t o r i c /C o m p o s i t i o n

NEW mmer g/Su n i r Sp 012 2

3/1/12 $24.95, paper, 5.5x8.5 978-0-87421-876-3 210 pages

Condon invents and negotiates productive rhetorical positions for the critical, white antiracist, filling the gap that is evacuated by critique alone. This is an important and novel contribution to our understanding of antiracist discourse and activism.

—Hyoejin Yoon, West Chester University

I Hope I Join the Band Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric Frankie Condon Click here to order

“Both from the Right and from the Left, we are stymied in talking well with one another about race and racism, by intransigent beliefs in our own goodness as well as by our conviction that such talk is useless. . . . White antiracist epistemology needs to begin not with our beliefs, but with our individual and collective awakening to that which we do not know.”

Drawing on scholarship across disciplines ranging from writing and rhetoric studies to critical race theory to philosophy, I Hope I Join the Band examines the limits and the possibilities for performative engagement in antiracist activism. Focusing particularly on the challenges posed by raced-white identity to performativity, and moving between narrative and theoretical engagement, the book names and argues for critical shifts in understandings and rhetorical practices that attend antiracist activism.

In I Hope I Join the Band, Frankie Condon leads readers through thought and historical circumstance on the way to understanding how racism tears at the possibility for healthy living.

—Claude Hurlbert, Indiana University of PA 18

www.USUPress.org • 800-621-2736

W r i t i n g S t u d i e s ; R h e t o r i c /C o m p o s i t i o n

NEW mmer u ng/S Spri 012 2

5/1/12 29.95, paper, 7x10 978-0-87421-880-0 288 pages

What any body is—and is able to do—cannot be disentangled from the media we use to consume and produce texts.

—from the Introduction

composing (media) = composing (embodiment) bodies, technologies, writing, the teaching of writing Kristin L. Arola Anne Frances Wysocki Click here to order

Kristin Arola and Anne Frances Wysocki argue that composing new media is composing bodies. The media we produce—and consume—embody us in a two-way process. The chapters in this collection articulate how our media carry us out into the world when, in producing texts, we feel ourselves to be individually expressing what matters. But available media also give us—and so limit us to—what makes sense among various structures and institutions: each text we consume teaches us (usually not overtly) some way of being in the world.

Composing (Media) = Composing (Embodiment) brings together powerful essays offering approaches for theorizing and teaching with new media while attending to our bodies. Through feminist, queer, phenomenological, disability studies, legal studies, and other theoretical lenses, the chapters address a wide range of texts (comics, blogs, Wikipedia, online maps, videos, games, digital interfaces, Pow Wow regalia). How do such texts mediate us? How do such texts shape communication and a sense of self and of body—and how do they participate in shaping what and how we compose? They ask us to focus on how, as theorists and teachers, we embody the worlds we desire. www.USUPress.org • 800-621-2736

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W r i t i n g S t u d i e s ; R h e t o r i c /C o m p o s i t i o n

NEW mmer u ng/S Spri 012 2

6/15/12 29.95, hardcover, 6x9 978-0-87421-882-4 300 pages

Exploring Composition Studies

Sites, Issues, and Perspectives Kelly Ritter Paul Kei Matsuda Click here to order

Kelly Ritter and Paul Kei Matsuda have created an essential introduction to the field of composition studies for graduate students and instructors new to the study of writing. The book offers a careful exploration of this diverse field, focusing specifically on scholarship of writing and composing. Within this territory, the authors draw the boundaries broadly, to include allied sites of research such as professional and technical writing, writing across the curriculum programs, writing centers, and writing program administration.

Importantly, they represent composition as a dynamic, eclectic field, influenced by factors both within the academy and without. The editors and their sixteen seasoned contributors have created a comprehensive and thoughtful exploration of composition studies as it stands in the early twenty-first century.

Given the rapid growth of this field and the evolution of it research and pedagogical agendas over even the last ten years, this multi-vocal introduction is long overdue.

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W r i t i n g S t u d i e s ; R h e t o r i c /C o m p o s i t i o n

NEW mmer u ng/S Spri 012 2

$24.95, paper, 6x9 978-0-87421-856-5 204 pages

Listening to Our Elders Working and Writing for Change Samantha Blackmon Cristina Kirklighter Steve Parks Click here to order

In 2011, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) turned one hundred years old. But our profession is endlessly beginning, constantly transforming itself and its purpose as new voices and identities claim their rights in our classrooms and in our country. The recognition of such claims, however, does not occur without a struggle, without collective work.

Listening to our Elders attempts to capture the history of those collective moments where teachers across grade levels and institutions of higher education organized to insure that the voices, heritages, and traditions of their students and colleagues were recognized within our professional organizations as a vital part of our classrooms and our discipline. In doing so, Listening to Our Elders demonstrates this recognition was not always easily given. Instead, whether the issue was race, sexuality, class, or disability, committed activist organizations have often had to push against the existing limits of our field and its organizations to insure a broader sense of common responsibility and humanity was recognized.

www.USUPress.org • 800-621-2736

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Composition

Oct 2011 $29.95, paper, 6x9 978-0-87421-820-6 320 pages

This book uses the 25th anniversary of North’s controversial study as an occasion to think about the current state of our field and where we are now headed. These essays are lively and well informed, written by scholars unafraid to take stands and push against received wisdom.

