Recent Books by Fir Acres Faculty and Distinguished Visiting Writers
How to Love a Jamaican by
"In these kaleidoscopic stories of Jamaica and its diaspora we hear many voices at once. All of them convince and sing. All of them shine."--Zadie Smith An O: The Oprah Magazine "Top 15 Best of the Year" * A Well-Read Black Girl Pick Tenderness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret--Alexia Arthurs navigates these tensions to extraordinary effect in her debut collection about Jamaican immigrants and their families back home. Sweeping from close-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and midwestern university towns, these eleven stories form a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life. In "Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands," an NYU student befriends a fellow Jamaican whose privileged West Coast upbringing has blinded her to the hard realities of race. In "Mash Up Love," a twin's chance sighting of his estranged brother--the prodigal son of the family--stirs up unresolved feelings of resentment. In "Bad Behavior," a couple leave their wild teenage daughter with her grandmother in Jamaica, hoping the old ways will straighten her out. In "Mermaid River," a Jamaican teenage boy is reunited with his mother in New York after eight years apart. In "The Ghost of Jia Yi," a recently murdered student haunts a despairing Jamaican athlete recruited to an Iowa college. And in "Shirley from a Small Place," a world-famous pop star retreats to her mother's big new house in Jamaica, which still holds the power to restore something vital. Alexia Arthurs emerges in this vibrant, lyrical, intimate collection as one of fiction's most dynamic and essential authors. Praise for How to Love a Jamaican "A sublime short-story collection from newcomer Alexia Arthurs that explores, through various characters, a specific strand of the immigrant experience."--Entertainment Weekly "With its singular mix of psychological precision and sun-kissed lyricism, this dazzling debut marks the emergence of a knockout new voice."--O: The Oprah Magazine "Gorgeous, tender, heartbreaking stories . . . Arthurs is a witty, perceptive, and generous writer, and this is a book that will last."--Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties "Vivid and exciting . . . every story rings beautifully true."--Marie Claire
Call Number: PS3601.R764 A6 2018Publication Date: 2018
Du Iz Tak? by
A 2017 Caldecott Honor Book The creator of Home turns a droll eye to the natural world, with gorgeous art and a playful invented language. Du iz tak? What is that? As a tiny shoot unfurls, two damselflies peer at it in wonder. When the plant grows taller and sprouts leaves, some young beetles arrive to gander, and soon--with the help of a pill bug named Icky--they wrangle a ladder and build a tree fort. But this is the wild world, after all, and something horrible is waiting to swoop down--booby voobeck!--only to be carried off in turn. Su! With exquisitely detailed illustrations and tragicomic flair, Carson Ellis invites readers to imagine the dramatic possibilities to be found in even the humblest backyard. Su!
Call Number: Juvenile Lit Picture Books ; 813 E4545dPublication Date: 2016 Also illustrated by Carson Ellis at at Watzek: Under Wildwood
Vexations by
A mother and daughter journey together through a strange speculative world in this experimental book-length poem. Annelyse Gelman's book-length poem Vexations is a surreal, glitchy meditation on empathy, ecology, and precarity. Throughout the book winds a narrative about a mother and daughter as they move through a world of social and economic collapse in search of a post-capitalist safe haven. All the while, they also navigate a condition that affects the daughter's empathic abilities, making her vulnerable to emotional contagion. Vexations is titled and structured after Erik Satie's composition of the same name, a piece that requires patience, endurance, and concentration from both its audience and its players. Similarly, Gelman's Vexations employs repetition and variation to engage the reader's attention. Hers is an ambient poetry, drawing on the aesthetic qualities of drone music and sampling voices and sounds to create a lush literary backdrop filled with pulsing psychedelic detail.
