LoginThe Metro: Good reads from the Wayne State University Press
Since 1941 the Wayne State University Press has published over two-thousand titles that explore a number of topics from literature, to history to politics. Senior Director Stephanie Williams joined the program to discuss its offerings this season.
Notable titles
Repoliticizing the Word Through Poetry and Preaching: Early Black Christian Women’s Lives Matter by April C.E. Langley
Weaving together the legacies of early Black Christian women, author April C. E. Langley explores how faith, poetics, and spirituality have shaped Black activism in the United States. Langley provides a dynamic close reading of the speeches, letters, poems, and sermons of three foremothers of modern Black women’s social justice movements—Phillis Wheatley, Maria W. Stewart, and Jarena Lee—and highlights the resistance strategies emerging from their use of religion as a means for imagination and potential liberation.
Dispatches from the Avant-Garage by Rebecca Kosick
Rebecca Kosick chronicles the rise, work, and legacy of the Alternative Press, a grassroots art and poetry publishing initiative founded in 1969 in Detroit, Michigan. Operated by Ken and Ann Mikolowski out of their home, The Alternative Press published original countercultural artwork and poetry by nationally renowned artists, including Alice Notley, and Robert Creeley, and Detroit-based powerhouse artists, such as Jim Gustafson, and Donna Brook.
Kosick’s research reanimates the Alternative Press’s unconventional publications with more than one hundred full-color images, while illuminating the national impact their avant-garde interventions had at the intersection of politics, art, and life in the twentieth century.
Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall by Dudley Randall, edited by Melba Boyd
Dudley Randall was one of the foremost voices in African American literature during the twentieth century, best known for his poetry and his work as the editor and publisher of Broadside Press in Detroit. While he published six books of poetry during his life, much of his work is currently out of print or fragmented among numerous anthologies. Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall brings together his most popular poems with his lesser-known short stories, first published in The Negro Digest during the 1960s, and several of his essays, which profoundly influenced the direction and attitude of the Black Arts movement.
By the Waters of Paradise: An American Story of Racism and Rupture in a Jewish Family by Clare Kinberg
In the 1930s, Rose, an Ashkenazi Jewish woman, married Zebedee Arnwine, an African American man. This memoir weaves the genealogical and historical journeys of Rose and Zebedee with discussion of Rose and Kinberg’s Jewish ancestry in Romania and Ukraine and investigates their mutual decisions to settle their interracial families in Michigan.
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