During the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration sent workers to interview over 2,200 former slaves about their experiences during slavery and the time immediately after the Civil War. The interviews conducted with the former Louisiana slaves often showed a different life from the slaves in neighboring states.

Louisiana was unique among the slave-holding states because of French law and influence, as demonstrated in the standards set to govern slaves in Le Code Noir. Its history was also different from many Southern states because of the prevalence of large sugar cane as well as cotton plantations, which benefited from the frequent replenishment of rich river silt deposited by Mississippi River floods. At Frogmore Plantation, which is located in Louisiana across the Mississippi River from Natchez, co-owner Lynette Tanner has spent 16 years researching and interpreting the slave narratives in order to share these stories with visitors from around the globe. The plantation offers historical re-enactments, written by Tanner, that are performed by descendants of former Natchez District slaves.

In this collection, Tanner gathered interviews conducted with former slaves who lived in Louisiana at the time of the interviews as well as narratives with those who had been enslaved in Louisiana but had moved to a different state by the 1930s. Their recollections of food, housing, clothing, weddings, and funerals, as well as treatment and relationships echo memories of an era, like no other, for which America still faces repercussions today.

Lynette Tanner and her husband own Frogmore Plantation, a working cotton plantation and gin distillery, as well as Terre Noir, a second plantation in Concordia Parish. Tanner has received numerous awards for her preservation efforts and her promotion of Louisiana tourism. Tanner was the author and narrator of “The Delta:  A Musical History” for the Smithsonian traveling exhibit which was on display in the La. Delta area.

Award-winning poet Enid Shomer’s new and selected poems explore the many facets of womanhood, from youthful desire to life’s later stages.

In Riptide, Shomer’s poems, written over the last forty years, illuminate the nature of being—whether human or kudzu—“this / headlong rush, this stammer / of green, this slow / stampede toward light.” Elegant lyrics, anchored in her beloved Florida landscape, use stunning imagery to convey Shomer’s rapturous engagement with the natural world. Longer sequences showcase narrative and formal dexterity while deftly bringing historical personae to life in poems such as “Pope Joan.” New poems powerfully examine mortality and sensuality as experienced in an aging body.

With lush music and deeply spiritual attention, Shomer’s work transforms the mundane into the numinous. Now in her early eighties, Shomer is still at the top of her form.

The story of Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from Central Park Zoo and captured the hearts and imaginations of millions of followers around the world, with 32 pages of stunning color photographs.

This is a parable of freedom, wildness, and our urban ecosystems. Flaco has been dubbed “the world’s most famous bird.” From the night in February of 2023 when vandals cut a hole in his cage until his death a year later in a courtyard on the Upper West Side, his is a story full of adventure and unexpected turns.

Nature writer David Gessner chronicles the year-long odyssey of Flaco and the human drama that followed the owl who captured the imaginations of New Yorkers and people around the world. Though he’d spent his life in a cage, Flaco learned to survive in New York City by eating rats, squirrels, and birds. He was an immigrant coming from elsewhere to make it in the big city. Central Park, the island of green in an urban sea, was his new home territory.

Flaco’s urban adventure brought controversy, pitting those who felt he should be returned to the safety of the zoo against those who created the “Free Flaco” movement. The birding world was fractured over the ethics of the online sharing of his location that brought scores of enthusiasts to view him each day. And his end—with a grim necropsy revealing Flaco had suffered a viral infection from eating pigeons and had multiple rodenticides in his system—serves as a Rachel Carson-esque warning about the harm we’ve done to our urban environments, inspiring the passage of long-sought legislation protecting urban birds and regulations meant to reduce the use of rodenticides in New York City.

A former West Virginia coal miner encounters corruption and cultural upheaval working on a dam project that will submerge his town.

In the remote corner of West Virginia in the 1960s, former coal miner Lance Drennen takes a job as an overseer for the construction of an immense flood-control dam, which will drown 2800 acres of land that have been in his and other local families for generations. When Lance witnesses a terrible accident and discovers irregularities on the site that are guaranteed to line the pockets of the company and the local government, he must decide whether or not he will become a whistle-blower.

With incredible eloquence and clarity, Matthew Neill Null sets in motion the characters who will tug at either end of Lance’s life: his wife, Johnny, the adoring daughter of a hell-raising radical coal miner, who has withdrawn into her own world, and Jim Koss, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Koss is the only person who can draw Johnny out, and he becomes Lance’s confidante. But Koss has a secret history: he had been fired from the Washington agency designing the dam because of his communist sympathies.

In a most concrete and riveting narrative, The Floodgate explores the social and economic upheavals of the era—labor unrest, political and corporate corruption, persecution of communists, the devastation of the environment—and their powerful impact on powerless communities. It is a story of loyalty to family and community, moral responsibility for personal choices, corporate greed and environmental destruction, and the depths and limits of love.

WINNER OF THE LEE SMITH NOVEL PRIZE

Behind the Waterline takes readers to the home of a teenager and his grandmother in a New Orleans neighborhood on the eve of Katrina, where there are few resources and little warning of what is about to happen, in this novel that mixes magical realism with reality.

When Hurricane Katrina approaches New Orleans, teenaged Eric and his grandmother and many of their neighbors decide to ride out the storm. Kionna Walker LeMalle’s masterful debut novel brings her readers, like the rising water, onto Eric’s street in the Third Ward, where stranded dogs bark for a time, where neighbors are floating on doors, and where Eric and his grandmother must take refuge in his second floor bedroom. After days of heat, dwindling supplies, and relentless rising water, neighbors begin to disappear and Eric’s grandmother, already known as an eccentric, begins to falter. It is then that Eric—in a dream, a hallucination, or something else—discovers a room beyond his closet wall, a place he has never seen. What he discovers inside will send him on a path to discover secrets to survival, bitter progress, and, ultimately, the history of his own people—those he sorely misses and those he never even knew.

2023 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Long List

2023 Book of the Year, Southern Literary Review

Named a 2023 Great Group read, Women’s National Book Association

A South Carolina family endures one life-shattering day in 1961 in a town that lies in the shadow of a nuclear bomb plant.

It’s November 1, 1961, in a small town in South Carolina, and nuclear war is coming. Ten-year-old Wilson Porter believes this with every fiber of his being. He prowls his neighborhood for Communists and studies fallout pamphlets and the habits of his father, a scientist at the nuclear plant in town.

Meanwhile, his mother Nellie covertly joins an anti-nuclear movement led by angry housewives—and his father, Dean, must decide what to do with the damning secrets he’s uncovered at the nuclear plant. When tragedy strikes, the Porter family must learn to confront their fears—of the world and of each other.