Baja Oklahoma, by Dan Jenkins

Dan Jenkins' second best-known novel, Baja Oklahoma, features protagonist Juanita Hutchins, who can cuss and politically commentate with the best of Jenkins' male protagonists. Still convincingly female, though in no way dumb and girly, fortyish Juanita serves drinks to the colorful crew patronizing Herb's Cafe in South Fort Worth, worries herself sick over a hot-to-trot daughter proving too fond of drugs and the dealers who sell them, endures a hypochondriac mother whose whinings would justify murder, dates a fellow middle-ager whose connections with the oil industry are limited to dipstick duty at his filling station—and, by the way, she also hopes to become a singer-songwriter in the real country tradition of Bob Wills and Willie Nelson. That Juanita is way too old to remain a kid with a crazy dream doesn't matter much to her. In between handing out longneck beers to customer-acquaintances, battling hot flashes, and deciding when boyfriend Slick is finally going to get lucky, Juanita keeps jotting down lyrics reflective of hard-won wisdom and setting them to music composed on her beloved Martin guitar. Too many of her early songwriting results are one-dimensional or derivative, but finally she hits on something both original and heartfelt: a tribute to her beloved home state, warts and all.

DAN JENKINS is the author of best-selling novels, non-fiction, and newspaper and magazine pieces. A native of Fort Worth and TCU graduate, Jenkins was a nationally acclaimed senior writer for Sports Illustrated. He currently writes a column for Golf Digest and is official historian for the National Football Foundation and College Football Hall of Fame.

The Far Canyon, by Elmer Kelton

In The Far Canyon, Kelton masterfully unveils for his reader the finality of the buffalo’s demise, the beginning of a time when cattle would replace the American bison on the southern plains and ultimately end the Plains Indian culture. The novel reveals the history of the period, not in a general grand swoop of the pen, but rather, up close and personal, so his readership can judge the impact of the period upon his characters.
The novel’s first chapter introduces Comanche warrior Crow Feather, whose situation is emblematic of a common recurring theme in all of Kelton’s works . . . change. Protagonist Jeff Layne is faced with the very same dramatic problem, the devastating threat to one’s self-concept inherent in change. Layne, the hide hunter from Slaughter is weary of killing and death. He decides to return to South Texas, determined to earn his living with the newest resource on the plains, cattle. And the cultures collide.
Kelton eloquently reveals the impact of hide hunters on Plains Indian culture. Crow Feather realizes that no matter how many whites the Comanche kill, there will always be more “coming back.” Crow Feather also understands that his life and the lives of his wives and children will never be easy again. Are Layne and Crow Feather of a character that will allow them to escape a predetermined fate by reaching that far canyon, or will they simply perish under the cultural dictate of their historical time?
The question is a thematic dilemma that Kelton excels at, and it is what transforms his writing into serious literature.

For more than fifty years, ELMER KELTON, who died on August 22, 2009, was Texas’ most respected writer about the American West. Author of more than fifty novels, Kelton wrote both serious historical novels and what he called “powder burners.” But whether writing serious fiction or genre fiction, Elmer Kelton’s work was marked by careful craftsmanship and serious purpose. He was recognized by his peers as “the Best Western Writer of All Time.” He was awarded seven Spur Awards by the Western Writers of America, the Levi Straus Golden Saddleman Award from WWA, four Wrangler Awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, and the Lon Tinkle Award from the Texas Institute of Letters for Lifetime Achievement. For many years, he combined his work as a novelist with a distinguished career as an agricultural journalist, spending more than twenty years as a columnist and editor with The Livestock Weekly. His passing leaves a large gap in Texas letters.

 

Edmund J. Davis of Texas, by Carl H. Moneyhon

Volume two of The Texas Biography Series reveals Edmund J. Davis, the heroic man who stood in strong opposition to his peers and better reflected the ideals of the nation than those of so many of his contemporaries. Carl H. Moneyhon presents a long overdue favorable account of a man who was determined to make progressive changes and stand in stark opposition to the state’s political elite. What moved this man to take such a dramatic stand against his political peers? Moneyhon strives to answer this very question.
Edmund J. Davis was not only a part of the political elite during the Civil War, but he also opposed secession. He refused to follow most of Texas’ leaders and actively opposed the Confederacy by attempting to bring Texas back to the Union. After the war, Davis was a leader in reconstructing the state based on true free labor and pursued progressive and egalitarian policies as governor of Texas.
Through the entire reconstruction process Davis faced extreme Confederate hostility. After leaving the governor’s mansion an unpopular man and politician, he still remained dedicated to changing Texas. He worked to change his adopted state until the day he died.

