University Ink - A Showcase of UofL Authorship: Creative Works

A series of open0access illustrated children’s books in the tonal language of Chatino, the language spoken in southern Mexico in the state of Oaxaca and by Chatinos who have migrated in different states in the U.S. with a heavy concentration in parts of Alabama and Georgia, as well as in the Raleigh-Durham area in North Carolina.

Sister is a novella that traces its protagonist's life through three significant eras and attempts to offer a sensitive and considered answer to the question: how do you build a family out of the wreckage of your youthful indiscretions? The book is set in rural, southeastern Ohio, and covers a span of more than twenty years; it's both a portrait of a marriage and a portrait of a woman attempting to do her best with the hand that life has dealt her.

Following his acclaimed debut novel, The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo, the eleven stories of Ian Stansel's Glossary for the End of Days explore today's cultural and political climate with a disarming blend of speculation and realism. Whether faced with tragedy, approaching disaster, or an all-too-familiar uncertainty, Stansel's protagonists--siblings, lovers, executives, drifters--reveal complex and often startling turns of mind, surprising themselves as well as the reader.

The sensibility overseeing these powerful stories is quirky and playful; Strickley is a connoisseur of a myriad of source materials, from contemporary tabloid fodder to age-old literature and legend. In each piece, a wholly human character comes to life to delight and instruct the reader, to make her revisit what she thought was the familiar world and find it, somehow, faintly shifted and newly fresh. Antonya Nelson, author of Bound and Funny Once This collection is both artful and absolutely ferocious. Sarah Anne Strickley calmly follows her stories into darkness. I honestly can't think of many writers who are this fearless. Chris Bachelder, author of National Book Award Finalist, The Throwback Special

A contemporary Western debut about two brothers locked in a deadly feud, a woman on horseback trailing her husband's killer, and the inescapable ties of home and family. A fully realized tale that challenges notions of the modern West,The Last Cowboys of San Geronimowill satisfy fans of Kent Haruf, Larry McMurtry, Molly Gloss, and Smith Henderson, and establish Stansel as a new voice in this grand tradition.

This "smart and darkly glimmering story, a hold-your-breath thriller written in finely wrought prose, and a book that will spark a hundred conversations about risk and love and the dignity" follows one woman's search for her former best friend--into the underworld and beyond --Lauren Groff, New York Times bestselling author of Fates and Furies.

"Paul Griner'sHurry Please I Want to Know takes the reader on a sweeping tour of America--from Iraqi soldiers to prison telemarketers, from famous cartoonists to bone procurers, from missing persons to the resurrected dead--the real, the surreal, and everything in-between. Griner seems to know everybody's secrets, and this astonishing collection sets out to reveal them."-- Dan Chaon, author ofAwait Your Reply and Stay Awake

Amateur theatre director Stephen Thorne plots a sensational production of a Greek tragedy in order to ruffle feathers in the small city where he lives. Accompanied by an eccentric and fly-by-night cast and crew, he prepares for opening night, unaware that as he unleashes the play, he has drawn the attention of ancient and powerful forces.

Book two of the Were-War Series. With her son dead and her grandson Cursed, aged Gran must send him into hiding to protect him: and to protect others from him. But there are those who hunt Weres to use for their own evil purposes, and they are backed by the resources of entire kingdoms. Is there anything a sweet, old lady can do to protect her kin from such powerful adversaries?

This riveting war story introduces us to the beautiful Kate Zweig, the English widow of a German surgeon, and Claus Murphy, an exiled American with German roots--two lovers with complicated loyalties. In 1918, Kate and her husband, Horst, are taken for spies by Russian soldiers and forced to flee their field hospital on the eastern front, barely escaping with their lives. Years later, in London during the Nazis' V-1 reign of terror, Claus spends his days making propaganda films and his nights as a British spy, worn down by the war and his own many secrets. When Claus meets the intriguing Kate, he finds himself powerfully drawn to her, even after evidence surfaces that she might not be exactly who she seems.

