In this pathbreaking volume, Velina Hasu Houston gathers together eleven plays that speak in the 'hybridized, unique American voices of Asian descent... and often dissent.' These writers resist the bigotry that attempts to target them solely as people of color as well as the homogenizing tendencies of a multiculturalism that fails to recognize the varied make-up of Asian-America. Anthologized for the first time, these plays testify to the rich complexity of Asian-American experience while they also demonstrate the different styles and thematic concerns of the individual playwrights. What are Asian-American plays about? Family conflicts, sexuality, social upheaval, betrayal ...the stuff of all drama. Whether the characters are a middle-aged Taiwanese woman who is married to an Irish American and who dreams of opening a Chinese restaurant, a Chinese-American female bond trader trying to survive a corporate takeover, or an ABC (American Born Chinese) gay man whose lover has AIDS, their Asian-ness is only a part of their story. As a playwright, Houston is keenly aware of the rigid formulas that often exclude writers of color and women writers from mainstream theater. "But Still, Like Air, I'll Rise" brings forth vibrant new work that challenges producers and audiences to broaden their expectations, to attend to the unfamiliar voices that express the universal and particular vision of Asian-American playwrights. Author note: Velina Hasu Houston is Associate Professor and Director of the Playwriting Program in the School of Theatre at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She is also an award-winning playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and poet. Her work has been presented internationally at such venues as the Manhattan Theatre Club, Old Globe Theatre, A Contemporary Theatre, Syracuse Stage, Smithsonian Institute, Kennedy Center, and Japan Society. She has written for film and television and her plays and critical essays are published in several anthologies. Her first anthology for Temple was "The Politics of Life: Four Plays by Asian-American Women".

Anne Panning’s fiction has been described as warm and original by Publishers Weekly, intelligent and humorous by the Boston Globe, graceful and wry by... Booklist, and infectious and enchanting by the New York Times. In fact, Panning’s last collection of short stories, Super America, was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Enter this exciting new novel, the best work yet from a writer whose astute observations of American life are as honest as they are engaging.Butter is a coming of age tale set against the backdrop of small-town Minnesota during the 1970s and told from the perspective of an eleven-year-old girl, Iris, who learns from her parents that she is adopted. The story of Iris’s childhood is at first beguiling and innocent: hers is a world filled with bell-bottoms and Barbie dolls, Shrinky Dinks and Shaun Cassidy records, TV dinners and trips to grandma’s. But as her parents’ marriage starts to unravel, Iris grows more and more observant of disintegration all around her, and the simple cadences of her story quickly attain an unnerving tension as she wavers precariously between girlhood and adolescence. In the end, Iris’s story represents a profound meditation on growing up estranged in small town America—on being an outsider in a world increasingly averse to them. Passionate, lyrical, and disquieting, this intensely moving novel is a rich exploration of a crucial theme in American literature that will confirm Anne Panning’s place as a major figure in the world of contemporary fiction.

This Golden Guide from St. Martin's Press illustrates in full color 423 of the most common, widespread, important, or unusual North American species of... Lepidoptera. Information includes:How to identify butterflies and mothsHow to attract, rear and preserve them for studyHow to assist these fascinating insects in their struggle for survivalPlus range maps, a special emphasis on immature forms, and an inde of scientific names.

This magnificent field guide greatly expands on Butterflies Through Binoculars: The Boston-New York-Washington Region--identified by Defenders of... Wildlife Magazine as "the first to focus on netless butterflying" and called " a clear winner" by the Audubon Naturalist. Glassberg here shows us how to find, identify, and enjoy all of the butterflies native to the eastern half of the United States and southeastern Canada. This guide:*Combines the immediacy and vividness of actual photographs of living butterflies with the traditional field guide format*Emphasizes conservation over collection*Includes 630 color photographs, arranged on 72 color plates, of butterflies in the wild*Provides adjacent color maps that show where each species occurs in a given locality and for how much of the year*Supplies entirely new field marks for butterfly identification*Demonstrates how to identify subjects by way of the key characteristics butterflies are likely to display in their natural settings*Shows how species can be recognized both from above and below*Explains how to differentiate between males and females.For butterfly enthusiasts, for bird watchers who want to add a new dimension to their hobby, for anyone who is simply interested in exploring the wilds of their own back yard, this new field guide offers hours of delightful help and instruction.

