New Books in the American South New Books Network

Justin Gardiner is the author of two nonfiction books and a collection of poetry. His most recent title is the book-length lyric essay Small Altars, published by Tupelo Press in 2024. Besides his role as Nonfiction Editor for Southern Humanities Review, Justin is also an Associate Professor at Auburn University.
Founded in 1967, SHR considers subject matter both within and beyond the South. The magazine has had Justin Gardiner as its nonfiction editor for the past half decade. Four essays are discussed in the episode, with most of all of them showing evidence of the associative qualities that Gardiner, as a poet, enjoys in whatever genre. In this case, we started with Lisa Greenwell’s essay “Your Soul Doesn’t Need You.” While ostensibly an essay about a carjacking she experienced, it goes wider to consider alike how well both more cognitively based therapy and poetry that speaks to one’s soul can aid recovery. In Leslie Stainton’s “Here with You,” an understanding of how the artist Joseph Cornell’s boxes reflect his life with a brother who suffered from cerebral palsy parallels the circumstances of the author’s own, younger sister. Delicacy is the order of the day. In Ceridwen Hall’s essay, “Submarine Reconnaissance: Bodies, Permutations, Voyages,” Hall delves into whether submarines are “female” (as her mom believes) or a “he” when in combat, along with many fascinating aspects of serving aboard a submarine and the “aquatic” nature of our memories and the way we must constantly “refit” our thinking. The other, remaining essay, Jennifer Taylor-Skinner’s “I Don’t Want Somebody in My House,” highlights the grand piano that serves as her companion, in contrast to how an esoteric French composer (Erik Satie) had two baby grand pianos stacked atop each other in his southern France villa. Again, expect the unexpected.
Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit this site.
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Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States (U California Press, 2024) explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface.
Blacksound as an idea is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically at stake--for creators and audiences alike--in revisiting the long history of American popular music.
Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University (nathan.smith@yale.edu).
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Robert Cochran’s Haunted Man's Report: Reading Charles Portis (U Arkansas Press, 2024) is a pioneering study of the novels and other writings of Arkansan Charles Portis (1933–2020), best known for the novel True Grit and its film adaptations. Hailed by one critic as “the author of classics on the order of a twentieth-century Mark Twain” and as America’s “least-known great novelist,” Portis has garnered a devoted fan base with his ear for language, picaresque characters, literary Easter eggs, and talent for injecting comedy into even the smallest turn of phrase. As a former Marine who served on the front lines of the Korean War and as a journalist who observed firsthand the violent resistance to the civil rights movement, Portis reported on atrocities that came to inform his fiction profoundly. His novels take aim at colonialism and notions of American exceptionalism, focusing on ordinary people, often vets, searching for safe havens in a fallen world.
Haunted Man’s Report, a deeply insightful literary exploration of Portis’s singular and underexamined oeuvre, celebrates this novelist’s great achievement and is certain to prove a valuable guide for readers new to Portis as well as aficionados.
Robert Cochran is Professor of English at the University of Arkansas. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989, and has been awarded three Fulbright lecturing assignments (Romania in 1985, Hungary in 1986, and Korea in 1995). Professor Cochran has refused to specialize decently, writing books on topics as remote from one another as Irish playwright Samuel Beckett and Ozark folklore collector Vance Randolph.
Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers (2016), he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. His work also appears on Pages and Frames.
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The UAW's Southern Gamble: Organizing Workers at Foreign-Owned Vehicle Plants (IRL Press, 2023) is the first in-depth assessment of the United Auto Workers' efforts to organize foreign vehicle plants (Daimler-Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Volkswagen) in the American South since 1989, an era when union membership declined precipitously. Stephen J. Silvia chronicles transnational union cooperation between the UAW and its counterparts in Brazil, France, Germany, and Japan and documents the development of employer strategies that have proven increasingly effective at thwarting unionization.
Silvia shows that when organizing, unions must now fight on three fronts: at the worksite; in the corporate boardroom; and in the political realm. The UAW's Southern Gamble makes clear that the UAW's failed campaigns in the South can teach hard-won lessons about challenging the structural and legal roadblocks to union participation and effectively organizing workers within and beyond the auto industry.
Stephen J. Silvia is a Professor at American University's School of International Service, where he teaches international economics, international trade relations, and comparative politics. He is the author of Holding the Shop Together.
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Renowned Asia expert Michael Auslin is pivoting from Asia instead of towards it: today, he joins Madison's Notes to discuss his new project on the history of Washington, D.C., which, like ancient Rome or Victorian London, is a world capital of a nation at the height of its power. He explores the city's development from its early days to its role during pivotal moments in American history, including the Civil War and the Cold War, building on the research he shares in his Substack The Patowmack Packet.
Dr. Michael Auslin is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is the author of six books, including Asia's New Geopolitics and The End of the Asian Century, as well as the host of The Pacific Century podcast. Previously, he was an associate professor of history at Yale University, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo. He is also a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the senior advisor for Asia at the Halifax International Security Forum, a senior fellow at London’s Policy Exchange, and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
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In 1867, John Muir set out on foot to explore the botanical wonders of the South, keeping a detailed journal of his adventures as he traipsed from Kentucky southward to Florida. One hundred and fifty years later, on a similar whim, veteran Atlanta reporter Dan Chapman, distressed by sprawl-driven environmental ills in a region he loves, recreated Muir’s journey to see for himself how nature has fared since Muir’s time. Channeling Muir, he uses humor, keen observation, and a deep love of place to celebrate the South’s natural riches. But he laments that a treasured way of life for generations of Southerners is endangered as long-simmering struggles intensify over misused and dwindling resources. Chapman seeks to discover how Southerners might balance surging population growth with protecting the natural beauty Muir found so special.
Each chapter touches upon a local ecological problem—at-risk species in Mammoth Cave, coal ash in Kingston, Tennessee, climate change in the Nantahala National Forest, water wars in Georgia, aquifer depletion in Florida—that resonates across the South. Chapman delves into the region’s natural history, moving between John Muir’s vivid descriptions of a lush botanical paradise and the myriad environmental problems facing the South today. Along the way he talks to locals with deep ties to the land—scientists, hunters, politicians, and even a Muir impersonator—who describe the changes they’ve witnessed and what it will take to accommodate a fast-growing population without destroying the natural beauty and a cherished connection to nature.
A Road Running Southward: Following John Muir's Journey Through an Endangered Land (Island Press, 2022) is part travelogue, part environmental cri de coeur, and paints a picture of a South under siege. It is a passionate appeal, a call to action to save one of the loveliest and most biodiverse regions of the world by understanding what we have to lose if we do nothing.
Matt Simmons is an Assistant Professor of History at Emmanuel University where he teaches courses in U.S. and public history. His research interests focus on the intersection of labor and race in the twentieth-century American South. Connect with him at Matthew Simmons | LinkedIn.
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