A call to arms exploring the protest movements of 2020 as they reverberated through the athletic world

Starting with the refusal of George Hill of the Milwaukee Bucks to participate in an August 2020 playoff game following the shooting of Jacob Blake by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Grant Farred shows how the Covid-restricted NBA “bubble” released an energy that spurred athletes into radical action. They disrupted athletic normalcy, and in their grief and rage against American racism they demonstrated the true progressivism lacking in even the most reformist-minded politicians and pundits. Farred goes on to trace the radicalism of black athletes in a number of sports, including the WNBA, women’s tennis, the NFL, and NASCAR, locating contemporary athletes in a lineage that runs through Muhammad Ali as well as Tommy Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics. 

Only a Black Athlete Can Save Us Now uses sport as a point of departure to argue that the dystopic crisis of our current moment offers a singular opportunity to reimagine how we live in the world.

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

A novel in five parts, Only a Lodger . . . And Hardly That puts Vesna Main’s power of beautiful observation on full display as she explores how writing stories about one’s ancestors is key route to learning about and fashioning one’s own identity. While the stories are self-contained, together they form a narrative whole that approaches this age-old idea from five unique perspectives.
 
In “The Eye/I,” we meet someone called She, who obsessively tells the story of her childhood and adolescence to an unnamed narrator. “The Acrobat” is a sequence of prose poems, written in the style of magic realism, which tell the story of Maria and her life-changing adolescent encounter with a flying circus performer. The female protagonist of the first section narrates “The Dead,” describing the secret life of a grandfather she never truly knew and his unusual habit of sending family members anonymous parcels of carefully chosen books. In “The Poet,” she examines four family photographs in order to piece together a story of her other grandfather, the husband of Maria. The final section, “The Suitor,” is a first-person narrative told by Mr. Gustav Otto Wagner, an older man who hoped to marry Maria but was ultimately turned down.
 

Besides extensive illustrations and photographs of each species, Only in Arkansas provides pertinent literature references to the original distributions of each form within the state and reports known information of the general biology, evolutionary relationships, and habitat occupied by each endemic form.

Featuring the work of more than fifty poets writing across the last eight decades, Only the Road / Solo el Camino is the most complete bilingual anthology of Cuban poetry available to an English readership. It is distinguished by its stylistic breadth and the diversity of its contributors, who come from throughout Cuba and its diaspora and include luminaries, lesser-known voices, and several Afro-Cuban and LGBTQ poets. Nearly half of the poets in the collection are women. Only the Road paints a full and dynamic picture of modern Cuban life and poetry, highlighting their unique features and idiosyncrasies, the changes across generations, and the ebbs and flows between repression and freedom following the Revolution. Poet Margaret Randall, who translated each poem, contributes extensive biographical notes for each poet and a historical introduction to twentieth-century Cuban poetry.