Today’s post is a rebroadcast of our May 20 livestream with Mitch Ploskonka, author of The Bad Poor: Race, Class, and the Rise of Grit Lit.

About The Bad Poor:

The Bad Poor examines the rise of Grit Lit, a movement in contemporary southern literature written by and about poor southern whites. Examining issues of genre, race, and culture, Mitch Ploskonka traces the emergence of this iconoclastic mode through its major authors to reveal a literary-cultural identity rooted in difference, marked by resistance to respectability and class performance, and shaped by reckoning with the legacies of whiteness and regional memory.

For those long dismissed as “white trash” and denied an active voice in their own representation, Grit Lit confronts the parallel concerns of finding a way to describe themselves and the means to communicate it appropriately. Beginning with Harry Crews and progressing chronologically to the present—including discussions of key works by Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison, Rick Bragg, and Tom Franklin, among others—Ploskonka examines how Grit Lit authors forge self-representations by experimenting with genres and engaging with identity politics. Through the ongoing search for a usable, unshameful identity, Grit Lit enacts a painful but heartening narrative of grappling with the realities of people and place by acknowledging difference.

As stories about the gritty or rough South proliferate across media, The Bad Poor relates an important story of literary self-fashioning by analyzing a body of literature that speaks to larger cultural discourses regarding racial identity, social justice, disability, and class divisions.

Praise for The Bad Poor:

“Mitch Ploskonka’s provocative meditation on poor whites and their shape-shifting roles in contemporary culture and politics offers deep insight and understanding for readers of the insurgent literary form known as Grit Lit. This is important work, and The Bad Poor does it with style.”

—Matt Wray, author of Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness

“The Bad Poor provides a fresh exploration of Grit Lit through the intersectional lenses of race, feminism, queerness, and disability studies. In this important contribution to southern studies, Ploskonka examines the evolution of Grit Lit, asking a series of urgent and provocative questions about the genre and its evolving forms.”

—Sarah Robertson, author of Gothic Appalachian Literature

About the Author:

Mitch Ploskonka is assistant professor of English at the Ohio State University Agricultural Technical Institute (ATI). His research focuses on southern literature, disability studies, and popular culture.

The LSU Press Live Author Series brings the talented writers of LSU Press to your home. On Wednesdays and Thursdays at 2pm CDT on our Facebook page, we broadcast a different LSU Press writer reading from their book and talking about their inspiration and craft. Post on the event page or DM us with questions for your favorite LSU Press author, and we will ask them live!

Share

Today’s post is a rebroadcast of our May 14 livestream with Tyler Priest, author of Offshore Oildom: America’s Energy Expansion into the Ocean.

About Offshore Oildom:

Offshore Oildom tells the riveting story of the United States’ quest to secure the oil riches of the sea. Drawing on a wealth of untapped sources, Tyler Priest reveals how the offshore oil industry emerged from an ambitious project to incorporate the ocean’s submerged lands into the territory of the United States. These lands were frontier spaces, beyond traditional jurisdiction and control. Efforts to commandeer them for oil and gas extraction thus required new institutions of governance.

From the titanic struggle over the tidelands starting in the 1930s to Project Independence in the 1970s, the process of establishing an offshore dominion of oil provoked intractable conflicts over money, values, and power. It pitted coastal states against their land-locked counterparts and captains of industry against federal civil servants and coastal communities. It stoked partisan and internecine warfare. It set off an international race to annex offshore territory, complicating U.S. foreign-policy objectives. It weighed on the minds of Supreme Court justices and troubled every occupant of the White House from Franklin Roosevelt forward. The modern environmental movement was born in opposition to offshore oil just as the 1970s energy crisis compelled the acceleration of drilling in the ocean.

Creating and governing an offshore oildom involved nothing less than redrawing the territorial borders of the nation, rebuilding the political foundations of the U.S. energy system, and testing the environmental limits of resource extraction. This history is essential to understanding the tension between energy security and environmental protection in modern America.

Praise for Offshore Oildom:

“A brilliant examination of the history of offshore oil cast in a crisply written narrative. Tyler Priest forces readers to think anew about the politics of industry, states’ rights, the environment, and American expansion, showing us why he’s one of our preeminent energy scholars.”

—Jack E. Davis, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea

“With both precision and breadth, Tyler Priest provides an engrossing account of the legal, social, and political events that shaped the rich federal oil kingdom off the U.S. coasts. He likens this oildom’s creation to ‘a smoldering political and legal potato, scorched from all sides’ by coastal states battling the feds in court and in Congress, a polarized battle that continues to this day.”

—Jacqueline L. Weaver, professor emerita of law, University of Houston Law Center

“Tyler Priest, a preeminent historian of energy and the environment, explores how a single well drilled off a pier near Santa Barbara in 1898 gave rise to a major American industry—offshore oil and gas. In spirited prose, Priest demonstrates how this U.S. industry was created not only by innovation, creative engineering, and complex execution; it was also the result of fierce political battles.”

—Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power and The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

“In writing Offshore Oildom, Tyler Priest has amassed a stunning amount of information on the emergence of U.S. offshore oil production, utilizing scores of oral interviews and extensive archival and official records scattered across the country. The result, more than two decades in the making, is a masterpiece in American energy history. No thoughtful discussion of energy resource development can ignore this deeply researched landmark study.”

