Every October, we unite for National Arts & Humanities Month (NAHM), the nation’s largest annual celebration of arts and culture. It’s a moment to honor the artists, educators, veterans, arts administrators, and community leaders whose creativity strengthens democracy, fuels our economy, and tells America’s story. This year’s theme, Stories Unite Us, reminds us that creativity defines who we are as a nation and who we aspire to be. [source: americansforthearts.org]
Please enjoy our curated list of American stories from new books and journal articles below.
Black Women’s Art Ecosystems: Sites of Wellness and Self-Care
By Tanisha M. Jackson
Celebrates Black women’s artistic achievements while revealing how their work creates communities of restoration and mental health.
Lingering Inland: A Literary Tour of the Midwest
Edited by Andy Oler
Foreword by José Olivarez
A singular collection of creative nonfiction, Lingering Inland plumbs the personal and collective essence that binds Midwesterners together through words and places.
Journal of Aesthetic Education
OPEN ACCESS: “Visuality and Multimodality as Tools for Learning in Geography and Art Education” by Kerstin Ericson and Tarja Karlsson Häikiö
The article elaborates didactic perspectives on place-based learning in geography education and art education.
The Hours Are Long, But the Pay Is Low: A Curious Life in Independent Music
By Rob Miller
Delivers a warm-hearted yet clear-eyed account of loving and living music on the edge, in the trenches, and without apologies.
By Diane Diekman
Informed by a wealth of new research and interviews, Randy Travis is the first in-depth biography of the country music legend.
“Sand Talk: Process Philosophy and Indigenous Knowledges” by Julien Tempone-Wiltshire
Through a close study of T. Yunkaporta’s 2019’s Sand Talk, this article explores fractal thinking and other aspects of Indigenous knowledge, beliefs, and cultural practices. Given that Indigenous Peoples’ Day is also celebrated in October, it’s the perfect month to give this article a read!
Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era
By Marlee S. Bunch
Blends personal memory with Civil Rights history to document the pivotal role Black women played in education during a transformative and charged period in American history.
“The “Pathetic Fallacy” and Related Figures in Classical Bucolic Poetry: Between Ancient Culture, Ecocriticism, and Science” by Alessandro Rolim de Moura
This paper addresses the use of the term “pathetic fallacy” by critics to describe the representation of nature in bucolic poetry, identifying and discussing the main interpretative trends in scholarship.
Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth
By Nora Wendl
Eloquent and confessional, Almost Nothing restores Edith Farnsworth to her place in architectural history and the masterpiece that bears her name.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology
“Becoming Melwas: Performance, Embodiment, and the Supernatural in Late Medieval Britain” by Sam Lasman
This article discusses a pair of Welsh poems, both now called Ymddiddan (or Ymryson) Gwenhwyfar a Melwas, “The Dialogue (or “Contention”) of Gwenhwyfar and Melwas,” that foreground questions of performativity, gender, and the relationship between embodiment and adaptation.
By Zachary McLeod Hutchins
An innovative perspective on Smith’s early exploits, Joseph: An Epic reinterprets the origin story of a religious seeker and the faith he created.