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Welcome to the Texas Review Press!
The Texas Review Press is a member of the Texas A&M University
Press Consortium. The Press publishes fiction, poetry, and prose
non-fiction as well as a literary magazine, The Texas Review.
The forthcoming issue of The Texas Review will feature fiction from Charles Baxter, Kathy Flann, W.P. Osborn, and Nicholas Rinaldi; an essay on the initiation fiction of George Garrett, by Clay Claybough; and poetry from Al Basile, Barbara Crocker, Christian Nagle, Fred Ostrander, Jamie Ross, and Richard Spilman, among others.
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Recent and Forthcoming
Aphrodite's Daughter
Winner of the 2006 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize
Becky Gould Gibson
From villages in Crete to Carolina farms to San Francisco
pavement, the women in these poems struggle to live
by their own lights, despite pressure for them to
serve as mere appendages to men. Aphrodite’s
Daughter tells stories of women in myth, history,
art, and contemporary life. The goddess’s daughter,
fed up with her role in her mother’s story,
says to her: “i’m leaving – i’m
walking out/ of your myth finally – i need a
mother not a love goddess. . .” This volume
springs from the sense that, as Adrienne Rich reminds
us, under patriarchy women often feel “wildly
unmothered.”
“Aphrodite’s Daughter is a stunning and
absorbing collection of poems.” —Pam Bernard
“Gibson has given us a rich and expansive collection,
brimming with everyday mysteries, set against the
background of ancient myth and ritual.” —Kathryn
Stripling Byer, North Carolina Poet Laureate and author
of Coming to Rest
Becky Gould Gibson, also the author of Off-Road Meditations,
Holding Ground, First Life, and Need-Fire, has had
poetry in several anthologies and a number of journals.
Since 1988 she has taught English and Women’s
Studies at Guilford College. She lives with her husband
in Winston-Salem, NC.
A History of Hurricane Katrina
Edited by Heather Andrews, Tameika Ashford, Joshua Bowen, Brandon Cooper, Lesley Cort, Michael Dunican, Steven Rydarowski, and Melanie Sweeney
Foreword by Paul Ruffin
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina—the costliest hurricane ever to hit the United States—monopolized headlines, thoughts, and hearts across the country as lives were forever changed, some erased. This book not only chronicles the devastation of that storm but also immortalizes through words and photographs some of the tales of personal tragedy associated with it, while celebrating the resilience of the human spirit, as communities come together and begin to rebuild.
Moving House
Winner of the 2006 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize
Lisa Hammond Rashley
The poems in Moving House are grounded in the sometimes haunted landscapes of South Carolina, a setting rich with the flavors of ripe peaches and tomatoes and fresh-caught shrimp. The speaker of these poems turns her attention to the ordinary objects of her Southern home, seeing artistry in the scales of a fish, the pearly buttons of a linen shirt, a missed eclipse, a sprig of morning glory run wild. In the interaction between story, history, family, and memory, these poems find meaning rooted in the land, a source of both fear and wonder.
Lisa Hammond Rashley is an associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina Lancaster. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Southern Poetry Review, South Carolina Review, and North Carolina Literary Review.
 Turnback Creek
Winner of the 2006 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize
Lonnie Busch
A man gains and loses many things on his journey from birth to death. Toward the end of life, it seems a man loses more than he gains. Retired heavy-equipment operator Cole Emerson has lost his wife, is about to lose his only sister, and is estranged from his daughter. He sells his trailer in Oklahoma and moves into his sister Elsie's house on Hardman Lake, a sprawling man-made impoundment in the lush Ozark Mountains of southern Missouri. Elsie is dying. During the day, Cole cooks, cleans, and tries to keep her comfortable, napping when she naps, adapting his needs to her schedule. At night, he escapes into the dark solitude of Hardman Lake to fish for bass and clear his head, until one night in Turnback Creek he sees a mysterious girl who awakens in him a young man's desires and old buried memories.
Lonnie Busch has worked as a painter and illustrator, creating artwork for corporations and institutions across the United States, including the 2002 "Greetings from America" stamps and the 2004 "Summer Olympics" stamp for the US Postal Service. His short stories have appeared in such publications as The Minnesota Review, The Baltimore Review, Chicago Quarterly Review,and The Southeast Review. Stories of his have also been finalists in the World's Best Short Short Story Competition in 2004 and the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction in 2005. His most recent projects include the cover for Jimmy Buffett's latest novel, A Salty Piece of Land, as well as a block of forty new stamps for the Postal Service entitled "Wonders of America," which debuted in May of 2006.
