Recent Books by Kenyon Authors

Chris O. Cook '00, To Lose & to Pretend (Brooklyn Arts Press). Cook's poems move through a terrain that's part pop culture, part personal, and part philosophical, with surprising images and provocative reflections on poetry at every turn.

Allison Joseph '88, My Father's Kites (Steel Toe Books). "How does one plan some sort of funeral / for someone who thought God the biggest hoax?" In her sixth collection of poems, many of them sonnets, Joseph contemplates a father who would "damn / me straight to hell for everything I've said," but who also "used to build me kites, / who'd whittle twigs to form a homemade frame."

Benjamin A. Kleinerman '97, The Discretionary President: The Promise and Peril of Executive Power (University Press of Kansas). A professor of constitutional democracy at Michigan State University, Kleinerman traces the debate over executive power from Hobbes through Lincoln, probing an issue that took on new urgency in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Janet C. Myers '91, Antipodal England: Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination (SUNY Press). Myers, who teaches English at Elon University, uses memoirs and emigrant guides as well as novels to explore the ways in which British emigrants to Australia shaped conceptions of home and national identity.

David Meerman Scott '83, The New Rules of Marketing & PR, Second Edition (John Wiley & Sons). Marketing guru Scott has completely revised and updated his immensely useful, engagingly written guide, which originally appeared in 2007. The subhead says it all: how to use social media, blogs, news releases, online video, and viral marketing to reach buyers directly.

Kelley Wilder '93, Exposures: Photography and Science (Reaktion Books). Photography is an art. No, a science. No, that divide is artificial. Wilder's wide-ranging, fascinating, and beautifully illustrated book takes us through the history of photography, discussing photographic techniques as tools in scientific inquiry, along with the ways in which science has influenced art photography.

Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott, Fly Away (Johns Hopkins University Press). For years, in an innovative class and through their own research, Kenyon professors Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott have explored the mass exodus of blacks from the rural South to the urban North during the twentieth century. Fly Away (Johns Hopkins University Press) is a culmination of their work, vividly depicting black culture as it moved from areas like South Carolina's low country and the Mississippi Delta to cities like New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Allen Ballard '52 H'04, Carried by Six (Seaforth Press), a novel published last year by Allen Ballard '52 H'04, received a 2010 literary award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. One of two "honor book" winners in the fiction category, this gripping, fast-paced story takes the reader into the Philadelphia projects, where an Iraq war vet is making a stand against the local drug dealers.

Fred McGavran '65 P'03, The Butterfly Collector (Black Lawrence Press). For a real estate agent, hell is a silent phone. You sit at your desk pretending to have something to do, while the big producers usher their clients in and out of their private offices and rush off to six figure closings. You're lucky if they ask you to put up a yard sign at one of their new listings or hand out circulars at an open house. And all the time you're thinking, what am I going to do if I can't make it on commissions? How long until the credit cards are maxed out, the eviction notice is slipped under the door, and Martha's lawyer is after me again for criminal contempt? An attorney by profession, McGavran has won a good many prizes for his highly inventive fiction. A mundane enough situation, albeit with a whiff of trouble. But the story, "A Friend of Bill Gillen," quickly veers into truly disturbing territory-as do the fourteen other irresistibly unsettling, at times eerily humorous stories in The Butterfly Collector (Black Lawrence Press), by Fred McGavran '65 P'03. An attorney by profession, McGavran has won a good many prizes for his highly inventive fiction.

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