Innovative and engaging, From the Garden Club explores how older women in a rural town use literacy to shape their lives and community. Deftly weaving elements of memoir with scholarly theory, Charlotte Hogg describes the lives of her grandmother and other women in her hometown of Paxton, Nebraska. The literacy practices of these women-writing news articles and memoirs, working at the library, and participating in extension clubs and the Garden Club-exemplify the complexities within rural communities often unseen or dismissed by locals and outsiders as "only" women's work. Combining...

Robert Penn Warren, Karl Shapiro, Joyce Carol Oates, Charles Bukowski, and Denise Levertov are but a few of the outstanding authors whose works grace this celebration of fifty years of "descant," the literary journal of Texas Christian University. This retrospective traces the journal's history from its beginnings as the product of a literary discussion group modeled after the Vanderbilt Fugitives to its recent years as a critically acclaimed small magazine that receives thousands of submissions and offers annual awards for fiction and poetry.
The anthology begins with a memoir by Betsy...