Oakland, Jack London, and Me
Eric Miles Williamson
Acclaimed novelist, editor, and critic Eric Miles Williamson, with the publication of his first book of nonfiction, establishes himself as one of the premier critics of his generation. There is no other book that resembles Oakland, Jack London, and Me.
The parallels between the lives of Jack London and Eric Miles Williamson are startling: Both grew up in the same waterfront ghetto of Oakland, California; neither knew who his father was; both had insane mothers; both did menial jobs as youths and young men; both spent time homeless; both made their treks to the Northlands; both became authors; and both cannot reconcile their attitudes toward the poor, what Jack London calls “the people of the abyss.”
With this as a premise, Williamson examines not only the life and work of Jack London, but his own life and attitudes toward the poor, toward London, Oakland, culture and literature. A blend of autobiography, criticism, scholarship, and polemic, Oakland, Jack London, and Me is a book written not just for academics and students. Jack London remains the best-selling American author in the world, and Williamson’s Oakland, Jack London, and Me is as accessible as any of the works of London, his direct literary forbear and mentor.
Eric Miles Williamson's first novel, the internationally acclaimed East Bay Grease (Picador USA, 1999), was a PEN/Hemingway Finalist and listed by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as one of the Best Books of 1999. It was published in Great Britain and translated into French, German, and Finnish and reviewed by nearly 150 newspapers, radio and television shows and magazines. David Brown, producer of such films as Jaws, Driving Miss Daisy, The Player, A Few Good Men, and Chocolat, has recently optioned the film rights and begun project development. Williamson’s second novel, Two-Up, was listed by the Kansas City Star and the San Jose Mercury News as one of the best 100 books of 2006, a distinction earned by only 26 novels. The French translation of Two-Up will appear in 2008. Williamson is the fiction editor of The Texas Review.
News from Previous Contributors
Windows Into My World
Sarah Cortez, whose poetry most recently appeared in The Texas Review's Spring/Summer issue of 2003, has edited Windows into My World: Latino Youth Write Their Lives (Arte Público Press). Thirty-six Latino youth uniquely document their struggles with the issues that young people encounter—friendship, death, anorexia, divorce, sexuality—but added to these difficulties are those specific to their ethnicity, such as adjusting to a new culture and language, and handling familial and cultural expectations that can limit their hopes and dreams but just as often enrich their lives. Cortez is a poet, educator, and law enforcement officer. She is the author of a poetry collection, How to Undress a Cop, (Arte Público Press, 2000), which won the PEN Texas Literary Award in Poetry. She lives and works in Houston, Texas.
Collection of Drift: A Novel in Stories
It was called the crime of the century, and it was front-page news: the Lindbergh kidnapping, the disappearance of the world's most famous baby. Correction of Drift: A Novel in Stories (Fiction Collective 2), by Pamela Ryder, imagines the private lives behind the headlines of the Lindbergh kidnapping case, and examines the endurance--and demise--of those consumed by the tragedy.
Ryder's story, "A Comfort in the Stones," appeared in the Spring/Summer 2002 issue of The Texas Review. She has also published stories in The Black Warrior Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Conjunctions, and Quarterly West. Correction of Drift is her first novel.
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News
A reminder for all those with manuscripts they'd like to submit to any of the Texas Review Press competitions. The submission deadlines are as follows: the Robert Phillips Poetry Prize (June 15); the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Chapbook Prize (July 15); the George Garrett Fiction Prize (September 15); and the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize (October 15). For more information, complete guidelines, and catalog information for previous winners, please check out our competition pages.
From the Spring-Summer 2008 Catalog
 The Southern Poetry Anthology: South Carolina
Stephen Gardner and William Wright, eds.
The Southern Poetry Anthology: South Carolina is the first in a series of poetry anthologies that will focus on contemporary poetry of the American South, region by region. In this inaugural collection, editors William Wright and Stephen Gardner have collected and compiled the work of seventy-six poets who claim—or have claimed sometime in their life—South Carolina as home and as a palpable influence on their work. The Southern Poetry Anthology determines to focus acutely on the often mentioned “sense of place” and to let the poetry define what “place” means, whether in historical, autobiographical, geographical, or purely poetic manifestations.
