Smurglets are Everywhere, text by Alan Birkelbach, illustrations by Susan Halbower    
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What are Smurglets? Why, Smurglets are little creatures that make friends instantly, enjoy dressing up—and love to hide! Where do you find Smurglets? They’re everywhere!

Every page of this fun-filled poetry book is filled with delight for kids and adults alike. Texas Poet Laureate Alan Birkelbach tells you not only where Smurglets come from, but, using captivating rhythms, goofy rhymes, and wonderfully made-up words, he tells readers from ages 5 to 50 why Ogres Hate Okra, about what happens when Blob Junior Goes to Camp, and the dire consequences of losing your Galoopa! It’s all wild and wacky! Delightfully illustrated by prize-winning artist Susan Halbower kids will return again and again to read about, and marvel at, Giggleville, Komodos, and Weldon Wing (The Armpit King!), not to mention all the other creatures and crazy situations.

Here’s a goofy excerpt from the poem: What’s on the Menu:

The wicked witch’s house next door
was made of gingerbread.
Since people don’t eat sweets as much
she used lunch meat instead.

What happens next? You’ll have to read to find out!

Parents will be reminded of the fun poems they grew up with, the poems they would memorize and then recite again and again. The topics include pizza and dinosaurs and anacondas—plus, wherever you look there’s a smurglet! While the book might be targeted for 5 to 12 year-olds everyone who is a child at heart will find something to enjoy.

Teachers will discover this is the new book they have been searching for at story-time and for teaching about poetry. It’s playful, entertaining, easy to read, and easy to memorize. Not too hard to understand, not too grown-up, and not too many pages—it’s the perfect book to get kids to read (and make them giggle.) Smurglets are Everywhere! And soon you’ll see why!

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ALAN BIRKELBACH is the 2005 Poet Laureate of Texas. He has been writing poetry since he was twelve years old. He thinks writing poetry is the most fun ever. He lives in Plano, Texas with a big, white dog.

SUSAN HALBOWER is an award-winning artist who lives in Fort Worth. She designs bow wow CARDS and has been drawing pictures of animals for years and years and years (which means she’s really good at it.)

Hill Country Deco: Modernistic Architecture of Central Texas, by David Bush and Jim Parsons
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Using a host of vibrant images, David Bush and Jim Parsons’ Hill Country Deco: Modernistic Architecture of Central Texas captures the essence of the Art Deco style of architecture as represented in the Hill Country of Texas. Hill Country Deco explores how the rich history of these structures collides with the progressive notions of historic preservation for remodeling buildings and restoring façades. This collection of historical and modern photographs will encourage a newfound appreciation for Art Deco as seen in Central Texas.

The Art Deco style covers a range of buildings, from commercial to residential, and styles. The sweeping curves of the Alameda Theater in San Antonio exhibit typical Art Moderne style. The Austin U. S. courthouse brings WPA Deco up to date from the 1940s, and the San Antonio Express-News Building showcases the classic style of what most people today think of as Art Deco.

Not only does this book of photography embrace the history of Art Deco; it takes a series of edifices and recognizes the artistic elements and economic purposes of each one. The authors offer insight on architectural preservation while providing an appreciative view of sometimes overlooked corners of Central Texas. Some buildings are obscure and hardly recognizable as what they once were; others were fortunate enough to have their Deco style maintained over the span of decades. Bush and Parsons have made it a personal mission to ensure that the readers of Hill Country Deco will, upon viewing these beautiful buildings, yearn for a road trip to some of these sites to discover Art Deco history for themselves.

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DAVID BUSH was born and raised in New Orleans where his parents and grandparents encouraged his appreciation of historic architecture. He holds a master’s degree in historic preservation from Middle Tennessee State University. Since 1990, he has worked professionally with preservation organizations in Connecticut, Florida and Texas, spending most of his career with Galveston Historical Foundation and Greater Houston Preservation Alliance. With Jim Parsons, he is co-author and co-photographer of the book Houston Deco: Modernistic Architecture of the Texas Coast, released in 2008.

JIM PARSONS is a freelance writer, editor and photographer, and a volunteer for Greater Houston Preservation Alliance. A graduate of the University of Houston, he has conducted the extensive research on local history and architecture. He is a native of Baytown, Teas, and now resides in Houston.

New and Selected Poems, by karla k. morton
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This beautiful, linen hardbound book is a word-lover’s dream.

