Wittliff Collections Literary Series – serie

More than the lifeblood of our natural world, Texas rivers have nourished the human spirit for as long as people have gathered on their banks. A living bond has flowed between Texas writers and rivers ever since the 1960 publication of John Graves’s classic journey along the Brazos, Goodbye to a River.Many of Texas’ leading writers have had their hearts captured by a river, and they have created sparkling accounts of the waterways they love. Now, editors Steven L. Davis and Sam L. Pfiester have assembled the best of those works into a revelatory collection of diverse literary voices.Ranging from the desert canyonlands of the Rio Grande to the swampy Big Thicket, from crystal clear Hill Country streams to the Red River’s treacherous quicksand, Viva Texas Rivers! showcases many classic writings along with brand new essays written for this volume. The literary nonfiction is complemented by flashes of poetry that brilliantly reflect these curving ribbons of light.Authoritative and expertly edited, Viva Texas Rivers! offers shimmering accounts of hidden paradises, as well as searing exposÉs of abuse and despoliation. Yet even in the bleakest times, as these writers have found, Texas rivers can bestow a sacred grace —and unexpected redemption.Viva Texas Rivers! brings you as close to the living nirvana of a Texas River as you can get without launching yourself into a canoe and following a great blue heron as it glides just above the breaking rapids, leading you around the bend as the river flows onward toward the best places in our hearts.

Celeste Bedford Walker, one of the most accomplished contemporary playwrights in Texas, crafts dramas from history and everyday life that illuminate the African American experience in all its variety, tragedy, pathos, and hilarity. Collected here are five of her most acclaimed plays: Sassy Mamas, Greenwood: An American Dream Destroyed, Reunion in Bartersville, Distant Voices, and Camp Logan.The topics treated by Walker are timelier than ever. Sassy Mamas follows “three women of substance and of a certain age who flip the script on gender stereotypes and become involved with younger men.” Greenwood: An American Dream Destroyed tells the powerful story of the horrific attack on the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, once known as the “Black Wall Street.” In Reunion in Bartersville, described by Walker as “a comedy-mystery in two acts,” the 50-year class reunion of Bartersville High School turns to hilarious suspense when an unexpected guest arrives. Recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Distant Voices “resurrects” persons buried in College Memorial Park, the second-oldest African American cemetery in Houston, to celebrate the wisdom of those gone before. Camp Logan is based on real-life events in Houston in 1917, when members of the highly decorated 24th Infantry Regiment were subjected to brutal Jim Crow treatment, resulting in a riot that left dozens dead and the execution of seventeen African American soldiers for mutiny.Readers and audiences should be prepared to laugh out loud, to be challenged, to be disturbed, and above all, to be enlightened by this poignant collection of plays.

Born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1941, acclaimed filmmaker Severo Perez moved to Los Angeles in 1972 to pursue a career in the motion picture industry. His films have won awards, including five CINE Golden Eagles. Perez is also an accomplished playwright and novelist. Filmmaker’s Journey offers valuable insights into the life and work of this influential and visionary artist. Perez’s 1995 film . . . and the Earth Did Not Swallow Him, perhaps his best-known work, is adapted from TomÁs Rivera’s classic 1971 Chicano novel . . . y no se lo tragÓ la tierra. The film follows the lives of a South Texas family of migrant farmworkers in the 1950s. Perez’s nuanced, powerful film beautifully evokes the substance and spirit of Rivera’s work, and it has won international critical acclaim, including top honors at film festivals worldwide. Some of these include the Sol Award at the 1995 CineSol Latino Film Festival, Best Feature Film at the San Diego Independent Film Festival, and Best Feature Film at the Minneapolis Rivertown Film Festival. Filmmaker’s Journey recounts Perez’s winding path toward building a career as an independent filmmaker. Beginning with the events accompanying the first week of production for . . . and the Earth Did Not Swallow Him—which coincided with the riots incited by the Rodney King verdict on April 29, 1992—then picking up the thread of his Westside San Antonio upbringing and his early fascination with making movies, Perez recounts his experiences with the small art houses, the obscure film collectives, and the move to Los Angeles that would eventually launch his forty-five-year career producing programming for PBS, cable, and network television.

Ann Alejandro, who lived all her life on a ranch in Uvalde, Texas, was a prolific writer with breathtaking natural talent. Though she lived for more than thirty years with chronic pain caused by fibromyalgia and other, mostly undiagnosed, illnesses, she wrote thousands of pages of poems, essays, and other creative works, the vast majority of it unpublished until now. Alejandro was also known for her lengthy letters, many written to her mother, who lived in the same town. Here in I Know About a Thousand Things, editors Naomi Shihab Nye and Marion Winik have selected the very best of Alejandro’s writing—vignettes, anecdotes, rants, and more. In fact, the opening poem in this collection, “I Know a Thinger Two,” was assembled by Nye, using lines from the many letters and emails she had received from Alejandro over the years. This collection, with commentary by Winik and Nye, is drawn from Alejandro’s vast creative output. It brings a measure of recognition to a woman who, though she labored in what might be seen as faithful obscurity, left behind a body of essays, letters, and poetry deserving of the most serious contemplation and appreciation. I Know About a Thousand Things: The Writings of Ann Alejandro of Uvalde, Texas will delight and enrich readers for years to come.