—Jay Hakes, author of The Presidents and the Planet: Climate Change Science and Politics from Eisenhower to Bush

About the Author:

Tyler Priest is associate professor of history at the University of Iowa. He is the author of the award-winning book The Offshore Imperative: Shell Oil’s Search for Petroleum in Postwar America and has published in the Journal of American History, Environmental History, Enterprise & Society, the Wall Street Journal, Politico, and Science. In 2010 he served as a senior policy analyst on the President’s National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.

The LSU Press Live Author Series brings the talented writers of LSU Press to your home. On Wednesdays and Thursdays at 2pm CDT on our Facebook page, we broadcast a different LSU Press writer reading from their book and talking about their inspiration and craft. Post on the event page or DM us with questions for your favorite LSU Press author, and we will ask them live!

Share

Today’s post is a rebroadcast of our May 13 livestream with Melissa Daggett, author of Eugène and Eulalie: A Family Saga of Love, Race, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans.

About Eugène and Eulalie:

Melissa Daggett’s Eugène and Eulalie is an epic story of love, race, prosperity, and legal maneuvering. It chronicles for the first time in a comprehensive way the largely forgotten lives of Eulalie Mandeville, a free woman of color, and her white partner, Eugène Macarty. Mandeville and Macarty, both descendants of elite colonial families, began an interracial relationship in the 1790s that endured for more than half a century and produced five children. It also led to Mandeville’s phenomenal rise to the pinnacle of wealth and success within the unique tripartite racial structure of nineteenth-century New Orleans.

Daggett uses the voluminous Nicolas Théodore Macarty et al. vs. Eulalie Mandeville f.w.c. (1848) court case to examine how an interracial relationship continued for more than fifty years despite onerous laws during the Spanish regime and the antebellum era that complicated such partnerships. She examines the origins of the Macarty and Mandeville families, revealing how they paralleled each other in Louisiana history and often intersected on social, military, economic, and political levels. Daggett also analyzes the struggles of the free people of color in both colonial Louisiana and early America and explores the ways slavery, manumission, and inheritance laws connected the two families. Above all, her work recovers the unique story of Eugène Macarty and Eulalie Mandeville, which has languished in the shadows of historical obscurity for generations.

Praise for Eugène and Eulalie:

“Melissa Daggett’s deeply researched and beautifully written Eugène and Eulalie is a stunningly original book. With a firm grasp of Louisiana’s complex past and a keen eye for detail, the author explores the intricate life of an extraordinary free woman of color in antebellum New Orleans. Along the way, the reader will gain fresh insight into Louisiana’s storied history of interracial relationships.” ~Mark Charles Roudané, author of The New Orleans Tribune: An Introduction to America’s First Black Daily Newspaper

“Melissa Daggett recounts the captivating story of an interracial couple, Eugène Macarty and Eulalie Mandeville, with aplomb. Using a wide range of documents, she reveals the intricacies of family life within a unique Creole society during a time of shifting racial, class, and gender allegiances and legalities. This page-turner is rich and illuminating. Daggett knows how to make history come alive.” ~Miki Pfeffer, editor of A New Orleans Author in Mark Twain’s Court: Letters from Grace King’s New England Sojourns

“Building on an impressive array of multilingual sources, Melissa Daggett adds an extraordinary new chapter to the city’s history. Her riveting study centers on a biracial couple, the offspring of prestigious Creole families. In the 1790s, they entered into a fifty-year, marriage-like relationship. After Eugène Macarty died, Eulalie Mandeville defended her property from challenges of Macarty’s white relatives. Daggett brings fascinating details drawn from the legal proceedings to illuminate the political and social landscapes of antebellum New Orleans.” ~Caryn Cossé Bell, author of Creole New Orleans in the Revolutionary Atlantic, 1775–1877

About the Author:

Melissa Daggett is a former professor of history at San Jacinto College and the author of Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: The Life and Times of Henry Louis Rey.

The LSU Press Live Author Series brings the talented writers of LSU Press to your home. On Wednesdays and Thursdays at 2pm CDT on our Facebook page, we broadcast a different LSU Press writer reading from their book and talking about their inspiration and craft. Post on the event page or DM us with questions for your favorite LSU Press author, and we will ask them live!

Share

Today’s post is a rebroadcast of our May 7 livestream with Drew Flanagan, author of From Occupation to Integration: Recivilizing the French Zone of Post-Nazi Germany, 1945-1955.

About From Occupation to Integration:

After the collapse of the National Socialist regime in May 1945, France became one of four principal occupying powers in a defeated Germany. Within their zone of occupation along the Upper and Middle Rhine, French occupiers participated in the Allied project to remake German society. In the process, they confronted the long history of Franco-German rivalry in the region and their country’s diminished power in the wake of World War II.

From Occupation to Integration explores how French ideas about civilization and the civilizing process shaped the practice of occupation in the French Zone and the early stages of European integration. The French Zone was set apart from the other Allied zones by the occupiers’ belief that Nazi “barbarism” was deeply rooted in German culture and history. In seeking to transform the Germans along their border into acceptable partners for France within a united western Europe, the French occupiers applied aspects of France’s universal “civilizing” mission, adapting strategies and practices developed in the country’s overseas colonies to fit a European population.

