John Poch's newly curated collection, Gracious: Poems of the 21st Century South, spotlights both emerging and notable voices from this poetry-rich region. This book promises to be the best and most influential anthology of Southern poetry published in over thirty years. Gracious steers away from stereotypical mockingbird-and-magnolia verse and instead amplifies a variety of lyric voices covering a wide breadth of Southern experience. Bryan Giemza's timely introduction situates the anthology among the current discourse in Southern studies. Gracious features the work of some of our best-known poets alongside those who have just published their first books. In all, there are eighty-four poets included whose work moves both the heart and the intellect. Gracious is, in the end, a new poetic geography, a book that strives to define Southern poetry for a generation to come. It is a book intended not only for the classroom; it aims to capture the imaginations of readers of all ages and backgrounds.

In the 1930s, the U.S. government famously sent photographers across the country to document on film the need for federal assistance in rural areas. Dorothea Lange's well-known image Migrant Mother came from this effort, along with thousands of other photographs. Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, and Marion Post Wolcott contributed to this compelling body of images. As primary photographers for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the state of Louisiana, the three took more than 2,600 photographs, recording the modest homes, family gatherings, and working lives of citizens across the state. In Images of Depression-Era Louisiana, Bryan Giemza and Maria Hebert-Leiter curate more than 150 of those photographs, offering a riveting collection that captures this pivotal time in Louisiana's history. The book's stunning photo gallery, with original captions, provides a moving visual tour of Louisiana during a period of economic struggle and transition. Organized by photographer, parish, and date, the revealing images reflect an era when extreme poverty exacerbated the divide between classes and races. Scenes of agricultural and rural communities- families in clapboard houses, sugarcane cutters in the field, and trappers navigating bayous- as well as cityscapes of New Orleans's bustling markets, busy docks, and peaceful Jackson Square demonstrate the scope of the photographers' work and the diversity of conditions and occupations they found. Giemza and Hebert-Leiter trace the genesis of the FSA Collection, examine its role in promoting the documentary style of picture-taking, and explore the motivations and methods of the collection's head, Roy E. Stryker. They sketch the biographies, techniques, and perspectives of Shahn, Lee, and Wolcott, explaining how the photographers operated in Louisiana from their first experiences to their last days in the state. Letters and other archival documents further illuminate the three artists' impressions of Louisiana, its people, and its traditions.

Bryan Giemza challenges the myth of the solitary genius, both in scientific and humanistic endeavors, and demonstrates how Cormac McCarthy is the exceptional figure whose work allows and encourages us to interrogate the marriage of the sciences and humanities. Drawing from previously unsurfaced archival connections as well as a range of primary sources and interview subjects, including those close to McCarthy, Giemza places McCarthy's work within contemporary scientific discourse and literary criticism. Timely and innovative in both content and structure, the volume includes a biographical examination of the writer's love of science and the path that led him to the Santa Fe Institute and offers a rare look behind its closed doors. The book probes the STEM subjects - with chapters focused on technology, engineering, and math - within and throughout McCarthy's fictional universe and biography. The final chapter explores McCarthy's friendship with Guy Davenport and their shared interest in creating a unified aesthetic theory alongside McCarthy's essays and most recent literary projects, The Passenger and Stella Maris. In arguing that science and art are connected by aesthetics, Giemza confirms the profound truth of McCarthy's unwavering belief that "There's a beauty to science" and a language of human understanding that transcends words.

