This month’s featured titles include short stories, a fantasy book for tweens, and a scholarly look at Carmen adaptations – all by alumni and faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences.
“In multiple stories, people come back from the dead,” Kirkus observes, “and everywhere, there are sentences to make you laugh.”
Intersections
Amy Wang Manning ’90
Working under the byline Amy Wang, Manning, who majored in government, is a co-editor of this compendium, subtitled A Journalistic History of Asian Pacific America.
It chronicles the contributions that reporters and editors of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) descent have made to the coverage of such major stories as the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin—the victim of an anti-Asian hate crime—and the 2023 Maui wildfires.
It also features profiles of more than a dozen notable journalists, including news anchor Connie Chung and longtime NBC News reporter Ann Curry.
An Arts & Sciences alum, Bender is an anthropology professor and department chair at Wake Forest University; her coauthor is a fluent Cherokee speaker.
Into the Wild Magic
Michelle Knudsen ’95
Knudsen is the author of more than 50 books for young readers, including Library Lion—a New York Times bestseller that Time magazine called one of the 100 best children’s books of all time.
Her latest, aimed at middle-grade readers, follows a lonely, bullied 11-year-old named Bevvy who hopes to make friends with a new girl named Cat.
“In this spirited magical adventure, Knudsen puts a new spin on fantasy elements such as unicorns as well as contemporary ideas around transportation (some characters travel via giant moth),” says Publishers Weekly.
Carmen in Diaspora
Jennifer Wilks, PhD ’03
Wilks, who earned a doctorate in comparative literature on the Hill, is on the faculty at the University of Texas, Austin.
Her scholarly book—subtitled Adaptation, Race, and Opera’s Most Famous Character—is a cultural history of versions of Carmen, the classic work about the passionate and tragic romances of a Romani woman who works in a cigarette factory.
Wilks examines adaptations in which she is portrayed as a woman of African descent, such as the movie musical Carmen Jones, for which Dorothy Dandrige earned an Oscar nomination.
Other productions that Wilks discusses include the TV movie Carmen: A Hip Hopera, starring Beyoncé Knowles; the film Karmen Geï, which reimagines the character in contemporary Senegal; and the musical Carmen la Cubana, set in Havana just before the Cuban revolution.
The Kidney and the Cane
Alex Nading
“As a global reconfiguration of the norms and practices of medical and environmental science, planetary health still remains something of an aspiration,” writes Nading, an associate professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences. “But as a grassroots project, it has already begun, in an unlikely place: on the edge of the sugarcane zone.”
Nading’s nonfiction book chronicles his fieldwork in Nicaragua, where he studied the impacts of the cane industry on plantation workers. As he relates, the region has seen an epidemic of what’s known as “chronic kidney disease of nontraditional causes,” or CKDnt.