Whether implementing counterinsurgency methods developed in French North Africa in the pacification and control of their zone or attempting to address what they perceived as the deep-rooted flaws of German culture through reeducation and propaganda, the French applied their civilizational thinking, using that vision to justify and guide the first postwar attempts at cross-border economic integration. Through both conflicts and cooperation with the German population, the French in occupied Germany negotiated a shared vision of western European civilization that they hoped would ensure French leadership in Europe.

In this engaging study, Drew Flanagan deftly details and analyzes the entanglement between the Europeanization of the French Zone and decolonization in France’s empire, prompting readers to consider the continued impact of colonial and imperial ideas and practices on contemporary Europe and the European Union.

About the Author:

Drew Flanagan is assistant professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford.

The LSU Press Live Author Series brings the talented writers of LSU Press to your home. On Wednesdays and Thursdays at 2pm CDT on our Facebook page, we broadcast a different LSU Press writer reading from their book and talking about their inspiration and craft. Post on the event page or DM us with questions for your favorite LSU Press author, and we will ask them live!

Share

Today’s post is a rebroadcast of our April 30 livestream with Lauren Nicole Henley, author of Inquisition for Blood: The Making of a Black Female Serial Killer in the Jim Crow South.

About Inquisition for Blood:

For three years in the early 1900s, a serial killer zigzagged across the rice belt region of the United States, using an everyday ax to slaughter Black families living within a mile of the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Sunset Route. The similarities among the murders were uncanny, yet lawmen in early twentieth-century America had neither the technology nor the vocabulary to identify the serial killer in their midst. Instead, regional authorities worked the cases as individual homicides.

This approach led to seemingly contradictory realities: the unknown killer was dubbed “the axman,” and a young Black woman named Clementine Barnabet was arrested as a suspect. She offered questionable confessions and swiftly gained international recognition, as the press reimagined Clementine as a cult-leading, ax-wielding, sacrifice-driven serial killer. But there was a problem: Clementine was already in jail by the time more than half of the murders occurred.

In Inquisition for Blood, Lauren Nicole Henley examines this conundrum as she describes how axman madness consumed an entire region for years. She unpacks these crimes and their aftermaths to show how Black communities responded to incomprehensible violence, how the state criminalized Blackness, and how a young Black woman ultimately came to be understood as a serial killer. Drawing on more than three thousand newspaper articles, hundreds of pages of court records, prison ledgers, death certificates, censuses, city directories, and more, Henley tells a historical narrative that is as intriguing as any true crime novel, challenging our assumptions about who has the ability to get away with murder.

Praise for Inquisition for Blood:

“Lauren Nicole Henley has produced an absolute page-turner highlighting the female serial killer armed with an ax. Following the trail of blood that alarmed America in the early twentieth century, this book is a way-shower on true crime, fusing together multiple deaths with a hungry media, protective communities, religion, gender, and the making of a criminal in a powerful way.” —Sowande’ M. Mustakeem, author of Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage

“Inquisition for Blood tells a riveting story. In this deeply researched book, Lauren Henley writes a compelling history about race, gender, and intraracial crime in the American South. Offering readers details about a series of brutal murders in Progressive-era Louisiana, Henley explains how white media accounts, state agents, and individual endeavors constructed gendered Black criminality. Inquisition for Blood is a must-read for those looking to understand the roots of Black female criminality.” —LaShawn Harris, author of Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City

“In Inquisition for Blood, Lauren Henley investigates a series of ax murders that took the lives of entire Black families in the early Jim Crow period, as well as the life of the Black woman who confessed to several of the killings. Through extensive research that encompasses court and legislative records, regional and national newspapers, as well as archival records, Henley elucidates how crime, religion, the media, injustice, and incarceration were often shaped by white perceptions of race to such an extent that, very often, the truth was lost.” —Karen L. Cox, author of Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South

“In this beautifully written work, Lauren Henley recovers the forgotten saga of the Ax Man and Clementine Barnabet. As it challenges historical understandings of the ‘serial killer,’ it asks us to confront our lingering fascination with spectacular acts of violence.” —K. Stephen Prince, author of The Ballad of Robert Charles: Searching for the New Orleans Riot of 1900

About the Author:

Lauren Nicole Henley is an assistant professor in the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond. She earned her PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin.

The LSU Press Live Author Series brings the talented writers of LSU Press to your home. On Wednesdays and Thursdays at 2pm CDT on our Facebook page, we broadcast a different LSU Press writer reading from their book and talking about their inspiration and craft. Post on the event page or DM us with questions for your favorite LSU Press author, and we will ask them live!

Share

Today’s post is a rebroadcast of our May 6 livestream with Patti M. Marxsen, author of Karen Blixen’s Search for Self: The Making of “Out of Africa.”

About Karen Blixen’s Search for Self:

In Karen Blixen’s Search for Self, Patti M. Marxsen presents a twenty-first-century reconsideration of Blixen’s iconic memoir Out of Africa, originally published in 1937 and now regarded as a classic of twentieth-century literature. The methodology of this “book about a book” draws on seasoned historical perspectives of European colonial activities in early twentieth-century Africa as it engages Blixen’s letters, tales, speeches, interviews, the photographic record of her various personas, memoir literature of others who knew her, and three generations of scholarship, including pointed postcolonial critiques. Mixing scholarly research with personal reflection, Marxsen recounts an inspiring tale of a writer’s evolution, along with thoughtful analysis of the art and craft of memoir.