—Joseph M. Harris, author of Rewriting and A Teaching Subject

The Changing of Knowledge in Composition Contemporary Perspectives Lance Massey Richard C. Gebhardt Click here to order

The Changing of Knowledge in Composition suggests that we may be moving toward another fundamental shift in how composition understands itself as a field. In this collection, Massey and Gebhardt offer many signs that composition again faces a moment of precariousness, even as it did in the 1980s— the years of the great divorce from literary studies. The contours of writing in the university again are rapidly changing, making the objects of scholarship in composition again unstable. Composition is poised to move not from modern to postmodern but from process to postprocess, from a service-oriented "field" to a research-driven "discipline." Some would say we are already there.

Momentum is building to replace "composition" and the pedagogical imperative long implied in that term with a "writing studies" model devoted to the study of composition as a fundamental tool of, and force within, all areas of human activity.

Appropriately, contributors here use Stephen M. North’s 1987 book The Making of Knowledge in Composition to frame and background their discussion, as they look at both the present state of the field and its potential futures.

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Composition; Writing Centers

Oct 2011 $29.95, paper, 6x9 978-0-87421-861-9 256 pages

This book is exactly what I think of when I think of USU Press: innovative scholarship that offers new insights into the pedagogical issues surrounding writing and its production.

—Resa Crane Bizarro

Writing Centers and the New Racism A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change Laura Greenfield Karen Rowan Click here to order

Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan have created a rich resource for writing center tutors, administrators, and scholars. Motivated by a scholarly interest in race, literacy, and pedagogy, and by an ethical commitment to antiracism work, contributors address a series of related questions: How does institutionalized racism in American education shape the culture of literacy and language education in the writing center? How does racism operate in the discourses of writing center scholarship and lore, and in what ways are writing centers unwittingly complicit in racist practices? How can they meaningfully operationalize antiracist work? How do they persevere through the difficulty and messiness of negotiating race and racism in their daily practice?

The conscientious, nuanced attention to race in Writing Centers and the New Racism is meant to model what it means to be bold in engagement with these hard questions and to spur the kind of sustained, productive, multivocal, and challenging dialogue that, with a few important exceptions, has been absent from the field.

The depth of what’s presented in this collection of essays is extraordinary. It’s educational, informative, and in many places, quite inspiring.

—Jaime Mejía www.USUPress.org • 800-621-2736

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Composition

Dec 2011 $26.95, paper, 6x9 978-0-87421-866-4 156 pages

A Teaching Subject is a book I recommend to every colleague and student of composition and repeatedly return to myself. Harris uses the occasion of this new edition not simply to update but to add fresh, insightful perspectives, elegantly expressed, to the cornucopia presented in the original.

—Bruce Horner, Endowed Chair in Rhetoric and Composition,University of Louisville

A Teaching Subject

Composition Since 1966, New Edition Joseph Harris Click here to order

In this classic text, Joseph Harris traces the evolution of college writing instruction since the Dartmouth Seminar of 1966. A Teaching Subject offers a brilliant interpretive history of the first decades during which writing studies came to be imagined as a discipline separable from its partners in English studies. Postscripts to each chapter in this new edition bring the history of composition up to the present.

Reviewing the development of the field through five key ideas, Harris unfolds a set of issues and tensions that continue to shape the teaching of writing today. Ultimately, he builds a case, now deeply influential in its own right, that composition defines itself through its interest and investment in the literacy work that students and teachers do together. Unique among English studies fields, composition is, Harris contends, a teaching subject.

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Poetry

$19.95, cloth, 5½x8½ 978-0-87421-826-8 88 pages

About the Dead struck me on first reading as an adventurous book grounded in real places and real people, and reading it was like following the poet up a steep climb on a rocky slope as he improvised his route, and at every step I was struck by the rightness of his choices, surprised by so many odd words that seemed so exactly right.

—Garrison Keillor

About the Dead Travis Mossotti Foreword by Garrison Keillor Click here to order

Travis Mossotti writes with humor, gravity, and humility about subjects grounded in a world of grit, where the quiet mortality of working folk is weighed. To Mossotti, the love of a bricklayer for his wife is as complex and simple as life itself: "ask him to put into words what that sinking is, / that shudder in his chest, as he notices / the wrinkles gathering at the corners of her mouth." But not a whiff of sentiment enters these poems, for Mossotti has little patience for ideas of the noble or for sympathetic portraits of hard-used saints.

His vision is clear, as clear as the memory of how scarecrows in the rearview, "each of them, stuffed / into a body they didn't choose, resembled / your own plight." His poetry embraces unsanctimonious life with all its wonder, its levity, and clumsiness. About the Dead is an accomplished collection by a writer in control of a wide range of experience, and it speaks to the heart of any reader willing to catch his "drift, and ride it like the billowed / end of some cockamamie parachute all the way / back to the soft, dysfunctional, waiting earth."

Poetry Award Winner 2011 www.USUPress.org • 800-621-2736

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