CARL H. MONEYHON is professor of history at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. A specialist on the Civil War and Reconstruction, much of his work focuses on the Texas experience. He's published Republicanism in Reconstruction Texas; Texas After the Civil War: The Struggle of Reconstruction; and Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of the Civil War in Texas. Moneyhon is a Fellow of the Texas State Historical Association, holds degrees from the University of Texas, Austin, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

This is a joint project of the Center for Texas Studies at TCU and TCU Press. The series is made possible by a grant from Houston Endowment.

Paul Ruffin: New and Selected Poems , by Paul Ruffin

The Texas Legislature recently named Paul Ruffin 2009 Poet Laureate of Texas. To those who read literary journals or mid-list popular books, Paul Ruffin is a well-known author and poet. Ruffin is prolific in his writing, having published over a thousand poems, short stories, novels, and nonfiction pieces with decades of unfailing artistry. In the fifth installment of the TCU Texas Poet Laureate Series, editor Billy Bob Hill writes in his introduction that he has long admired Paul Ruffin’s use of poetic devices. Ruffin uses alliteration and subtle textured sounds throughout his poetry, making them likeably conversational while full of crafted sound patterns. Ruffin also employs whimsical narratives, coining the word “Necrofiligumbo” in “When the Mummy Became a Mommy.” But, Hill explains, the true power of this book comes from its storytelling. With the new material, readers will encounter compelling, often drop-dead funny storytelling.
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 bi-annual 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. The next book in the series will focus on the work of 2010 laureate, Karla K. Morton.

PAUL RUFFIN, 2009 Poet Laureate of Texas, is Texas State University Regents' Professor and Distinguished Professor of English at Sam Houston State University, where he edits The Texas Review and directs Texas Review Press. His books include two novels, three collections of short stories, two books of essays, and six collections of poetry.

The TCU Texas Poet Laureate Series is made possible by a generous Vision in Action grant from TCU.

Play by Play: Phoenix and Building the Herberger Theater Center, by Elizabeth B. Murfee and Jack August, Jr.

QIn their unrelenting drive to create a thriving desert metropolis, leaders of the most populous city in the arid Southwest, Phoenix, Arizona, seemed oblivious to two essential elements that form a vibrant urban environment. The arts were noticeably absent and the city’s urban core had dissipated into a vast and empty suburbia: a city lacking an urban heart. In 1980, a visionary—Dick Mallery, partner at the powerhouse law firm, Snell & Wilmer—emerged to take the first major step to shape Phoenix into a great city, not just a big one.
A veritable civic drama, Play by Play illustrates the central role the arts hold when a city consciously reaches for distinction and demonstrates how cultural life can influence politics and business. This lively study traces ten years in the life of a city 1980–1990; a defining decade that saw Phoenix descend from boomtown to bust as the savings and loan crisis fractured its real estate market and the economy collapsed. These devastating events almost derailed the selfless efforts of a new group of urban leaders—led by Mallery, along with Gary Herberger, architect, businessman, and philanthropist—who devoted a significant portion of their lives, often in the face of overwhelming odds, to make a place for the arts in downtown Phoenix. This interpretive history—an inside look at the heart of this desert metropolis—is placed in regional and national context and in many ways defines the modern urban Southwest.

ELIZABETH B. MURFEE has been consultant to national foundations on cultural policy, worked with the Houston Opera, was manager of Texas Opera Theater, and written publications for the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. A cum laude graduate of Rider University, she married Dino DeConcini in 1998; they reside in New York and Tucson.

JACK L. AUGUST, JR. is executive director of the Barry Goldwater Center and Visiting Scholar in Legal History at Snell & Wilmer. August writes on twentieth-century western political and environmental history, including Vision in the Desert, Senator Dennis DeConcini, and Dividing Western Waters. In 2009, August coauthored Adversity Is My Angel: The Life and Career of Raúl H. Castro.