As a modern woman both trapped and liberated by privilege, Karen Christentze Dinesen Blixen experienced considerable personal and financial challenges during her years living in colonial Kenya (1914–1931), a period that Marxsen approaches as a belated coming-of-age journey rather than a romantic tale. Blixen returned to Denmark at age forty-six, bankrupt and in a state of physical and mental fragility with no idea about what she would do or how she would live in a bourgeois society that she viewed as “incarceration.” Only when Blixen set out to reinvent herself with the “liberating mask” of the pseudonym Isak Dinesen did she begin to realize her potential as a storyteller and find the strength to develop her uniquely poetic narrative voice by writing about her African years.

Blixen’s process of loss and recovery through writing constitutes the frame of Marxsen’s book, just as it constitutes the frame of Out of Africa. Marxsen traces Blixen’s inner life through letters and writings to probe the origins of her imaginative power, her instinctive multiculturalism (considered “eccentric” in colonial Kenya), and the feminism of a creative woman in a new century. Marxsen continues the story through the contested legacies of the book, including its serving as the basis for the acclaimed, Academy Award–winning film released in 1985.

This new study of Blixen’s widely read memoir, which has remained consistently in print for almost ninety years, broadens understandings of the author’s complex self-realization, the skill of her literary art, and the book’s evolving afterlife.

Praise for Karen Blixen’s Search for Self:

“Patti M. Marxsen takes us on a fascinating tour of the multiple aspects that have contributed to the creation and reception of Karen Blixen’s memoir. From the author’s original quest to record her experience of Africa, to our contemporary issues of postcolonialism, feminism, and the influence of Hollywood, Marxsen is a keen-eyed, sure-footed guide, enriching our (re)reading experience at every turn.” —Alison Anderson, author of The Summer Guest

“In this thorough and insightful re-evaluation of Blixen and the afterlife of Out of Africa, Marxsen introduces the author to a new generation of potential readers. Marxsen’s enthusiasm for Blixen—balanced by judicious critique—makes for a highly readable as well as informative account of the Danish writer and her poignant memoir of colonial Kenya.” —Simon Lewis, author of White Women Writers and Their African Invention

“As Blixen deployed her selective memory and fervent, rebellious mind, she composed a myth of tenuous belonging that reveals as much about herself as about Africa. Those seeking a nuanced and fair reading of Out of Africa—one that confronts difficult political questions while honoring the evocative, feminist brilliance of its author—will find it in Marxsen’s singular analysis.” —Janet McIntosh, author of Unsettled: Denial and Belonging Among White Kenyans

“Marxsen’s excellent book on the making of Out of Africa reveals Blixen’s contradictory perspectives on topics such as colonialism, feminism, and racism. In so doing, Marxsen explores how the inclusion/exclusion arrangement and emphasis inherent in memoir writing underscore the complexities of Blixen’s character. In the end, the reader develops a deep admiration for Marxsen’s remarkable subject.” —Norman McMillan, author of Distant Son: An Alabama Boyhood

About the Author:

Patti M. Marxsen is a biographer and independent scholar whose works have been published in the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean. Her books include Helene Schweitzer: A Life of Her Own and Jacques Roumain: A Life of Resistance.

The LSU Press Live Author Series brings the talented writers of LSU Press to your home. On Wednesdays and Thursdays at 2pm CDT on our Facebook page, we broadcast a different LSU Press writer reading from their book and talking about their inspiration and craft. Post on the event page or DM us with questions for your favorite LSU Press author, and we will ask them live!

Share

Today’s post is a rebroadcast of our April 29 livestream with Constance Bailey, Shelley Ingram, and Casey Kayser, editors of the brand-new collection Get It While It’s Hot: Gas Station, Roadside, and Convenience Cuisine in the U.S. South.

About Get It While It’s Hot:

Get It While It’s Hot brings together scholars, food writers, influencers, and even a CEO to discuss the phenomenon of eating by the side of the road. This innovative collection examines an increasingly commonplace belief across the U.S. South—that some of the best, most enjoyable food comes from places you would not expect: a gas station, the back of a pickup truck, or a ramshackle building made of plywood.

The essays collected here look at the delicious food that can be found in such spaces, but also at the ways that gas station, roadside, and convenience cuisine contributes to the social and cultural identities of people and communities in the U.S. South. Sometimes these roadside spaces serve goals of equity and food justice as they relate particularly to race, class, and gender, and sometimes they stymy them. Contributors address the importance of roadside vendors to low-income areas and communities of color, while also revealing how gas stations and convenience stores are particularly prone to anti-Black surveillance and community gatekeeping. Several essays examine the appearance of service stations and unconventional food vendors in southern literature. Interviews with photojournalist Kate Medley, social media influencer Stafford Shurden, and Stuckey’s CEO Stephanie Stuckey provide firsthand perspectives on the diverse landscapes of food culture in the South.

By surveying the importance of roadside and convenience cuisine to communities across the region, Get It While It’s Hot illustrates that these spaces do not function like typical restaurants. They mark boundaries of community, establish consistency and familiarity, and invite people, sometimes paradoxically, to pull up a chair and sit a while.