Call Number: PS3607.E463 V39 2023Publication Date: 2023
Also by Annelyse Gelman and at Watzek: Everyone I Love is a Stranger to Someone: Poems
The Descendants by
Narrated in a bold, fearless, unforgettable voice and set against the lush, panoramic backdrop of Hawaii, The Descendants is a stunning debut novel about an unconventional family forced to come together and re-create its own legacy. Matthew King was once considered one of the most fortunate men in Hawaii. His missionary ancestors were financially and culturally progressive-one even married a Hawaiian princess, making Matt a royal descendant and one of the state's largest landowners. Now his luck has changed. His two daughters are out of control: Ten-year-old Scottie is a smart-ass with a desperate need for attention, and seventeen-year-old Alex, a former model, is a recovering drug addict. Matt's charismatic, thrill-seeking, high-maintenance wife, Joanie, lies in a coma after a boat-racing accident and will soon be taken off life support. The Kings can hardly picture life without her, but as they come to terms with this tragedy, their sadness is mixed with a sense of freedom that shames them-and spurs them into surprising actions. Before honoring Joanie's living will, Matt must gather her friends and family to say their final goodbyes, a difficult situation made worse by the sudden discovery that there is one person who hasn't been told: the man with whom Joanie had been having an affair, quite possibly the one man she ever truly loved. Forced to examine what he owes not only to the living but to the dead, Matt takes to the road with his daughters to find his wife's lover, a memorable journey that leads to both painful revelations and unforeseen humor and growth.
Call Number: PS3608.E477 D47 2008Publication Date: 2008
Also by Kaui Hart Hemmings and at Watzek: House of Thieves
Ashore by
Poetry. From the waters of Waikīkī, to the forests outside Honolulu, and across the Pacific ocean, the poems in Laurel Nakanishi's debut collection consider the relationships between place and story. In estrangement and intimacy, at home and away, on the surface and in the depths, these poems level a steady gaze on the world and ask, "And yet, what do I really know?" The answer comes in memory and geography, in old songs and moments folded into a larger time. These poems ask us to live deeply on the earth, to attend to the "stories at work in us," and known ourselves anew.
Call Number: PS3614.A39 A84 2021Publication Date: 2021
Also by Laurel Nakanishi and at Watzek: Manoa Makai
Incarnadine by
Winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry * An NPR, Slate, Oregonian, Kansas City Star, Willamette Week, and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year * Amazon's Best Book of the Year in Poetry 2013 * In Incarnadine, Mary Szybist restlessly seeks out places where meaning might take on new color. One poem is presented as a diagrammed sentence. Another is an abecedarium made of lines of dialogue spoken by girls overheard while assembling a puzzle. Several poems arrive as a series of Annunciations, while others purport to give an update on Mary, who must finish the dishes before she will open herself to God. One poem appears on the page as spokes radiating from a wheel, or as a sunburst, or as the cycle around which all times and all tenses are alive in this moment. Szybist's formal innovations are matched by her musical lines, by her poetry's insistence on singing as a lure toward the unknowable. Inside these poems is a deep yearning--for love, motherhood, the will to see things as they are and to speak. Beautiful and inventive, Incarnadine is the new collection by one of America's most ambitious poets.
Call Number: PS3619 .Z93 I53 2013Publication Date: 2013
Also by Mary Szybist and at Watzek: Granted
These Boys and Their Fathers by
In 2010, Don Waters set out to write a magazine story about a surfing icon who had known his absentee father. It was an attempt to find a way of connecting to a man he never knew. He didn't imagine that the story would become a years-long quest to understand a man who left behind almost nothing except for a self-absorbed autobiography for his abandoned son. These Boys and Their Fathers touches on Waters's early life with his single mother--and her string of dysfunctional men--and his later search for and encounters with his father, but it quickly expands into a gripping account of the life of a 1930s pulp writer, also named Don Waters, with whom Waters becomes obsessed. This wildly original book blends memoir, investigative reporting, and fiction to sort out difficult aspects of family, masculinity, and what it means to be a father.
Call Number: PS3623.A8688 Z46 2019Publication Date: 2019
All books by Don Waters at Watzek Library
Welcome to Watzek Library!
On this page you'll find a selection of books and online publications by workshop faculty. The books are featured on a display near the entrance of the library, and may be checked out with a temporary library card. Ask at the desk just inside the entrance for your library card, and explore other services available to you as a Fir Acres student.
There isn't nearly enough room on this page to link to everything written by Fir Acres faculty! To find more, try a combination of searching in the library catalog and Google, and consulting individual authors' websites, listed at the bottom of this page.
Stories, poems, and essays with an orange owl icon require Lewis & Clark authentication. Use a wired computer (not a laptop) on campus to ensure access.
