Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction Ser.

A move at age ten from a Detroit suburb to Chattanooga in 1984 thrusts Anjali Enjeti into what feels like a new world replete with Confederate flags, Bible verses, and whiteness. It is here that she learns how to get her bearings as a mixed-race brown girl in the Deep South and begins to understand how identity can inspire, inform, and shape a commitment to activism. Her own evolution is a bumpy one, and along the way Enjeti, racially targeted as a child, must wrestle with her own complicity in white supremacy and bigotry as an adult. The twenty essays of her debut collection, Southbound, tackle white feminism at a national feminist organization, the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the South, voter suppression, gun violence and the gun sense movement, the whitewashing of southern literature, the 1982 racialized killing of Vincent Chin, social media's role in political accountability, evangelical Christianity's marriage to extremism, and the rise of nationalism worldwide. In our current era of great political strife, this timely collection by Enjeti, a journalist and organizer, paves the way for a path forward, one where identity drives coalition-building and social change.

A tireless and discerning advocate for contemporary practitioners of creative nonfiction, Ned Stuckey-French was at the center of every national discussion about the genre. He greatly contributed to our scholarly understanding of the history of the essay and was working on his first essay collection when he died of cancer in 2019. That collection, One by One, the Stars, presents new, highly personal essays tracing Stuckey-French's childhood in Indiana and a burgeoning interest, during adolescence, in politics and social justice to his life as a father, teacher, and writer. Thematic threads connect these elements, and foremost is his growing commitment to activism on behalf of the disadvantaged, overlooked, or threatened. The volume also features some of Stuckey-French's "greatest hits" as a public scholar and writer, including "Don't Be Cruel: An Argument for Elvis," "Our Queer Little Hybrid Thing: Toward a Definition of the Essay," and his popular essay on his Facebook addiction, for which he was widely known. Along the way, his stories and reflections offer fascinating and timely insights into family dynamics, history, politics, ecology, social justice, and literature. All of it is infused with Ned Stuckey-French's guiding spirit, full of curiosity, compassion, and conviction.

The Sum of Her Parts explores how women's body parts and the roles/parts that women play have been deployed toward political ends. One essay examines Sarah Winchester and the lore that sprung up around her most famous-and most falsely mythologized-home, the Winchester Mystery House, to suggest that the woman and her house have been used as vessels to hold the nation's ongoing gun guilt. Another essay springboards from a personal encounter into etymological history, tracing how the word "cunt" went from being a relatively benign description of a body part to the word the Oxford English Dictionary cites as the most vile invective in the English language. Connecting topics as diverse as bra shopping, Wonder Woman, and a Metallica rockumentary, Griffiths explores what women's parts mean in contemporary America. Griffiths uses humor and sincerity to approach the topic of the female body through a wide variety of essay forms, blending lyric and narrative modes. Using fragmentation as well as traditional argumentation, the collection invites the reader to think ambiguously and explosively, allowing complication rather than easily connected dots. The result is a discussion of the female body that is varied, complex, nuanced, and thoughtful.