New and Forthcoming

Purple Church tells the story of Brother Jimmy Russell, a vulnerable and lonely Baptist minister who has everything going for him until his life falls apart after leukemia claims the life of his devoted bride. Brother Jimmy is then tempted by the young and beautiful Ashley White, who was abused by her father as a child and then raped by her fiance's father when she was in college. Ashley's tragic past leaves her empty and starved for attention, a perfect combination that leads her to skid row on a lofted stage in a popular Memphis strip club. The tale is one of redemption and spiritual consequence for both the handsome preacher and the lovely coed, whose salvation is Brother Jimmy's only reason for living.

Starner Jones, an emergency medicine physician living in Memphis, was born and raised in northeast Mississippi and educated at the University of the South, Saint George's University School of Medicine, and the University of Mississippi Medical Center. A seventh-generation Mississippian, Jones enjoys world travel, hunting, fishing, and golf. Purple Church is his debut novel.

Bill Morgan had everything—or at least he did until, as chair of the board of Travis College of Medicine, he severed a seventy-year relationship between the College and its principle teaching hospital and touched off a blood feud between them. He and Dean Dan Maffit provoke a struggle with the hospital's board chair, Jimmie Rutherford, and its CEO and ex-Israeli operative, Sandy Wechsler, in which the two institutions vie for prestige and dominance and for the physicians who serve them. We follow Morgan's fate in the ensuing conflict as his ambitions bring him face to face with his inner demons and insecurities. In the wake of the turmoil the lives of physicians, administrators and board members spin out of control. This novel of medical politics asks us to consider how not-for-profit institutions make decisions and how these decisions unmoor people's lives in unpredictable ways and run the risk of violating the public trust.

Michael Lieberman is a research physician and poet who lives in Houston with his wife Susan. He has published five collections of poems and is a winner of the PEN-Texas Award for Fiction. Never Surrender--Never Retreat is his first novel.

The Phoenix Commotion is a local building initiative created to prove that constructing homes with recycled and salvaged materials has a viable place in the building industry. This process uses only apprentice labor and teaches marketable skills to anyone with a work ethic who is willing to swing a hammer. By keeping labor costs low and using donated or found materials, the homes created are truly affordable. (www.phoenixcommotion.com)

This book is an examination of the history of Phoenix Commotion and the philosopy of Dan Phillips, the prime mover of the enterprise. Here readers will be introduced to the major projects of Phillips and Phoenix Commotion: the story behind them and the specifics of these unique structures, complete with black-and-white and color plates.

The editors of this book--Donald R. Bates, Amanda Dellett, Christina Fernandez, Jake Gebhardt, Doug Haines, Anna R. Jennings, Dustin Levien, Lauren McAuliffe, Margaret Miller Sellers--were all members of Paul Ruffin's 2011 Editing/Publishing Practicum. They researched, designed, and wrote all the copy for this book.

Because of her dark-haired beauty, Delphine Roberts became a reluctant success, first as a model, then as an actress. Her work with a great French director brought her international movie stardom. A film with a famous Italian director gave her a daughter. However, none of this satisfied her. Searching for something else in her life, she and her little girl explored the world together, traveling from London to Vietnam, from Paris to Istanbul, and beyond. Fascinated by the Middle East, she explored and lived in many parts of that ancient world, including Palestine. Deeply affected when she sees the massive wall severing Palestinian lands from Israeli territory, Delphine is determined to learn the facts and see first-hand the hardships faced by ordinary Palestinian citizens. Eventually, she raises the money to produce and star in a movie about the Palestinian territories. Although working conditions are brutal, she is determined to finish the movie, even if it's the last she ever makes.

Bruce Douglas Reeves has published three novels—The Night Action, Man on Fire, and Street Smarts--and his short fiction has appeared in dozens of magazines and literary journals. He lives with his wife, Sherrill, in Berkeley, California.

"I taught undergraduates for forty-five years (the last thirty at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee), and for most of those years I spent as much time as possible outside. I hunted as much as I could, and I fished some. I also spent time in the woods of Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi just walking around looking at things that caught my eye and trying to understand. Outdoor life and academic life for me have been intimately connected, and this collection of essays explores that connection. The essays in Wedding the Wild Particular make plain the sheer delight I have taken in the primary world and the degree to which that delight has enriched my academic vocation. They make what I believe is a coherent argument for the importance of natural literacy in the intellectual life." --Robert Benson

Robert Benson taught undergraduates for forty-five years and recently retired from the University of the South. He divides his time between Sewanee and the Alabama Gulf Coast.

We Are the Bus travels the world in 42 poems—from Hat Island in Puget Sound to Oaxaca's zocalo to the steps of St. Peter's Basilica. In language simple, precise, and musical, the poems revisit the complexities of growing up and moving on. We Are the Bus tells stories full of people—telescope makers and fisherman, neighbors, travelers and family, high divers and tired pilgrims, Norwegian horseshoe players and American mothers-in-law. Vivid details and surprising events give authority to the language as each poem moves from memory and observation toward clarity and song.

James McKean, born in Seattle, completed an M.F.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Iowa. His publications include two books of poems, Headlong and Tree of Heaven, and a book of essays: Home Stand Growing up In Sports. McKean now teaches for the Queens University Low Residency M.F.A. program in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The poems in Isn't It Romantic? are set primarily in and around the Connecticut River Valley of central Connecticut, where the speaker wanders, trying to do his best Wordsworth impression without much success. He sees redemption in Franciscan acts of kindness (even as he does violence out of ignorance, by accident, or in the name of practicality), considers how people come to or are driven to certain crossroads, wonders what is waiting on the other side of this existence, and supposes that the individual, if not humanity collectively, still has a chance to take it easy on the earth.

John Popielaski was born in Port Jefferson Station, New York, and attended the State University of New York at Stony Brook and American University. He is the author of A Brief Eureka for the Alchemists of Peace (Antrim House) and O, Captain, which won the 2006 Ledge Press Poetry Chapbook Award. He lives in Portland, Connecticut, and spends time at his camp in Maine.]

This ground-breaking, mixed genre memoir journeys from the soil of Texas farmland near Floresville to the shrimpers' nets of the Gulf Coast, near Matagorda. Three generations of Hispanic families are viewed through the faith-filled lens of the miraculous and the poignancy of dreams never realized. The journey continues to mid-twentieth century Houston, where what is done is as powerful as that which never happened.

Sarah Cortez is the author of How to Undress a Cop. She has edited Windows into My World: Latino Youth Write Their Lives (2007); Hit List:The Best of Latino Mystery (2009); Indian Country Noir (2010); and You Don't Have a Clue: Latino Mystery Stories for Teens (2011). She lives and works in Houston, Texas.

Susan Palwick, novelist and Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, volunteers four hours a week as a lay chaplain in the emergency room of a local hospital. In The Emergency Department Sonnets, a single volunteer shift unfolds in forty-five sonnets, short poems allowing us to hear the many voices--the patients', the staff's, the chaplain's--of the ER. These stories, snippets of much larger ones, capture both the chaos and the beauty of the dramas unfolding every day in every hospital, where the human search for meaning is driven by stark reminders of mortality.

Susan Palwick is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, and Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Education at the University of Nevada School of Medicine, where she teaches Narrative Medicine. She has published three novels and a short-story collection. She is a Licensed Lay Preacher in the Episcopal Diocese of Nevada.