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 Colquitt, who served as the journal's editor for nearly forty years and who, along with Louise Cowan and the TCU ""Fugitives,"" founded descant in 1956. The early years of ""Descant"" had a distinctly local flavor and featured such young talents as Bill Camfield, who would later become a pioneer writer and performer in children's television, and William Barney, who would become Poet Laureate of Texas.But Colquitt had an uncanny ability for recognizing and publishing promising writers from across the nation, and soon descant was an established literary voice. Since Colquitt's retirement in the mid-1990s, the editors of ""Descant"" have continued the tradition of publishing both emerging authors and established writers such as William Harrison, Clyde Edgerton, and Andrew Hudgins.

In June 2015, Bree Newsome scaled the flagpole in front of South Carolina's state capitol and removed the Confederate flag. The following month, the Confederate flag was permanently removed from the state capitol. Newsome is a compelling example of a twenty-first-century woman rhetor, along with bloggers, writers, politicians, activists, artists, and everyday social media users, who give new meaning to Aristotle's ubiquitous definition of rhetoric as the discovery of the "available means of persuasion." Women's persuasive acts from the first two decades of the twenty-first century include new technologies and repurposed old ones, engaged not only to persuade, but also to tell their stories, to sponsor change, and to challenge cultural forces that repress and oppress. Persuasive Acts: Women's Rhetorics in the Twenty-First Century gathers an expansive array of voices and texts from well-known figures including Hillary Rodham Clinton, Malala Yousafzai, Michelle Obama, Lindy West, Sonia Sotomayor, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, so that readers may converse with them, and build rhetorics of their own. Editors Shari J. Stenberg and Charlotte Hogg have complied timely and provocative rhetorics that represent critical issues and rhetorical affordances of the twenty-first century.

Fresh off their sleeper hit, "I'm not a Vampire, I just suck my thumb," the daughter and father team of Ryan Ashley Rector and Clarence Rector are back with a brand new adventure. This new adventure follows PJ as he visits the zoo for the very first time. However, PJ encounters one small problem. All of the animals are sleeping Follow along with PJ as he discovers all of the comical reasons for the animals sleeping.

"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 theory from education and sociology, the text engages compositionists in broader conversations regarding rural literacies. The authors share strategies that will help compositionists participate in pedagogies that are rooted in a richer understanding of rural literacies and work toward sustainability for all communities in a globalized age.

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 conversations with these women with their writing, Hogg describes and analyzes the ways they both embrace and challenge traditional notions of place and identity. Drawing on ethnographic research, composition theory, literacy studies, and regionalism, Hogg demonstrates how these women use literacy to evoke and sustain a sense of place and heritage for members of the community, to educate the citizens of Paxton, and to nourish themselves as learners, readers, and writers. interdisciplinary sources in considering how rural culture is created and sustained. Charlotte Hogg is an assistant professor of English at Texas Christian University. She has published articles in Great Plains Quarterly and Western American Literature, and creative nonfiction and fiction in The Southeast Review and Clackamas Literary Review.