In this expansive study, Bryan Giemza recovers a neglected subculture and retrieves a missing chapter of Irish Catholic heritage by canvassing the literature of American Irish writers from the U.S. South. Giemza offers a defining new view of Irish American authors and their interrelationships within both transatlantic and ethnic regional contexts. From the first Irish American novel, published in Winchester, Virginia, in 1817, Giemza investigates a cast of nineteenth-century writers contending with the turbulence of their time, writers influenced by both American and Irish revolutions. Additionally, he considers dramatists and propagandists of the Civil War and Lost Cause memoirists who emerged in its wake. Some familiar names reemerge in an Irish context, including Joel Chandler Harris, Lafcadio Hearn, and Kate (O'Flaherty) Chopin. Giemza also examines the works of twentieth-century southern Irish writers, such as Margaret Mitchell, John Kennedy Toole, Flannery O'Connor, Pat Conroy, Anne Rice, Valerie Sayers, and Cormac McCarthy. For each author, Giemza traces the influences of Catholicism as it shaped both faith and ethnic identity, pointing to shared sensibilities and contradictions. Flannery O'Connor, for example, resisted identification as an Irish American, while Cormac McCarthy, described by some as ""anti-Catholic,"" continues a dialogue with the Church from which he distanced himself. Giemza draws on many never-before-seen documents, including authorized material from the correspondence of Cormac McCarthy, interviews from the Irish community of Flannery O'Connor's native Savannah, Georgia, and Giemza's own correspondence with writers such as Valerie Sayers and Anne Rice. This lively literary history prompts a new understanding of how the Irish in the region helped invent a regional mythos, an enduring literature, and a national image.

A Depression-era comic masterpiece, E. P. O'Donnell's The Great Big Doorstep centers on the Crochets, a Cajun family who live in a ramshackle house between the levee and the Mississippi River. The Crochets dream of one day owning a stately plantation befitting the magnificent cypress doorstep they have salvaged from the river and proudly display outside their humble home. The memorable characters in this novel have their own concerns: the patriarch, Commodo, is full of wild bravado as he fluctuates between scheming, laboring, and malingering; his wife reigns as the queen of retort, though toughened by years of making do and doing without. The Crochet children also cope with personal struggles: Topal, twenty, restless, and moody, and recently dumped by her fiancA (c); Arthur, eighteen, attempts to strike out on his own while dodging the coddling of his mother and the fury of his father; Evvie, almost fifteen, plans to join a religious order after renouncing a lover; and twins Gussie and Paul, and baby T. J., provide an ongoing chorus of laughter and tears. The Great Big Doorstep has remained a literary and cultural classic since its publication in 1941. In an 1979 afterword, Eudora Welty praises O'Donnell's comic genius, citing his ""supreme gift"" for dialogue, while Bryan Giemza's introduction underscores the work's place in the tradition of comic Southern novels.

Much of American popular culture depicts the 1930s South either as home to a population that was intellectually, morally, and physically stunted, or as a romantic, sentimentalized haven untouched by the nation's financial troubles. Though these images stand as polar opposites, each casts the South as an exceptional region that stood separate from American norms. Reassessing the 1930s South brings together historians, art critics, and literary scholars to provide a new social and cultural history of the Great Depression South that moves beyond common stereotypes of the region. Essays by Steven Knepper, Anthony J. Stanonis, and Bryan A. Giemza delve into the literary culture of the 1930s South and the multiple ways authors such as Sterling Brown, Tennessee Williams, and E. P. O'Donnell represented the region to outsiders. Lisa Dorrill and Robert W. Haynes explore connections between artists and the South in essays on New Deal murals and southern dramatists on Broadway. Rejecting traditional views of southern resistance to modernization, Douglas E. Thompson and Ted Atkinson survey the cultural impacts of technological advancement and industrialization. Emily Senefeld, Scott L. Matthews, Rebecca Sharpless, and Melissa Walker compare public representations of the South in the 1930s to the circumstances of everyday life. Finally, Ella Howard, Nicholas Roland, and Robert Hunt Ferguson examine the ways southern governments and activists shaped racial perceptions and realities in Georgia, Texas, and Tennessee. Reassessing the 1930s South provides an interpretation that focuses on the region's embrace of technological innovation, promotion of government-sponsored programs of modernization, rejection of the plantation legend of the late nineteenth century, and experimentation with unionism and interracialism. Taken collectively, these essays provide a better understanding of the region's identity, both real and perceived, as well as how southerners grappled with modernity during a decade of uncertainty and economic hardship.