We have another Essential reading to celebrate Black History Month!! Zoë Gadegbeku @HerWildness , author of Blue Futures, Break Open, shares with us another foundational work from which she draws inspiration. Watch for posts on Monday during the month of February! See below ⬇️ ⬇️ ⬇️ The main characters in Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s novel aren’t quite “star-crossed.” It is probably more accurate to describe them as worlds colliding. With the death of her mother, Petronella, Yejide is now the new custodian of a very heavy family legacy. Like the women before her, she is tasked with taking care of the dead and their restless spirits. Emmanuel was raised by his mother, Janaya, as an adherent of the Nazarite faith, which requires that its believers never interact with the dead. After a long period of struggling to support himself and his mother, Emmanuel finds work in Fidelis, which turns out to be a cemetery in the fictional city of Port Angeles, based on Trinidad’s capital city, Port of Spain. Renouncing his faith and to the horror of his mother, Emmanuel takes the gravedigger job. He doesn’t exactly meet Yejide when she begins planning for her mother’s funeral. Rather, they meet in a storm, in what Emmanuel thinks is a dream, though both the storm and the dream are very much real in the world that Lloyd Banwoconjures. The love story is layered and fraught as you can imagine, but the narrative goes beyond Yejide and Emmanuel, expanding into a meditation on grief and what we owe our living and our dead loved ones. I read this book the year I completed my first big revision of my own novel and immediately began to wonder how I could write something that would make other people lose themselves in it the way I did with Banwo’s work, about how I could bend the borders of real and surreal into something so lush. For example, without giving much more away, there’s a scene where Yejide comes across her mother sitting next to her dead twin sister, Geraldine. Both are knitting, but the dead sister’s needles and basket are empty of yarn. Incredible. #reading #books #blackhistorymonth

Happy pub day to Michael Kramp @dmkramp and Sarita Jayanty Mizin’s @PosttheColony edited edition of The Doom of the Great City (1880) by William Delisle Hay. William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City (1880) imagines the destruction of London as a result of human-induced environmental devastation, the threat of which is becoming increasingly visible today. This urban apocalypse narrative connects to pressing cultural discussions on global warming, modern life in cities, public health, and the interconnectivity of human life on earth. This first critical edition of Hay’s novella makes available his account of one man’s tale of survival amidst a toxic fog—a survival that includes his relocation to Maoriland in New Zealand. The editors foreground the relevance of the story to present and future pandemics, the persistence of environmental disasters, and the global population’s ongoing migration to cities. They place the narrative in dialogue with nineteenth-century concerns about climate change, pollution, natural resources, health care, empire, and (sub)urbanization that have remained significant challenges as we come to terms with the lasting impacts of the Anthropocene in the twenty-first century. Check out the Booktimist for an exclusive conversation between the editors. Link in Bio!

RT @JewishBook: We're kicking off Black History Month with @LoebDavon's powerful memoir, THE IN-BETWEENS. Peek inside with this excerpt. ht…

Our popular Essential reading series is back! To celebrate Black History Month, we’ve asked Blue Futures, Break Open author Zoë Gadegbeku @HerWildness. to share foundational works from which she draws inspiration. Watch for posts each Monday during the month of February! See below ⬇️ ⬇️ ⬇️ I first learned about the release of Wicked Flesh by Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson when I was almost done with my first [very rough] draft of my novel. For some reason, though I was determined not to enter 2020 with the work unfinished—there’s no way I could have known the fear and grief that lay ahead—I also felt very urgently that I wouldn’t be able to arrive at a complete draft until I was able to read Johnson’s book. And I found exactly what I was seeking. Wicked Flesh is so beautifully written and treats the lives of African women and women of African descent with care and rigor. Mapping history from Senegambia to New Orleans and Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, Johnson’s work considers Black femme freedom in the 18th century, probing archival silences (or rather deliberate exclusion and erasure) as spaces of possibility and not just emptiness. Johnson traces the various ways that these women experienced the slippery nature of power and subjugation across the African continent and diasporas and how they practiced intimacy, sometimes as solace and sometimes as strategy. Reading about these “wicked” “women in the water” (Johnson’s reference to Rae Paris’ poetry) deepened my hope that my characters, my own women in the water, could be recognizable to the women in her book, that maybe they passed by each other or even held hands somewhere in ritual or in flight. #reading #books #blackhistorymonth

RT @DeeshaPhilyaw: Thank you!