About the Authors:

Shelley Ingram, professor of English and folklore at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, is coauthor of Implied Nowhere: Absence in Folklore Studies and coeditor of Wait Five Minutes: Weatherlore in the Twenty-First Century.

Casey Kayser is associate professor of English and director of the Medical Humanities Program at the University of Arkansas. Her books include Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender and two coedited collections on the work of Carson McCullers.

Constance Bailey, assistant professor of English at Georgia State University, is the editor of Conversations with Kiese Laymon.

The LSU Press Live Author Series brings the talented writers of LSU Press to your home. On Wednesdays and Thursdays at 2pm CDT on our Facebook page, we broadcast a different LSU Press writer reading from their book and talking about their inspiration and craft. Post on the event page or DM us with questions for your favorite LSU Press author, and we will ask them live!

Share

Today, we have a recast of our April 15 livestream with James E. Caron and Comic Belles Lettres: Genealogies of Humor and Satire in Anglo-American Literature, 1711–1856, the first book in our new series, Explorations in American Humor, edited by Judith Yaross Lee.

About Comic Belles Lettres:

Comic Belles Lettres presents a significant rethinking of standard categories in scholarship on antebellum American humor—such as Old Southwest humorists and literary comedians—to provide a richer analysis of the comic writers of the period. By introducing an alternative aesthetic category, “comic belles lettres,” and placing it in a transnational context, James E. Caron details a robust cross-cultural background that includes British and American conceptions of masculinity, the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility, and the “man of feeling” trope.

Caron’s analysis uncovers a genealogy of comic characters with fresh readings of Washington Irving’s Sketch Book, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin that not only sweeps up other contemporary authors—Donald Mitchell and Frederic Cozzens—but also includes Joseph Addison’s famous character Sir Roger de Coverly. In addition, the investigation moves beyond fictional texts to demonstrate the reach of comic belles lettres by discussing two well-known historical figures, Lewis Gaylord Clark and William Thackeray, who embody the aesthetic’s signature figure, the Comic Gentleman. This segment delves into contemporary statements about the nature of comic art and comic laughter along with gendered concerns about the production of satire.

Comic Belles Lettres situates this unique mode of aesthetics within discursive practices of the 1850s—reviews, essays, and editorial decisions—that constitute important yet routinely overlooked aspects of the antebellum print archive, resulting in a new way of thinking about Anglo-American comic writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

About the Author:

James E. Caron is professor emeritus of English at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa, where he taught American literature for thirty-six years. He is currently copresident of the American Humor Studies Association (AHSA) and is a former senior associate editor of its journal, Studies in American Humor. In 2023 he received a lifetime achievement award from the AHSA.

The LSU Press Live Author Series brings the talented writers of LSU Press to your home. On Wednesdays and Thursdays at 2pm CDT on our Facebook and Substack pages, we broadcast a different LSU Press writer reading from their book and talking about their inspiration and craft. Post on the event page or DM us with questions for your favorite LSU Press author, and we will ask them live!

Share

Today, we have a recast of our April 2 livestream with Corinne Martin and Louisiana Healing Garden—her latest book, and a follow-up to the popular Louisiana Herb Journal, released in 2022.

About Louisiana Healing Garden:

Louisiana Healing Garden offers a guide to the medicinal properties of everyday plants such as crape myrtle, gardenia, and sweet olive, encouraging readers to learn about these plants and their uses while maintaining a healthy ecological balance in their home spaces.

In this follow-up to Louisiana Herb Journal, herbalist Corinne Martin continues her exploration of Louisiana’s plants and their capacity to provide healing in a time of unprecedented change and uncertainty. Louisiana Healing Garden is an herb book, a garden guide, and an introduction to the web of wild lives that make up our home state. Featuring fifty medicinal herbs, the book invites readers to participate in what Catholic priest and ecologist Thomas Berry called “the Great Work” of finding ways to live that benefit both humans and the places we inhabit.

As the state struggles with increasingly severe storms, land subsidence, rising waters, saltwater intrusion, and the loss of iconic trees, Martin suggests that the recognition and careful use of medicinal plants may help to stabilize at-risk species and areas, reduce the use of toxic applications on aggressive weeds, and support everyday health. Throughout the book, she offers personal reflections on her experiences of finding the herbs and poignant commentaries on some of the gifts and challenges of living in Louisiana.

Each herb listing includes plant identification features, habitat, distribution, medicinal properties, risks, and preparation methods. Martin also shares cultivation tips to aid home gardeners who are introducing healing plants into their landscapes. As she notes, this is not just an herb book. It’s an invitation into a place that is complex, wide, shifting, old, and ever new. With Louisiana Healing Garden as a guide, we can awaken to the many small gifts that surround us, shore up our health, and help to support positive changes in the places we call home.

