Writing the Heavenly Frontier celebrates the early voices of the air as it examines the sky as a metaphorical and political landscape. While flight histories usually focus on the physical dangers of early aviation, this book introduces the figurative liabilities of ascension. Early pilot-writers not only grappled with an unwieldy machine; they also grappled with poetics that were extremely selective. Tropes that cast Charles Lindbergh as the transcendent hero of the new millennium were the same ones that kept women, black Americans, and indigenous peoples imaginatively tethered to the ground....

Worthy is a memoir of loss and the search for acceptance. Raised in a Mormon household, Denice Turner strives to find her place in the Church, longing to be worthy of her mother s love. When her mother dies in a suspicious house fire, Turner is forced to face the problems with the stories she inherited. Contemplating the price of worthiness, Turner grapples with the mystery of her mother s death, seeking to understand her mother s battle with chronic pain.
The story unfolds as Turner confronts a history that includes a Greek grandfather whose up-from-the-bootstraps legacy refuses...