In her recent Washington City Paper review of Megan Howell’s new book Softie, Hannah Grieco wrote “Softie is nearly impossible to put down.” Hear the two of them in conversation this weekend in DC.

The holidays have come and gone, and this third week of January sees Morgantown and much of central Appalachia swaddled in a fluffy blanket of powder. Cold temperatures and quiet have descended upon the university city as school eases back into session. But our authors have been active!

Claire Jiménez interviews Megan Howell about cruelty, vulnerability, and the uncanny in her debut short story collection, Softie. #meganhowell #clairejimenez

RT @valnieman: @Ofmooseandmen @thebookseller @JohannaTC Great writing has a home with small/academic presses. @RegalHouse1 @WVUPRESS @Pres…

Praise for Megan Howell's short story collection, Softie, from @MsMagazine.🌟

RT @lissa_warren: Congratulations to @mjferrence! His book, I HATE IT HERE, PLEASE VOTE FOR ME: Essays on Rural Political Decay, has made t…

Up now on Booktimist: Salma Monani, author of Indigenous Ecocinema, describes new ways to approach Indigenous responses to climate issues. Introducing the concepts of d-ecocinema and d-ecocinema criticism, Salma Monani’s Indigenous Ecocinema expands the purview of ecocinema studies and not only brings attention to a thriving Indigenous cinema archive but also argues for a methodological approach that ushers Indigenous intellectual voices front and center in how we theorize this archive. Its case-study focus on Canada, particularly the work emanating from the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in Toronto—a nationally and internationally recognized hub in Indigenous cinema networks—provides insights into pan-Indigenous and Nation-specific contexts of Indigenous ecocinema. This absorbing text is the first book-length exploration foregrounding the environmental dimensions of cinema made by Indigenous peoples, including a particularly fascinating discussion on how Indigenous cinema’s ecological entanglements are a crucial and complementary aspect of its agenda of decolonialism. @imagineNATIVE #indigenouscinema #ecocinema #imaginenative

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We're so pleased to announce that we've signed engineering visionary Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard, hailed as the "father of the cable modem," for "The Accidental Network," a memoir describing how he developed and brought to market one of the signature technologies behind today’s global broadband revolution. Yassini-Fard devised a vision for transforming cable television lines to convey high-speed internet traffic not long after graduating from WVU with an electrical engineering degree in 1981. "How would our lives change," he wondered, "if everyday people had a stable, high-speed data connection to the internet?" They could work remotely, access connected healthcare (telemedicine), engage in distance learning, and be united with faraway families and friends. While Yassini-Fard wasn't the first to imagine a world of digital connectivity, he was in the vanguard of those actually making the dream a reality, through his extraordinary creative insight of utilizing the residential cable network and applying innovative digital signal processing techniques. “The Accidental Network” is both a valuable history of technology innovation and an engrossing account of business conducted at high speed. The book details Yassini-Fard’s journey from engineer to entrepreneur in the race to secure technology partners, create a wholly new marketplace, and convince cable industry executives that there was money to be made in transmitting data to households at a time when skepticism about the eventual reach of personal computing was the norm. This is the story of how Yassini-Fard and a 20-person team from his company LANcity were willing to bet it all (including the deed for Yassini-Fard's home!) on the creation of the cable modem and the pursuit of widescale global adoption. Look for "The Accidental Network" in Fall 2025! @LANcitymodem @stewartschley @WVUFoundation @WestVirginiaU

RT @lissa_warren: "Done well, government can be a way to help people get a fair shake." Listen to @mjferrence discussing his book, I HATE I…

RT @lissa_warren: Listen to I HATE IT HERE, PLEASE VOTE FOR ME author and @alleghenycol creative writing professor @mjferrence on @DeeTwoCe…

RT @lissa_warren: "We have to be bold enough to call out things we don't think are right." Great interview with @alleghenycol professor @mj…

RT @lissa_warren: Listen to @mjferrence on @PIVTRFoundation's Chatting with Betsy discussing the challenges of being a rural progressive an…