5 Questions with Erika Valdivieso, Author of “Empire’s Companion: Virgilian Epics From Colonial Iberoamerica.”
Erika Valdivieso’s new monograph, *Empire’s Companion*, uncovers a hidden corpus of Latin epic poetry written in sixteenth‑ to eighteenth‑century Spanish and Portuguese America. Drawing on archival research, she analyzes four colonial epics that emulate Virgil’s *Aeneid* while advancing the imperial projects of their time. The work demonstrates that colonial elites shared the same classical education as their European counterparts, producing literature that both reinforced and reimagined empire. Valdivieso plans to extend this inquiry to Atlantic‑wide georgic poems that confront the realities of slave labor.
Five Questions with Leonard M. Lopoo, Author of “Wanting Children: Family-Planning Policies and the Engineering of America’s Population”
Leonard M. Lopoo’s new book *Wanting Children* argues that U.S. family‑planning policy is skewed toward subsidizing contraception for low‑income Americans while ignoring infertility support, a legacy of early eugenicist policies. He introduces “wantedness” as a metric for population policy, emphasizing...
Faye Raquel Gleisser Receives 2025 Charles C. Eldredge Prize
The Smithsonian American Art Museum has awarded the 2025 Charles C. Eldredge Prize to historian Faye Raquel Gleisser for her book *Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America*. The prize, established in 1986, honors a recent publication that deepens...
Poetry Month Feature: CavanKerry Press
CavanKerry Press is celebrating National Poetry Month by highlighting three "jazz triptychs" from Indigo Moor’s new collection, Reconstructing Eden. The book experiments with a three‑movement structure that combines tercet, the poet‑invented Bastard Villanelle, and Rhyme Royal. Distributed through the University...
Poetry Month Feature: Tupelo Press
Tupelo Press is spotlighting two new titles for National Poetry Month: the Arabic/English anthology "Other Paths for Shahrazad," featuring contemporary Arab women poets, and Carrie Olivia Adams' "The Book of Marys and Glaciers," a collection that weaves desert, consumerism and...
“The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris”: A Playlist by Rachel Silveri
Rachel Silveri, an assistant professor at the University of Florida, has released *The Art of Living in Avant‑Garde Paris*, a new monograph that examines how interwar Paris artists wove creative practice into everyday life. The book is paired with a...
Five Questions with Susan Engel, Author of “American Kindergarten: Dispatches From the First Year of School”
Susan Engel’s new book *American Kindergarten* chronicles two years of visits to 29 classrooms across fourteen states, uncovering five core promises—reading, order, thinking, identity and love—that shape kindergarten experiences. Her observations reveal that classroom quality does not align neatly with...
Five Questions with Federico Marcon, Author of “Fascism”
Federico Marcon’s new book, *Fascism: The History of a Word*, offers a semiotic reconstruction of the term “fascism,” tracing its meanings from Mussolini’s regime through post‑war scholarship to contemporary political discourse. The work proposes a novel historiographical method that treats...