Praise for Louisiana Healing Garden:

“Through personal anecdotes and vivid vignettes, Corinne Martin sweeps you along to riverbanks, bayous, woods, cow pastures, and fields of Louisiana to meet the most amazing characters—the healing plants. Louisiana Healing Garden is packed with unforgettable scenes and information. You will learn the plants of Louisiana like never before.” ~Tammany Baumgarten, founding president of the Native Plant Initiative of Greater New Orleans

“What some folks call a weed, the author sees as a gift, full of purpose, history, and healing. In Louisiana Healing Garden, Corinne Martin teaches about the many benefits of the plants around us. But she doesn’t just teach about the herbs; she gives them character, story, and soul. You’ll never look at the green world around you in the same way.” ~Bayli Quick Brossette, curator of the Briarwood Nature Preserve

“In Louisiana Healing Garden, you will find both plants that feel familiar and plants that you’ve never encountered. With each plant story, you will deepen your understanding of the connection of nature to community and health. This book is a refuge, inviting you to discover your own healing garden where you will dig down into the earth and plant seeds.” ~Jennifer Blanchard, LSU instructor of horticulture

About the Author:

Corinne Martin is a clinical herbalist and amateur naturalist who has worked with medicinal plants for more than forty years. A retired instructor of holistic and integrative health, she has a passionate love for nature and for the lush and threatened environment of her home ground of Louisiana. She is the author of Louisiana Herb Journal (LSU Press, 2022).

The LSU Press Live Author Series brings the talented writers of LSU Press to your home. On Wednesdays and Thursdays at 2pm CDT on our Facebook and Substack pages, we broadcast a different LSU Press writer reading from their book and talking about their inspiration and craft. Post on the event page or DM us with questions for your favorite LSU Press author, and we will ask them live!

Share

We’re back today with a recast of our April 1 livestream with Chelsea Whitton and her debut poetry collection, Wonder Wheel!

About Wonder Wheel:

“Chelsea Whitton’s Wonder Wheel is wide-ranging formally, tender in its depictions of family, startling in the evocation of violence, and calming in its grasp of the world’s wideness.” —Mark Jarman

“Whether grappling with the tumultuous relationship between past and future selves, the grotesqueries of how femininity is constructed and performed, or the complexities of loss, Wonder Wheel is self-observant, candid, quirky, and poignant, full of unexpected gestures around whose corners lie profound discoveries.” —Rebecca Lindenberg

“Whitton’s voice is virtuosic, knocking off poetic forms with a seemingly effortless bravado, while also slipping into the confessional intimacy of a late night on Brooklyn bar stools sharing clove cigarettes. This is a stunning debut that is profoundly joyful and deeply serious.” —Jason Schneiderman

“Full of spit and sass, contradiction and denial, the center of Whitton’s wickedly off-kilter poetry churns with desire, her mind’s maw swirling large as a sunflower’s corolla.” —Cate Marvin

Chelsea Whitton’s debut poetry collection, Wonder Wheel, dexterously whirls in sonic circles, ruminating on themes of spiritual bestowal and terrestrial bequest, millennial identity, adult friendship, feminine desire, and the mythmaking at stake in family history. Disoriented speakers who nevertheless believe they know where they are going, and what they are doing, provide an occasion for lyric expansiveness and periodic bathos, including elegies for June Carter Cash, Patsy Cline, the author’s father, an ex-cat, and others. At the heart of the collection is a rhyming sonnet crown that offers a wicked inversion of the book’s larger vision by constructing an apocalyptic mythology of matrilineal inheritance reliant on resistance, destruction, and martyrdom as much as on cycles of creation and healing.

About the Author:

Chelsea Whitton is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in many print and online publications including Beloit Poetry Journal, Cream City Review, Copper Nickel, Cimarron Review, and Poetry Ireland, among others. She lives in southwestern Ohio and teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

The LSU Press Live Author Series brings the talented writers of LSU Press to your home. On Wednesdays and Thursdays at 2pm CDT on our Facebook and Substack pages, we broadcast a different LSU Press writer reading from their book and talking about their inspiration and craft. Post on the event page or DM us with questions for your favorite LSU Press author, and we will ask them live!

Share

Today we have a recast of our March 26 livestream with John Wall Barger and his new poetry collection, Resurrection Pie!

About Resurrection Pie:

“The poems in John Wall Barger’s Resurrection Pie are triumphal examples of the mystery that makes the lyric what it is. These are poems that are both easily apprehended and fathomless.” ~Shane McCrae

“Resurrection Pie is deliciously full of event and detail. Barger, a poet of great affability, is also wonderfully unwilling to smooth over trouble or falsify reality.” ~Daisy Fried

“Barger’s new collection shows the celebrated poet shimmying in the peaks of the contemporary lyric. The poems in Resurrection Pie gather and grieve and party hard with big-hearted tenderness and a propulsively twisting imagination.” ~Zach Savich

“Barger has an absurdist’s heart, and it’s a vast heart, full of grief, heartache, and enchantment. In these pages, you might find yourself in a duel with Elvis, or chatting with a ghost named Marcus Aurelius. There might be secrets buried in the yard, but Barger’s expansive imagination will illuminate each of those secrets, and you will be charmed and changed.” ~Matthew Olzmann

A resurrection pie is defined as any dish made from yesterday’s leftovers—a meal that, in essence, rises from the dead. In this spirit, John Wall Barger’s new collection of poetry calls forth the past and its dead, describing a bardo-like psychic terrain in a language of fable and trauma. The poems move fast and strange: a man arrives at his ex-lover’s island of secrets; a mourner coughs up red flower petals; a man walks backward across Philadelphia as bodies rise out of the ground; a boy watches his dead sister’s flea circus through a magnifying glass.

In language by turns vivid and destabilizing, Barger writes the odd, the marvelous, and the wounded with unguarded clarity. Resurrection Pie is a work of serious play: absurd, intimate, melancholic. Dispatches from inside the fever dream.