As the 2010 Texas Poet Laureate, karla k. morton believes that poetry is every man’s art, and has carved her place in Texas Letters with this stunning collection.
With well-loved titles such as “For Love and Michelangelo,” “The Closer,” “Why God Needs a Shotgun,” “Alamo Coastline,” “Woman in the Pipe Shop,” and “When Texas No Longer Fits in the Glove Box,” this collection will entrance and delight. These poems are among the many crowd favorites at morton’s readings across the state for her ground-breaking Little Town, Texas Tour as poet laureate.

Her poems take you on a journey; her flowing, storytelling style sparks memories and stirs emotions. Here’s a short poem, inspired by a talk with her son, words of advice when he first fell in love:

Don't Be Nervous 

 when you see her.
 Don't worry about
 what you will say, or
 how you will say it.
 Just look at her,
 and wonder
 how your hand will fit
 in the small of her back;
 how many pins it takes
 to hold up her hair. . .

It’s no wonder morton has been called “one of the more adventurous voices in American poetry . . .”

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The state of Texas has honored Texas Poets Laureate for seventy-five years, but much of their work has gone unpublished and unrecognized. In a significant step toward recognizing their achievements, TCU Press publishes a series of the work of the Poets Laureate, with a volume dedicated to each poet. The series began with the 2005 and 2006 laureates and continues through each biennial appointment. These beautiful volumes collect the finest work of each individual poet. While a single volume may stand alone as a valuable selection of a poet’s work, the series as a whole will draw their different voices together into a singular poetic expression of Texas.

Comanche Sundown , by Jan Reid
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Comanche Sundown is the story of the great war chief Quanah Parker, a freed slave and cowboy named Bose Ikard, and the women they love. In 1869 Quanah and Bose do their best to kill each other in a brutal fight on horseback in West Texas. But over several years, through the flash and chaos of war and killing they discover that they are friends, not enemies. They change from violent unformed youths into men of courage and decency.

The son of the ferocious warrior Nocona and the tragic captive Texan Cynthia Ann Parker, Quanah suffers the wound of being slurred and rejected by many Comanches as someone of impure blood and certain bad luck. When told he cannot marry his youthful love Weckeah, he rides off and joins another band of his people in the canyonlands and plains of the Texas Panhandle. Later, when Quanah has just emerged as a war chief in a daring rout of army cavalry, in defiance of elders and tradition he elopes with Weckeah and leads a following of the wildest Comanche bunch of all.

The enslaved son of a white physician, Bose is freed by the Civil War and rides on trail drives of longhorns into New Mexico Territory that are led by the pioneering Charles Goodnight. Bose winds up captured, utilized, and eventually valued by Quanah and his people. That period in young Bose’s life brings him into intoxicating friendship with Quanah’s other wife, To-ha-yea, a Mescalero Apache and born heart-breaker.

Comanche Sundown lays out a sprawling and plausible recast of Southwestern history that brings Pat Garrett, Billy the Kid, Bat Masterson, Colonel Ranald “Bad Hand” Mackenzie, and General William T. Sherman into one fray. In the tradition of Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Jan Reid’s novel offers a rich blend of historical detail, exquisite eye for the terrain and the animals, and insight into the culture, customs, poetry, and dignity of Native Americans caught up in a desperate fight to survive.

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JAN REID is a veteran writer-at-large for Texas Monthly and has contributed dozens of articles to Esquire, GQ, Slate, Men’s Journal, Garden & Gun, the New York Times Magazine, and many other leading publications. His highly praised nonfiction books include The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, The Bullet Meant for Me, and Rio Grande.  Reid’s first novel, Deerinwater, was published in 1985. Since then, he has devoted time between his many projects and some perilous adventures to the research and crafting of Comanche Sundown. Praised for the versatility of his writing, Reid has won honors that include a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, and awards by PEN and the Texas Institute of Letters. Born in Abilene, Texas, Reid grew up in Wichita Falls and for many years has made his home in Austin with his wife, Dorothy Browne.

Literary Houston, edited by David Theis
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The fifth in the “Literary Cities” series, Literary Houston gathers together historical and contemporary writing about this Texas city that everyone loves to hate. Rather than organize the pieces chronologically, Editor David Theis has assembled works according to themes such as biography and memoir; visitors; the city itself; events; poetry; and fiction. From Cabeza de Vaca’s early experiences to the Enron debacle, Theis presents Houston in a new, critical light.

