Showing results by publisher "Wesleyan University Press" in All Categories

"How can I teach a prayer / I only know how to recite?" "America, whose death / didn't you come from?" These are some of the questions that poet Joshua Gottlieb-Miller wrestles with in his beautiful, gripping new collection. By turns experimental and documentary, Dybbuk Americana draws out the questions around Jewish identity in the United States, and what it means to pass on Jewish identity to one's child. This hybrid text draws on art, mysticism, and history, taking the dybbuk, a figure from Jewish folklore, as its central metaphor.

The unique career of choreographer Liz Lerman has taken her from theater stages to shipyards and from synagogues to science labs. In this wide-ranging collection of essays and articles, she reflects on her lifelong exploration of dance as a vehicle for human insight and understanding of the world around us.

Westover, a girls' high school in Middlebury, Connecticut, has evolved from a finishing school for the Protestant elite, including F. Scott Fitzgerald's first love, to a meritocracy for pupils of many religions and races from all around the world.

The Mysterious Island was published in 1874, and it is one of Verne's longest novels. The plot depicts a group of men who have become castaways stranded on an island in the Pacific during the American Civil War. The novel describes their attempts not only to survive but also, with the aid of the scientific and technological know-how, to rebuild their world from the meager resources of the island. At the end, however, it is realized that Captain Nemo, from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, has secretly been helping the settlers.

In the first season of Life Lines: Poets in Conversation, hosted by Pushcart-prize nominated writer Dianne Bilyak, award-winning poets explore how poetry informs critical cultural discussions around grief, identity, womanhood, citizenship, environment, heritage, violence toward women, mother and daughter bonds, and generational trauma. Each guest poet has written a new book to introduce to the audience while also providing in-depth insights about the motivations behind the creation of the poetry, how the cover art connects to the work, and the themes explored in each book. Guest poets include ...

In a strange twist of kismet, Remica Bingham-Risher's paternal great-great-great grandmother, Minnie Lee Fowlkes, is interviewed for the Works Progress Administration Slave Narratives in Petersburg, Virginia in 1937, and her maternal grandmother, Mary Knight, is sent to Petersburg in 1941, diagnosed with "water on the brain"—postpartum depression being an ongoing mystery—nine days after birthing her first child.

Invasion of the Sea was written in 1904 when large-scale canal digging was very much a part of the political, economic, and military strategy of the world's imperial powers. Instead of linking two seas, as existing canals (the Suez and the Panama) did, Verne proposed a canal that would create a sea in the heart of the Sahara Desert. The story raises a host of concerns—environmental, cultural, and political. The proposed sea threatens the nomadic way of life of those Islamic tribes living on the site, and they declare war.

Kazim Ali is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work explores themes of identity, migration, and the intersections of cultural and spiritual traditions. His poetry is known for its lyrical and expressive language, as well as its exploration of themes such as love, loss, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world. "Sukun" means serenity or calm, and a sukun is also a form of punctuation in Arabic orthography that denotes a pause over a consonant.

Jules Verne (1828-1905) was the first author to popularize the literary genre of science fiction. Written in 1898 and part of the author's famous series Voyages Extraordinaires, The Mighty Orinoco tells the story of a young man's search for his father along the then-uncharted Orinoco River of Venezuela.

At the Weldon Institute in Philadelphia, a mob of zealous balloon enthusiasts plans to conquer the sky in a state-of-the-art dirigible. When a stranger, the mysterious Robur, declares that the future belongs not to balloons but to heavier-than-air flying machines, the Institute scornfully dismisses the idea. But Robur demands vengeance—and has a unique flying machine that will allow him to take it.