As National Poetry Month winds down, we wanted to share some great news from the past four weeks. Steven Sodergren’s The Army of the Potomac in the Overland and Petersburg Campaigns won the Colby Award for Best Military Book. Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans by Urmi Engineer Willoughby won the Kemper and Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana History. Sam V. H. Reese’s The Short Story in Midcentury America won the Arthur Miller Centre First Book Prize. And Neon Visions: The Comics of Howard Chaykin by Brannon Costello is a nominee for the 2018 Eisner Award for Best Scholarly/Academic Work.
Meanwhile, on the LSU Press Blog, Kirsten Squint discusses how the writing of LeAnne Howe is a unique intersection of Native American and Southern Literature and Chanda Feldman tells us how she dreamed up the riverine section of her new poetry collection. We also celebrated the publication of new books by T. R. Hummer, Wayne A. Wiegand and Shirley A. Wiegand, James P. Marshall, Stephen Cushman, Jeffrey S. Girard, and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara.
Below you’ll find a list of our May titles, upcoming events with our authors, and some recent publicity and reviews of our books. If you want to keep up with the press in real time, follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook!
New in May
Click here if calendar does not load.
Selected Publicity and Praise
The Humility of the Brutes: Poems by Ron Smith
“For its wit, personality and unique voice, The Humility of the Brutes is the best of Ron Smith and the pride of Southern verse.”—Deep South Magazine
Approaching the Fields: Poems by Chanda Feldman
“The ‘fields’ in the book’s title poem are ‘cotton // ready for harvesting’ and much of this understated yet forceful collection is concerned with the poet’s rural past, and the uneasy, unequal relationship between blacks and whites. While the book hums with melancholy, its dominant note, ultimately, is pride.”—Santa Barbara Independent
Stripper in Wonderland: Poems by Derrick Harriell
“By the end of Stripper in Wonderland, we, too, are ascending, elated by the new-formed bond with the collections’ speaker. These poems are a fantastic celebration of connections—between reader and poet, language and music, father and son.”—Black Warrior Review
Hybrid Creatures: Stories by Matthew Baker
“Baker’s stories read as crisp and minimalist, dictated to the page with a precision not unlike those same mathematical principles Tryg is so fond of.”—ZYZZYVA
Visitations: Stories by Lee Upton
“Balancing wit and wisdom, Lee Upton’s most recent short story collection, Visitations, is provocative and entertaining as it follows an eclectic cast of narrators in their journeys to self-discovery.”—The Literary Review
While in the Hands of the Enemy: Military Prisons of the Civil War by Charles W. Sanders, Jr.
“This book might very well be a ‘tour de force.’ That’s a French expression which means ‘an exceptional achievement by an artist, author, or the like, that is unlikely to be equaled by that person or anyone else; a stroke of genius.’ In this reviewer’s opinion it fits those criteria.”—Civil War News
Lee’s Tigers Revisited: The Louisiana Infantry in the Army of Northern Virgina by Terry L. Jones
“Any reader could benefit from time spent with this comprehensive study of ‘the furious fighters of the South.’”—Journal of America’s Military Past
Stepdaughters of History: Southern Women and the American Civil War by Catherine Clinton
“In wonderful detail and felicitous prose, Catherine Clinton has described several varieties of history’s stepdaughters, demonstrating their continuing relevance to our own times. Her book is both a call to action and a salutary reminder that, as William Faulkner famously put it, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’”—Michigan War Studies Review
Military Aviation in the Gulf South: A Photographic History by Vincent P. Caire
“Military Aviation in the Gulf South is a brilliant addition to this growing and successful line of aerial military histories from Louisiana State University Press and is a necessary purchase for addition to the libraries of aviation buffs.”—The Alabama Review
On to Petersburg:Grant and Lee, June 4-15, 1864 by Gordon C. Rhea
“For more than twenty years, Gordon C. Rhea has meticulously reconstructed this epic contest and presented his findings in four deeply researched, solidly written, volumes. Now, with On to Petersburg, Rhea brings to a close his examination of a campaign characterized by bloody fighting and daring maneuver and sets the stage for the ten months of siege warfare around the Cockade City that would follow.”—Civil War Monitor