About the Author:

John Wall Barger is the author of six previous collections of poems and one collection of essays. He lives in Vermont and lectures in the Writing Program at Dartmouth College.

The LSU Press Live Author Series brings the talented writers of LSU Press to your home. On Wednesdays and Thursdays at 2pm CDT on our Facebook and Substack pages, we broadcast a different LSU Press writer reading from their book and talking about their inspiration and craft. Post on the event page or DM us with questions for your favorite LSU Press author, and we will ask them live!

Share

Here is a recast of our March 25 livestream with Rose McLarney and her lyric essay collection, Rubble Masonry!

About Rubble Masonry:

“These compact and lyrical essays could have been written by no one save Rose McLarney. Her training in poetry—a pitch-perfect ear and metaphoric virtuosity—serves her investigation of expansive and braided topics in an original and fascinating book.” —Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs

“What a set list of musings in Rubble Masonry, with its peerless nuance and quirks! Peep the terrain of McLarney’s wide and mighty curiosity. Rubble Masonry is impressively splendid.” —Rodney Terich Leonard, author of Sweetgum & Lightning

“Reading Rubble Masonry, I was inundated by new possibility. I relearned, loving the new possibilities for the lyric ‘I,’ just as, like McLarney, I wondered, ‘What can I come closer to calling mine?’ A spellbinding read; I am full of praise.” —Sally Keith, author of Two of Everything

“This collection of startling, deeply original linked essays, with their lush, specific imagery and high-flying associative leaps, provides a meditation on the past in an attempt to understand the bewildering present. Rubble Masonry provides a space for contemplation—and, ultimately, for renewal.” —Charlotte Pence, author of Code

“What emerges is one of the most precise and tender meditations on place, ancestry, womanhood, and inheritance in recent American nonfiction—a work that does not rebuild the house but teaches us how to inhabit what remains.” —North American Review

Rubble Masonry is a collection of lyric essays that takes its title from the practice of stone masons who, rather than using materials cut to ideal measurements, work with found rocks’ natural shapes. It combines the rich images and musical language of poetry with prose’s capacity to share personal narratives and information from wide-ranging sources. Diverse content and innovative form distinguish a book that explores the places in which its author, Rose McLarney, finds herself as a woman from the mountain South—in history, national dialogues, public spaces, the natural world, and lineages that extend beyond an individual’s life on earth.

About the Author:

Rose McLarney’s collections of poems are Colorfast, Forage, Its Day Being Gone, and The Always Broken Plates of Mountains. She is coeditor of A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia and the Southern Humanities Review. McLarney is Lanier Endowed Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University.

The LSU Press Live Author Series brings the talented writers of LSU Press to your home. On Wednesdays and Thursdays at 2pm CDT on our Facebook and Substack pages, we broadcast a different LSU Press writer reading from their book and talking about their inspiration and craft. Post on the event page or DM us with questions for your favorite LSU Press author, and we will ask them live!

Share

Today we have a recast of our March 12 livestream with historian Kenneth W. Noe and his latest LSU Press book, Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend: Reconsidering Lincoln as Commander in Chief. Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend is a follow-up to 2020’s The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War, which was a Finalist for the Lincoln Prize and Winner of the Colonel Richard W. Ulbrich Memorial Book Award.

About Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend:

“Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend offers a fascinating narrative of how generations of writers and historians evaluated the sixteenth president’s reputation as commander in chief during the Civil War. Noe suggests that the admiring and uncritical depiction of Lincoln’s grasp of the military arts, which still largely prevails today, might be worthy of a more critical appraisal.” —Joan Waugh, author of U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth

Kenneth W. Noe’s Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend boldly questions the long-accepted notion that the sixteenth president was an almost-perfect commander in chief, more intelligent than his generals. The legend originated with Lincoln himself, who early in the war concluded that he possessed a keen strategic and tactical mind. Noe explores the genesis of this powerful idea and asks why so many have tenaciously defended it.

George McClellan, Lincoln’s top general, emerged in Lincoln’s mind and the American psyche as his chief adversary, and to this day, the Lincoln-McClellan relationship remains central to the enduring legend. Lincoln came to view himself as a wiser warrior than McClellan, and as the war proceeded, a few members of Lincoln’s inner circle began to echo the president’s thoughts on his military prowess. Convinced of his own tactical brilliance, Lincoln demanded that Ulysses Grant, McClellan’s replacement, turn to the “hard, tough fighting” of the Overland and Petersburg campaigns, when Grant’s first instinct was to copy McClellan and swing into the Confederate rear.

Noe suggests that the growth and solidification of the heroic legend began with Lincoln’s assassination; it debuted in print only months afterward and was so cloaked in religious piety that for decades it could not withstand the counternarratives offered by secular contemporaries. Although the legend was debated and neglected at times, it reemerged in interwar Great Britain and gained canonical status in the 1950s Cold War era and during the Civil War Centennial of the 1960s. Historians became torchbearers of the heroic legend and much else that we know about Lincoln, reorienting his biography forever. Based on lessons and language from the world wars, their arguments were so timely and powerful that they seized the field. Since then, biographers and historians have reevaluated many aspects of Lincoln’s life, but have rarely revisited his performance as commander in chief. Noe’s reappraisal is long overdue.

