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...

Rural Literacies identifies the problems inherent in trying to understand rural literacy, addresses the lack of substantive research on literacy in rural areas, and reviews traditional misrepresentations of rural literacy.
This innovative volume frames debates over literacy in relation to larger social, political, and economic forces, such as the impact of the No Child Left Behind Act on rural schools and the effects of out-migration, globalization, and the loss of small family farms on rural communities.
Drawing upon traditional literacy and composition research and employing...

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...

In "Reclaiming the Rural: Essays on Literacy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy," editors Kim Donehower, Charlotte Hogg, and Eileen E. Schell bring together a diverse collection of essays that consider literacy, rhetoric, and pedagogy in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The essays move beyond the typical arguments for preserving, abandoning, or modernizing by analyzing how rural communities sustain themselves through literate action. The contributors explore the rhetorics of water disputes in the western United States, the histories and influences of religious rhetoricsin Mexico, agricultural and...