Jean Dubonnet, an art director at an ad agency who specializes in effective but disturbing concepts for her clients, is drawn into an ominous and obsessive relationship with a compelling man whose relationships with other women have ended in death.

This true crime saga--with an eccentric Southern backdrop--introduces the reader to the story of a murder in a crumbling Louisville mansion and the decades of secrets and corruption that live within the old house's walls. On June 18, 2010, police discover a body buried in the wine cellar of a Victorian mansion in Old Louisville. James Carroll, shot and stabbed the year before, has lain for 7 months in a plastic storage bin--his temporary coffin. Homeowner Jeffrey Mundt and his boyfriend, Joseph Banis, point the finger at each other in what locals dub The Pink Triangle Murder. On the surface, this killing appears to be a crime of passion, a sordid love tryst gone wrong in a creepy old house. But as author David Dominé sits in on the trials, a deeper story emerges: the struggle between hope for a better future on the one hand and the privilege and power of the status quo on the other.   As the court testimony devolves into he-said/he-said contradictions, David draws on the confidences of neighbors, drag queens, and other acquaintances within the city's vibrant LGBTQ community to piece together the details of the case. While uncovering the many past lives of the mansion itself, he enters a murky underworld of gossip, neighborhood scandal, and intrigue.

In Victorian-era Louisville, the Home for Friendless Women is run by benevolent benefactors with one mission- to reform the fallen women who live there into pious mothers and wives through religious lessons and hard work. For Ruth, a college student who's expelled after a campus sexual assault, the Home is a purgatory to endure before she can get her life back. For Belle, a queer sex worker who exchanged her bed at a brothel for one in the Home, it's a safe place to rest her feet until she can track down her missing lover. And for Minnie, the daughter of the religious couple who founded the charity, the Home is her mother's idea of a cautionary tale. But as Minnie prepares for the Home's silver anniversary party, she finds herself questioning the true cost of good intentions-and grappling with a terrible secret that has the power to unravel the Home entirely.

Original stories of Black family life in Louisville, Kentucky, for readers of Dantiel Moniz (Milk Blood Heat) and Kai Harris (What the Fireflies Knew). The linked stories in Mama Said are set in Louisville, Kentucky, a city with a rich history steeped in tobacco, bourbon, and gambling, indulgences that can quickly become gripping and destructive vices. Set amid the tail end of the crack epidemic and the rise of the opioid crisis, Mama Said evokes Black family life in all its complexity, following JayLynn, along with her cousins Zaria and Angel, as they come of age struggling against their mothers' drug addictions. JayLynn heads to college intent on gaining distance from her depressed mother, only to learn that her mother's illness has reached a terrifying peak. She fears the chaos and instability of her extended family will prove too much for her boyfriend, whose idyllic family feels worlds, not miles, apart from her own. When bats invade Zaria's new home, she is forced to determine how much she is willing to sacrifice to be a good mother. Angel rebels on Derby night, risking her safety to connect with her absent mother and the wild ways that consumed her. Mama Said separates from stereotypes of Black families, presenting instead the joy, humor, and love that coexist with the trauma of drug abuse within communities. Kristen Gentry's stories showcase the wide-reaching repercussions of addiction and the ties that forever bind daughters to their mothers, flaws and all.

A father and son build a legendary motorcycle and, along the way, reconstruct their relationship in this moving memoir. Reminiscent of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Big Sid's Vincatiis an irresistible combination of step-by-step motorcycle construction mixed with a powerful story of fathers and sons, and shows not only how the Bibermans built their Vincati (which was featured in Cycle Worldand Classic Bike) but also how the two men reconstructed their relationship, one motorcycle part at a time.

Ecopoetic at its core, Kristi Maxwell's My My is concerned about the world, "that abundant stray," and scrutinizes the messiness of human relationships to each other and to the nonhuman--how acts of seeing can lift up or erase. Maxwell's seventh book operates under the sign of "or," testing out alternatives and revisions in the hopes of landing on a truth that can be lived with. Part-sigh, part-sly, these poems make friends with their own shiftiness and recognize that the imperfect might be the best place to look for our next c(l)ues.