About the Author:

Kenneth W. Noe is the Draughon Professor of Southern History Emeritus at Auburn University. He is most recently the author of The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War.

The LSU Press Live Author Series brings the talented writers of LSU Press to your home. On Wednesdays and Thursdays at 2pm CDT on our Facebook and Substack pages, we broadcast a different LSU Press writer reading from their book and talking about their inspiration and craft. Post on the event page or DM us with questions for your favorite LSU Press author, and we will ask them live!

Share

We’re back today with a recast of our March 12 livestream with the gifted Kate Gaskin and her new poetry collection, A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart!

About A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart:

“A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart is a gorgeous exploration of the complexities of parenting... Breathtaking in their tenderness and honesty, the poems remind us how love breaks and remakes us every season.” —Traci Brimhall

“Kate Gaskin’s A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart depicts a heart breaking and repairing in slow motion, but the most striking thing is the quality of this book’s light—sadness and grief are as bright as the sun, a mass of nuclear fusion shining with excruciating brightness into all the hurt places, filling them with love. An extraordinary collection.” —Niina Pollari

“Entering this beautiful, heartbreaking book is like walking through a gallery dedicated to preserving the precious artifacts of a world of grievous loss. Though the poems meditate on the darkest realities, light suffuses the blackest corners of grief. These poems are given to us by a suffering yet resilient soul, whose understanding of our flowering world is generous and profound.” —Sidney Wade

A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart chronicles a mother’s harrowing journey through infant loss and a disastrous hospital birth, while also exploring the joyful complexities of raising a neurodivergent child. Using image and sound derived from the beauty of the natural world, Kate Gaskin’s poems sift through grief while tapping into the sublime state that underlies loss and love.

About the Author:

Kate Gaskin is the author of Forever War, winner of the Pamet River Prize. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Southern Review, and Ploughshares, among others. She directs Adroit Journal’s summer mentorship program and is an assistant editor for TRP: The University Press of SHSU.

The LSU Press Live Author Series brings the talented writers of LSU Press to your home. On Wednesdays and Thursdays at 2pm CDT on our Facebook and Substack pages, we broadcast a different LSU Press writer reading from their book and talking about their inspiration and craft. Post on the event page or DM us with questions for your favorite LSU Press author, and we will ask them live!

Share

Today, we’re excited to share a recast of our March 4 livestream with the prolific poet, novelist, short story writer, and nonfiction writer Joseph Bathanti, whose latest poetry collection is called Steady Daylight.

Steady Daylight has already received praise from Fred Shaw of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, who writes: “Steady Daylight” balances memory, epicurean delights like “sfogliatelle from Barsotti’s” and a nodding appreciation to the earthly desire of workers everywhere: to toil in “Kingdom Come. The union up here takes zero [excrement].”

About Steady Daylight:

“Plainspoken, set on streets with names like Liberty and Prince, the poems in Joseph Bathanti’s Steady Daylight travel through time, taking us back to a midcentury Italian American childhood in Pittsburgh, a vanished world. Every memory feels alive here. Bathanti has a gift for making the past present, his poems like brief requiems for the living and the dead.” —Jehanne Dubrow

Steady Daylight, the latest volume of poetry from Joseph Bathanti, returns to the place he grew up, the now-vanished neighborhood of East Liberty in Pittsburgh. The speaker traipses fearlessly between real and imagined realms, in the face of often conflicted sensibilities, secrets, and silence. While the physical touchstones of the “old” East Liberty have evanesced, Bathanti invents a world ample enough for the dead and the living through incantatory language thrumming with hope and photographic integrity. Ultimately, Steady Daylight is an elegy and a praise song, a heartbreakingly beautiful requiem.

About the Author:

Joseph Bathanti, author of more than twenty books, is the former North Carolina poet laureate (2012–14); recipient of the North Carolina Award in Literature, the state’s highest civilian honor; and an inductee of the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.

The LSU Press Live Author Series brings the talented writers of LSU Press to your home. On Wednesdays and Thursdays at 2pm CDT on our Facebook and Substack pages, we broadcast a different LSU Press writer reading from their book and talking about their inspiration and craft. Post on the event page or DM us with questions for your favorite LSU Press author, and we will ask them live!

Share

Today we have a recast of our livestream on February 23 with the brilliant Dan Beachy-Quick, author of the brand-new collection, Elements & Offerings.

About Elements & Offerings:

The poet Paul Celan noted that, in his view of language, thinking and thanking are cognate, innately connected in their roots and connotations. Elements & Offerings, a new collection of poems by Dan Beachy-Quick, is a book-length poetic investigation of that hope—that to think is to learn to thank; that to thank is to learn to think. The first two sections seek a way to work toward poetic origins, taking inspiration from the alphabet, first philosophy, grammar, and prophecy; the last section offers poems composed over many years, simple gifts of gratitude to teachers and friends.

About the Author:

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator. His work has been supported by the Monfort, Lannan, and Guggenheim Foundations, and longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry. He teaches at Colorado State University, where he is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar, and serves as interim chair of the English department.

The LSU Press Live Author Series brings the talented writers of LSU Press to your home. On Wednesdays and Thursdays at 2pm CDT on our Facebook and Substack pages, we broadcast a different LSU Press writer reading from their book and talking about their inspiration and craft. Post on the event page, or tweet @lsupress, with questions for your favorite LSU Press author.

Share