After the Battle of San Jacinto, perhaps no one but the Allen brothers, land speculators from New York, could have imagined a city growing on the forlorn banks of Buffalo Bayou. But in what was the city’s first, but certainly not last, work of fiction, they sold their vision of a great city growing in a place that “Nature appears to have Designated… for the future Government. It is handsome and beautifully elevated, salubrious and well watered.” Well, Houston is well watered. Undeterred by the mosquitoes and the general swampiness of the land, Houston grew immediately, and attracted such pen-in-hand 19th century visitors as Frederick Law Olmstead and Andrew Sweet. The city has been the subject of sometimes appalled, sometimes thrilled commentary by passsers-through ever since; such vistors as H.L. Mencken, Jan Morris, Stanley Crouch, Norman Mailer, Ada Huxtable, and even Simone de Beauvoir have reported on what they found.

But it’s in the stories of Houstonians themselves (even the temporary Houstonians) that the city’s reason for being best comes into focus. It’s been a city of driven, ambitious people who often made an early mark here and moved on: Howard Hughes, Barbara Jordan, Walter Cronkite, the two Albert Guerards, father and son, and musicians like Lightnin’ Hopkins, Willie Nelson, Townes Van Zandt, to name a few.

Important writers have grown up here: Donald Barthelme, Vassar Miller, Rick Bass. Other authors, like prose writers Larry McMurtry, Antonya Nelson, Mary Gaitskill, Phillip Lopate, Rosellen Brown, and Max Apple, and poets Tony Hoagland, Edward Hirsch, and Mark Doty came here to study, teach and write. The city has fostered a burgeoning writing community outside the university. Lorenzo Thomas, Rich Levy, Daniel Rifenburgh and numerous others have left their marks on a city that defies easy description.

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DAVID THEIS moved to Houston in 1984 to study in the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. He then began publishing journalism in Houston City magazine, The Houstonian, the Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, and numerous other publications. In 1989 Theis became a staff writer for the Houston Press where he wrote news, features, and film reviews. In 2002 his novel Rio Ganges was published by Winedale Press. He is currently at work on a second novel.

Legacy of the Sacred Harp, by Chloe Webb
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Sacred Harp music or fasola is as old as America itself. Brought to this continent by the settlers of Jamestown, the sacred harp, which refers to the human voice, is also known as “shape-note singing.” In Legacy of the Sacred Harp, author Chloe Webb follows the history of this musical form back four hundred years, and in the process uncovers the harrowing legacy of her Dumas family line. The journey begins in contemporary Texas with an overlooked but historically rich family heirloom, a tattered 1869 edition of The Sacred Harp songbook.

Traveling across the South and sifting through undiscovered family history, Webb set out on a personal quest personal quest to reconnect with her ancestors who composed, sang, and lived by the words of Sacred Harp music. Her research irreversibly transforms her rose-colored view of her heritage and brings endearing characters to life as the reality of the effects of slavery on Southern plantation life, the thriving tobacco industry, and the Civil War are revisited through the lens of the Dumas family. Most notably, Webb’s original research unearths the person of Ralph Freeman, freed slave and pastor of a pre-Civil War white Southern church.

Wringing history from boxes of keepsakes, lively interviews, dusty archival library and church records, Webb keeps Sacred Harp lyrics ringing in readers’ ears, allowing the poetry to illuminate the lessons and trials of the past. The choral shape-note music of Legacy of the Sacred Harp whispers to us of the past, of the religious persecution that brought this music to our shores, and how the voices of contemporary Sacred Harp singers still ring out the unchanged lyrics across the South, the music pulling the past into our present.

Here's a message that Webb recently received from an appreciative reader:

Chloe Webb,

Thank you so much for writing this book! I got it yesterday, started it yesterday afternoon and finished it this morning. What a really great 400-year slice of American history; it reads like an exciting novel, except that it's all factual. You've really brought to life so many things that have somehow remained insistently dull in textbooks. I especially admire your determination to track down your people, no matter who, where, or what they were. Not surprisingly, it makes a tremendously rich tapestry, and you can be proud not only of the people, but also your part in sharing their stories with all of us. It's a wonderful piece of work.

Judy Hauff—Sacred Harp composer