In her fourth full-length book, White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, Kiki Petrosino turns her gaze to Virginia, where she digs into her genealogical and intellectual roots, while contemplating the knotty legacies of slavery and discrimination in the Upper South. From a stunning double crown sonnet, to erasure poetry contained within DNA testing results, the poems in this collection are as wide-ranging in form as they are bountiful in wordplay and truth. Speaking to history, loss, and injustice with wisdom, innovation, and a scientific determination to find the poetic truth, White Blood plants Petrosino's name ever more firmly in the contemporary canon.

Poetry. With robust syntax and a sense of humor, BRIGHT AND HURTLESS is committed to the discoveries made in the wild of association and remains optimistic about transformative powers made evident by language. Here, ear intersects with eye, intellect intersects with feeling, and different methods of paying attention and knowing the world are brought into contact. Invested in the unit of the word, these poems explore how a glance turns into a ricochet--what anchors, what upends, what morphs, and what remains.

The poems of Witch Wife are spells, obsessive incantations to exorcise or celebrate memory, to mourn the beloved dead, to conjure children or keep them at bay, to faithfully inhabit one's given body. They are also concerned with dismantling received ideas about contemporary American womanhood. What does it mean to be a wife or mother who feels ambivalent about motherhood? How are these roles further complicated for women of color in the United States? In sestinas, villanelles, hallucinogenic prose poems, and free verse, Kiki Petrosino summons history's ghosts--the ancestors that reside in her blood and craft--and sings them to life.

A distillation of the 30-plus years Skinner has dedicated to writing poems that have delighted and provoked readers around the world. This book includes essential work from six published volumes, beginning with his debut collection, Late Stars, from Wesleyan University Press in 1985. Since then Skinner's work has gathered many prizes and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, two fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and individual artist grants from the Howard and Ingram Merrill Foundations.

Winner of the 2016 FIELD Poetry Prize Chance Divine explores the broadest territory possible, from the origins of the universe to the speculative, precarious future. Bookended by the dazzling prose poem sequences called "Genesis" and "Revelation," Jeffrey Skinner's new collection is equally grounded in the contemporary science of photons, black holes, and climate change and the uncanny mythology of celestial talk shows, shifting identities, angels, and politicians. Visionary, wildly unpredictable, and often unsettlingly funny, this is a book that matters.

"Once I walked a thin rail through a glacier" begins "Shattered Bio," the first poem in Glaciology, Jeffrey Skinner's latest collection of poetry. Filled with images that slide into one another in a dreamlike way, from the "squeak of pine trees in a forest" to "pinwheel, the baby's hand," the poem provides a precise way of seeing how layers of tenderness and danger melt into one another, inhabiting the same world. At the center of the book, the eighteen-part title poem "Glaciology" takes readers to the core of misunderstandings as it juxtaposes the work of a glaciologist with fractured language, misread cues, and a literalness that defies conventional explanation.

The poems in this, Kiki Petrosino's second collection, fulfill the promise of her debut effort,Fort Red Border, and further extend the terms of our expectations for this extraordinary young poet. The book is in two sections, the first a focused collection of wildly inventive lyrics that take as launch pad such far flung subjects as allergenesis, the contents and significance of swamps, a revised notion of marriage, and ancestors--both actual and dreamed. The eponymous second section is a cogent series, or long poem, based on a persona named "the eater," who, along with the poems themselves, storms voraciously through tablefuls of Chinese delicacies (each poem in the series takes its titles from an actual Chinese dish), as well as through doubts and confident proclamations from regions of an exploratory self.

Communion is a pensive and thought-provoking collection of poetry by writer and poet Nettie Farris. It was selected for publication from among the entries to the 2012 Accents Publishing Chapbook contest.