“The Southern Poetry Anthology: South Carolina includes seventy-six contemporary poets with original, energetic and unmistakable voices who have called the Palmetto state home. Shadowed and illumined by South Carolina’s complex and rich heritage dating from 1514, when Spaniards explored the state’s coast, this collection will enrich contemporary American life because selections reflect the multifaceted character of the state that has played a major role in events that have shaped our nation.” —Vivian Shipley
“For anyone who thinks that poetry stopped in South Carolina after Henry Timrod and Paul Hamilton Hayne or, for that matter, even James Dickey, this generous and well-selected anthology of poems by poets who were born or lived in that state will prove to be a real eye-opener. These pages are full of those quiet recognitions, startling surprises, and sudden revelations of truth that only the best poetry can provide. I read it with the same kind of excitement that a good novel can provide, and I urge it upon all those readers who need to know (or who already know) that poetry is alive and well and flourishing in the Palmetto State.” —R. H. W. Dillard
Stephen Gardner is the G.L. Toole Professor of English at the University of South Carolina-Aiken, where he has taught literature and creative writing since 1972. The author of This Book Belongs to Eva, Gardner also edited the literary magazines kudzu and The Devil’s Millhopper.
William Wright is a teaching fellow and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. He is author of a book of poems, Dark Orchard, and has published in such journals as North American Review, New Orleans Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Colorado Review. His next editing project centers on contemporary Appalachian Poetry.
 Splinterville
Winner, 2007 Texas Review Fiction Award
Cliff Hudder
Near starvation in Northern Georgia, Confederate private Henry Wallace of Hood’s Texas Brigade accidentally ingests psychotropic mushrooms before marching into the second day of the Battle of Chickamauga, but lives to tell about it in a long (forty-one-foot) letter to his dead comrade’s father. Or does he? As Private Wallace’s meandering tale, scrawled on a roll of wrapping paper, unravels an account of friendship, bloodshed, and the world’s largest recorded snowball fight, historians and scholars battle in footnotes over whether this document full of peculiar claims, internal inconsistencies, and anachronistic content is a first-hand report or an elaborate forgery.
“This is a stunning debut by a master storyteller.” — Wendell Mayo
“I don’t recall many historical novellas or novels abounding in comedy. Another distinctive technique is the pseudo-footnotes. They remind me of Nabokov’s footnotes in Pale Fire. The character Clinch is highly memorable.” — Robert Phillips
“Hudder's evocation of another time and place is enhanced by his editor's protesting voice, both of which lend good humor to counterpoint the poignant story of young lives wasted in war.” — Clay Reynolds
“In a manner reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges, Cliff Hudder weaves a tale of fact, fiction, legend and imagination that is intriguing, enthralling and believable. Best of all, Splinterville represents entertainment in its best sense: to delight and enlighten.” — Robert Flynn
Cliff Hudder teaches English at Montgomery College in Conroe, Texas. An MFA graduate of the University of Houston, his stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, and The Missouri Review among other publications, and his work has received the Barthelme Award, the Michener Award, the Peden Prize, and the Brazos Bookstore Short Story Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Splinterville is his first book.
 Far-From-Equilibrium Conditions
Michael Lieberman
Winner, 2007 Texas Review Poetry Prize
Far From Equilibrium Conditions, Michael Lieberman's fifth collection of poems, struggles to find meaning in a world unmoored by turmoil and scientific discovery. In one poem, a speaker notes, "I will be assigned as nothing" and then implores that "it be a significant nothing." Lieberman is one of our most gifted poets whose preoccupation with love and desire create a gravity that is its own meaning in our topsy-turvy universe. Many of these poems are set in Lieberman's Houston neighborhood though they move far a field as they search for a coherent vision of the world. From A History of the Sweetness of the World (Texas Review Press, Huntsville, TX, 1995): “These poems are animated by a deep rectitude, ‘the convection that struggle is praise,’ and a fiery determination to wrest a gleaming light—a saving remembrance—from the engulfing shadows.”
— Edward Hirsch
From Sojourn at Elmhurst (New Rivers Press, Minneapolis, 1998): “In this brilliant book of linked poems, dualities are described and suffered as ‘the soul of the poet mediates the transactions of our life on this earth’ while ‘caught in the disorienting whirls in which order can be glimpsed.’” —Hilda Raz Editor-in-Chief, Prairie Schooner
From the dust jacket of Remnant (The Sheep Meadow Press, New York, 2002): “In Mike Lieberman’s Remnant we encounter two memories: one that’s emotional and straightforward, even passionate, almost sentimental—and another one, oblique and sober, the memory of a scientist, a skeptic who believes in research more than affection. The combination is fascinating and rare.” — Adam Zagajewski
Michael Lieberman is a physician scientist who lives in Houston with his wife Susan. He is the author of four previous collections of poems.
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Sam Houston State University
Department of English
PO Box 2146
Huntsville, TX 77341-2146
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