New in Cuban Poetry!

Marcelo Morales’s The World as Presence/El mundo como ser showcases a challenging, bold, and vivid new voice in Cuban literature.

Marcelo Morales is an established, prize-winning writer, yet he is younger in comparison to most of the Cuban poets known internationally, many of whom were born prior to the 1959 revolution. Morales’s poetry follows a timeline ranging from Martí to Guevara to the day of the 2014 announcement by Obama and Castro that diplomatic relations between the two nations would finally be restored.

As Cuba experiences a series of historically remarkable transitions, Morales emerges from this context to offer an incisive poetic account of this critical moment in Cuban, as well as world, history. The World as Presence/El mundo como ser is both the debut of this work in any language and the first English translation of a complete Morales collection.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR
Marcelo Morales is the author of the poetry collections Cinema (winner of the 1997 Pinos Nuevos Prize), El círculo mágico, and Materia (winner of the 2008 Julián del Casal Prize), among others. His novel La espiral appeared in 2006.

Kristin Dykstra, recipient of the 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship, translated Reina María Rodríguez’s Other Letters to Milena/Otras cartas a Milena and Juan Carlos Flores’s The Counterpunch (and Other Horizontal Poems)/El contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales), as well as various other books of Cuban poetry.

PRAISE FOR THE WORLD AS PRESENCE/EL MUNDO COMO SER
“Through Kristin Dykstra’s superb translation of The World as Presence/El mundo como ser, we see Marcelo Morales’s never-ending need to articulate, to question, and to be awed by what is important to him as intellectual, as citizen, as family member, and poet. While his concerns are often political, philosophical, and global, they are at the same time intricately and inseparably bound to the body and the personal life of the poet. Morales directly interrogates (in a context that does not encourage or support directness) both the Cuban past and present, and through his work we find reference to a number of important markers of Cuban history and culture. An unforgettable presence for the unforgettable tenseness of the present.”
—Daniel Borzutzky, author of The Book of Interfering Bodies and The Performance of Becoming Human

“In this book, Morales achieves an impressive and deeply engaging balance, never abandoning a passionate commitment to a philosophical (perhaps phenomenological) investigation of the nature of being and presence, an affirmation of love, and ongoing attention to his family, all the while engaging Cuban political/cultural history up to the present moment. The World as Presence/El mundo como ser is the most insightfully contemporary book of Cuban poetry that I have ever read.”
—Hank Lazer, author of The New Spirit, Poems Hidden in Plain View, and Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays 1996-2008, and editor of What is a Poet?

SPECS
162 pages / 1 B&W figure
ISBN: 978-0-8173-5884-6 Paper
ISBN: 978-0-8173-9085-3 Ebook
$19.95

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New in Archaeology!

Decorated stone artifacts are a significant part of archaeological studies of Native Americans in the Northeast. The artifacts illuminated in Amulets, Effigies, Fetishes, and Charms: Native American Artifacts and Spirit Stones from the Northeast include pecked, sculpted, or incised figures, images, or symbols. These are rendered on pebbles, plaques, pendants, axes, pestles, and atlatl weights, and are of varying sizes, shapes, and designs. Edward J. Lenik draws from Indian myths and legends and incorporates data from ethnohistoric and archaeological sources together with local environmental settings to interpret the iconography of these fascinating relics. For the Algonquian and Iroquois peoples, they reflect identity, status, and social relationships with other Indians as well as beings in the spirit world.

Lenik begins with background on the Indian cultures of the Northeast and includes a discussion of the dating system developed by anthropologists to describe prehistory. The heart of the content comprises more than eighty examples of portable rock art, grouped by recurring design motifs. This organization allows for in-depth analysis of each motif. The motifs examined range from people, animals, fish, and insects to geometric and abstract designs. Information for each object is presented in succinct prose, with a description, illustration, possible interpretation, the story of its discovery, and the location where it is now housed. Lenik also offers insight into the culture and lifestyle of the Native American groups represented. An appendix listing places to see and learn more about the artifacts and a glossary are included.

The material in this book, used in conjunction with Lenik’s previous research, offers a reference for virtually every known example of northeastern rock art. Archaeologists, students, and connoisseurs of Indian artistic expression will find this an invaluable work.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edward J. Lenik is the president and principal investigator of Sheffield Archaeological Consultants, a cultural resource management firm in Wayne, New Jersey. An authority on rock art in the Northeast, he has led workshops on artifact analysis and archaeology lab work at New Jersey museums. He is the author of Making Pictures in Stone: American Indian Rock Art of the Northeast and Picture Rocks: American Indian Rock Art in the Northeast Woodlands.

SPECS
208 pages / 79 B&W figures / 7 tables
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1923-6 Cloth
ISBN: 978-0-8173-9024-4 Ebook
$49.95

New in Education Research and Theory!

In Creating Citizens: Liberal Arts, Civic Engagement, and the Land-Grant Tradition, professors and administrators at Auburn University’s College of Liberal Arts recount valuable, first-hand experiences teaching Community and Civic Engagement (CCE). They demonstrate that, contrary to many expectations, CCE instruction both complements the mission of liberal arts curricula and powerfully advances the fundamental mission of American land-grand institutions.

The nine essays in Creating Citizens offer structures for incorporating CCE initiatives into university programs, instructional methods and techniques, and numerous case studies and examples undertaken at Auburn University but applicable at any university. Many contributors describe their own rewarding experiences with CCE and emphasize the ways outreach efforts reinvigorate their teaching or research.

Creating Citizens recounts the foundation of land-grant institutions by the Morrill Act of 1862. Their mission is to instruct in agriculture, military science, and mechanics, but these goals augment rather than replace an education in the classics, or liberal arts. Land-grant institutions, therefore, have a special calling to provide a broad spectrum of society with an education that enriches the personal lives of their students and the communities they are a part of. Creating Citizens demonstrates the important opportunities CCE instruction represents to any university but which are especially close to the heart of the mission of land-grant colleges.

The role and mission of public institutions of higher learning that are supported by public subsidies are perennial subjects of interest and debate. Creating Citizens provides valuable insights of interest to educators, administrators, students, and policy makers involved in the field of higher education.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brigitta R. Brunner is a professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Auburn University. She has served as the associate director for the Public Relations Program, a research fellow with the Imagining America Engaged Undergraduate Research Group, a College of Liberal Arts Engaged Scholar, an Auburn University Provost’s Fellow, a fellow in the Southeastern Conference Academic Leadership Development Program, and a fellow in the Journalism and Mass Communication Leadership in Diversity program sponsored by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

CONTRIBUTORS
Kelly D. Alley / Barb Bondy / Elizabeth Brestan-Knight / Brigitta R. Brunner
Nan Fairley / Anne-Katrin Gramberg / William E. Kelly / Christopher McNulty
Julia Pittman James Emmett Ryan / Kyes Stevens / Timothy S. Thornberry Jr.
Chad Wickman

PRAISE FOR CREATING CITIZENS
“Creating Citizens has the potential to make a meaningful impact and serve as a model for other institutions.”
—Valerie Paton, chairperson of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities’s Council on Outreach and Engagement Executive Committee

SPECS

192 pp / 3 B&W figures / 1 map / 1 table
ISBN: 978-0-817301907-6 Cloth
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8960-4 Ebook
Price: $49.95