This Last House, by Janis Stout

Memoirs are tricky, especially when the author isn’t widely known. But Janis Stout tackles the memoir with a new and inventive approach—she organizes her memories around the houses she’s lived in. “Sometimes,” she wrote, “I picture my life as a long row of houses.” Houses, she claims, are metaphors for the structures of our lives, and Stout’s houses twine their way through this memoir along with reflections on work and retirement, marriages good and bad, and quietness for engaging in the important last work of life. She is, she says, a little different in each house—but each house shaped who she became as she prepared to move into the last house, the house of retirement.
A college professor, mother of four sons, and wife, she writes of her early life through the lens of the houses she lived in at the time of events. There was the rock house of her early childhood from which she escaped to a failed early marriage that produced her sons. Other houses enfold her determination to finish college and her PhD; her concern for a son who is blind and brain-damaged; and, finally, a new, happy and enduring marriage.
Stout recounts the planning and building of the dream house in the New Mexico mountains, where she and her husband, Loren, would build new lives in retirement. And then their lives take a sudden turn when health issues made the house impractical. New Mexico wasn’t, after all, the last house.

JANIS STOUT retired from Texas A&M University in 2002 as dean of faculties and associate provost. She is author of three novels and ten scholarly books, most recently, Coming Out of War: Poetry, Grieving, and the Culture of the World Wars and Picturing a Different West: Vision and Illustration in the Tradition of Cather and Austin.

Grace & Gumption: The Cookbook , edited by Katie Sherrod

Grace & Gumption: Stories of Fort Worth Women (TCU Press, 2007) was a collection of profiles about women who moved beyond the traditional role of keeping house to make significant contributions to the history of Fort Worth. But whenever the fourteen authors of the original book gathered to make decisions, share information, give progress reports, and ask for help, they also shared wine and food.
But a cookbook of recipes used by the very women who were stepping out of the kitchen? Feeding themselves and their families was as vital to the women of Grace & Gumption, as it is to women, who today stand on their shoulders. For some, cooking was a joy; for others, it was just one more chore. Some women didn’t leave a food trail, but the contributors were inventive about finding “related” recipes—some of them wonderful sounding, some, not so much. Dozens of recipes are featured, everything from skinning a squirrel to Lamb Wellington, including recipes from the Kimbell Art Museum and Fort Worth's City Club.
This is a book to read for pleasure and to cook from. Recipes are standardized when that was possible without losing the charm of the original directions. Recipes have not been tested, a chore that would have been monumental.
Contributors are Judy Alter, Joy Donovan, Sandra Guerra-Cline, Jan Jones, Ruth Karbach, Brenda Matthews, Ruth McAdams, Sherrie McLeRoy, Carol Roark, Brenda Sanders-Wise, Katie Sherrod, Cindy Smolovik, Hollace Weiner, and Joyce Williams.

KATIE SHERROD is an independent Fort Worth journalist. She received the Dallas Press Club Award for her 2001 documentary, "Freedman's Cemetery Memorial," and the Exceptional Media Merit Award from the National Women's Political Caucus. Inducted into the Texas Women's Hall of Fame in 1987 for outstanding contributions in communications, Sherrod was named one of Fort Worth's Outstanding Women in 1988 and Texas Woman of the Year in 1989. She was the editor of Grace and Gumption: Stories of Fort Worth Women.

Material Culture , by Frances Colpitt

Documenting the work of twelve contemporary sculptors from Texas, Material Culture was published to accompany the exhibition of the same name at TCU in 2008. Both representational and abstract, the works in the exhibition were made from readymade and commonplace materials with an emphasis on craft, process, and the use of the hand. Providing a survey of the ongoing embrace of object making in Texas, the essays in this book examine formal, conceptual, cultural, and social issues from American and international perspectives. The authors do not argue for a regional sensibility, given the irrelevance of regionalism in our global society, but for the strength of an art that celebrates material culture in an increasingly dematerialized world.
Artists represented include Helen Altman, Richie Budd, Margarita Cabrera, Bill Davenport, Jonathan Durham, Lily Hanson, Joseph Havel, Jessica Halonen, Katrina Moorhead, Chris Sauter, Polly Lanning Sparrow, and Brad Tucker. Multiple color photographs document the works as they appeared in the exhibition. Each artist is also represented by an extensive biography and bibliography.

Curator of the exhibition and lead author is FRANCES COLPITT, the Deedie Potter Rose Chair of Art History at TCU. Her extensive record of publications includes the books Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective and Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century. She is a corresponding editor for Art in America.
JENNIFER DAVY is an artist and arts writer living in Berlin, Germany. She is completing her dissertation in media studies at the European Graduate School. KIRSTIE SKINNER is an art historian based in Scotland. Her Ph.D. dissertation, at Edinburgh College of Art, examines minimal and installation art. Both authors have published widely on contemporary art.

Material Culture is distributed by TCU Press and the Texas A&M University Press Consortium.