2021 Texas Book Festival Featured BookBronze Medal for Anthologies, Independent Publisher Book Awards 2023Nepantla Familias brings together Mexican American narratives that explore and negotiate the many permutations of living in between different worlds—how the authors or their characters create, or fail to create, a cohesive identity amid the contradictions in their lives. Nepantla—or living in the in-between space of the borderland—is the focus of this anthology. The essays, poems, and short stories explore the in-between moments in Mexican American life—the family dynamics of living between traditional and contemporary worlds, between Spanish and English, between cultures with traditional and shifting identities. In times of change, family values are either adapted or discarded in the quest for self-discovery, part of the process of selecting and composing elements of a changing identity. Edited by award-winning writer and scholar Sergio Troncoso, this anthology includes works from familiar and acclaimed voices such as David Dorado Romo, Sandra Cisneros, Alex Espinoza, Reyna Grande, and Francisco CantÚ, as well as from important new voices, such as Stephanie Li, David Dominguez, and ire’ne lara silva. These are writers who open and expose the in-between places: through or at borders; among the past, present, and future; from tradition to innovation; between languages; in gender; about the wounds of the past and the victories of the present; of life and death. Nepantla Familias shows the quintessential American experience that revives important foundational values through immigrants and the children of immigrants. Here readers will find a glimpse of contemporary Mexican American experience; here, also, readers will experience complexities of the geographic, linguistic, and cultural borders common to us all.Includes the work ofDavid Dorado RomoReyna GrandeFrancisco CantÚRigoberto GonzÁlezAlex EspinozaDomingo MartinezOscar CÁsaresLorraine M. LÓpezDavid DominguezStephanie LiSheryl LunaJosÉ Antonio RodrÍguezDeborah ParedezDiana Marie DelgadoDiana LÓpezSevero PerezOctavio Solisire'ne lara silvaRubÉn DegolladoHelena MarÍa ViramontesDaniel ChacÓnMatt Mendez

Deep in the Soul of Texas: An Anthology of Black Literature from the Lone Star State presents vivid firsthand accounts of resistance, perseverance, and triumph of the Black experience as the first-ever anthology of African American Texan writers. From Giddings poet Gwendolyn B. Bennett (1902–1981) to Beaumont native and intellectual Amilcar Shabazz, this anthology highlights the most prominent literary figures of each decade and features Texas' leading African American writers of today.Edited by Cary Clack, the first Black metro columnist at the San Antonio Express-News, this anthology represents an important attempt at uncovering and celebrating the roots of Black writing and writers from and about Texas. This collection of poetry, fiction, essays, drama, speeches, and memoir join to celebrate story, imagination, and language of the last 150 years of Texas history. Within each chapter, the anthology grows one step closer in addressing a longstanding question that looms over the Lone Star State: what does it mean to be Black in Texas?Each of the five parts in this anthology features a different facet of Black history from escape and heritage to folklore and injustice. Illuminating the varied Black experience in Texas, this anthology fills a major gap in Texas literature. Deep in the Soul of Texas brings light to all Texans as it helps change conversations—not just about what it means to be Black in Texas but expanding conceptions of what being "a Texan" truly means.

In the words of series editor Steven L. Davis, We Are Nature Defending Itself: An Anthology of Women on Bodies, Borders, and Place is “a revelation, a multicultural blend of well-known and emerging writers who come together to give nature a voice in our literature and our lives.” Not least of the many benefits to readers are its contributions from prominent Latina writers, presented here as advocates for the environment. Though this theme has long existed in Chicana literature, it has never been positioned as front and center as it is in this anthology.Volume editor Cordelia E. Barrera also includes notable Anglo, African American, and Indigenous contributors, crafting a true cultural blend of distinctive writing that will appeal to older generations while inspiring new ones. By incorporating these border voices, this collection effectively challenges long-dominant mythologies of the American West and offers a prominent place for literatures of social justice and the environment.The mix of poems, stories, and essays are divided into three sections: Bodies, Landscape, and Practices. Part I begins with the idea of experiencing and feeling a history of the body’s contact with landscapes and places as repositories of knowledge. Part II extends beyond particulars of private or public life to consider issues of place as sites and locations of radical action. Part III features ruminations and traditions of remembering, highlighting reciprocal relationships to the natural world that extend outward to the ways “women’s work” in and around the home shapes communal processes that reinforce continuity across time and space.We Are Nature Defending Itself adds important new work to the growing canon of nature and borderlands writing by women of color. In turn, these new voices deepen and broaden our understanding of humanity and its relationship to the natural environment.