Department of English

“SCISSORS, PAPER, ROCK is a book of insight and honest love; it has the lyricism of family legend, and the dead-on truthful ring of a report from the trenches. Fenton Johnson has made something wonderful here.”

• Barbara Kingsolver, author of Pigs in Heaven

“The emotional power of SCISSORS, PAPER, ROCK resides on a plot of land in Kentucky…, [It] chronicles the courtships, the births, the deaths and the agonizing disappointments of two generations of the...

Noted scholars [Holcomb and Scruggs] provide a solid framework for the study of the connections between Hemingway's writing and the literary works of black writers. The collection's unity relies on defining the "Black Renaissance" as encompassing not only the Harlem Renaissance but also teh subsequent advances in black literature sustaned through and beyond the war years, the Black Arts period, and "into the present transnational phase."—Choice Review

Swamp Isthmus takes the stripped, lyric voice of Selenography, the first book of Wilkinson’s No Volta pentalogy, and confronts a pre-apocalyptic vision of American urban life. Here, the city and forest are one, as are the river and sewer. The ghost and the body are one, and the buildings and the trees, the sidewalks and the switchbacks all fuse. The poems in Swamp Isthmus create the flipside of the pastoral—the urban returns to the rural, their fates...

This is the first work to begin to fill a gap: an understanding of discourse aimed to persuade within the Pre-Columbian Americas. The contributors in this collection offer glimpses of what those Indigenous rhetorics might have looked like and how their influences remain. The reader is invited to recognize “the invention of the Americas,” providing other ways to contemplate material life prior to contemporary capitalism, telling us about the global from long ago to current global capitalism....