As Spain consolidated its Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, discourses about the perfect Spanish man or "Vir" went hand-in-hand with... discourses about another kind of man, one who engaged in the "abominable crime and sin against nature"--sodomy. In both Spain and Mexico, sodomy came to rank second only to heresy as a cause for prosecution, and hundreds of sodomites were tortured, garroted, or burned alive for violating Spanish ideals of manliness. Yet in reality, as Federico Garza Carvajal argues in this groundbreaking book, the prosecution of sodomites had little to do with issues of gender and was much more a concomitant of empire building and the need to justify political and economic domination of subject peoples.Drawing on previously unpublished records of some three hundred sodomy trials conducted in Spain and Mexico between 1561 and 1699, Garza Carvajal examines the sodomy discourses that emerged in Andalucía, seat of Spain's colonial apparatus, and in the viceroyalty of New Spain (Mexico), its first and largest American colony. From these discourses, he convincingly demonstrates that the concept of sodomy (more than the actual practice) was crucial to the Iberian colonizing program. Because sodomy opposed the ideal of "Vir" and the Spanish nationhood with which it was intimately associated, the prosecution of sodomy justified Spain's domination of foreigners (many of whom were represented as sodomites) in the peninsula and of "Indios" in Mexico, a totally subject people depicted as effeminate and prone to sodomitical acts, cannibalism, and inebriation.

Heartbreaking, poetic, and intensely personal, Butterfly Boy is a unique coming out and coming-of-age story of a first-generation Chicano who trades one... life for another, only to discover that history and memory are not exchangeable or forgettable.  Growing up among poor migrant Mexican farmworkers, Rigoberto González also faces the pressure of coming-of-age as a gay man in a culture that prizes machismo. Losing his mother when he is twelve, González must then confront his father’s abandonment and an abiding sense of cultural estrangement, both from his adopted home in the United States and from a Mexican birthright. His only sense of connection gets forged in a violent relationship with an older man. By finding his calling as a writer, and by revisiting the relationship with his father during a trip to Mexico, González finally claims his identity at the intersection of race, class, and sexuality. The result is a leap of faith that every reader who ever felt like an outsider will immediately recognize. 2007 Finalist, Randy Shilts Awards for Gay Nonfiction, Publishing Triangle Winner, American Book Awards, Before Columbus Foundation

Butterfly Burning brings the brilliantly poetic voice of Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera to American readers for the first time. Set in Makokoba, a... black township, in the late l940s, the novel is an intensely bittersweet love story. When Fumbatha, a construction worker, meets the much younger Phephelaphi, he"wants her like the land beneath his feet from which birth had severed him." He in turn fills her "with hope larger than memory." But Phephelaphi is not satisfied with their "one-room" love alone. The qualities that drew Fumbatha to her, her sense of independence and freedom, end up separating them. And the closely woven fabric of township life, where everyone knows everyone else, has a mesh too tight and too intricate to allow her to escape her circumstances on her own.Vera exploits language to peel away the skin of public and private lives. In Butterfly Burning she captures the ebullience and the bitterness of township life, as well as the strength and courage of her unforgettable heroine.

Welcome to High Pines Summer Camp for Boys. There is hiking, swimming, canoeing--and a revolution led by General Frank. He promises change for the... better, but little by little, he begins to change, and the revolution turns into a nightmare....

In four sections—Childhood, Migration, First Generation, and Return—the contributors to this anthology write powerfully, often hauntingly, of their... lives in Haiti and the United States. Jean-Robert Cadet's description of his Haitian childhood as a restavec—a child slave—in Port-au-Prince contrasts with Dany Laferriere's account of a ten-year-old boy and his beloved grandmother in Petit-Gove. We read of Marie Helene Laforest's realization that while she was white in Haiti, in the United States she is black. Patricia Benoit tells us of a Haitian woman refugee in a detention center who has a simple need for a red dress—dignity. The reaction of a man who has married the woman he loves is the theme of Gary Pierre-Pierre's "The White Wife"; the feeling of alienation is explored in "Made Outside" by Francie Latour. The frustration of trying to help those who have remained in Haiti and of the do-gooders who do more for themselves than the Haitians is described in Babette Wainwright's "Do Something for Your Soul, Go to Haiti." The variations and permutations of the divided self of the Haitian emigrant are poignantly conveyed in this unique anthology.

As our justice system has embarked upon one of the greatest social experiments of our time-the expansive use of prisons as our response to crime-we have... forgotten the iron law of imprisonment: they all come back. In 2002 alone, more than 630,000 individuals left federal and state prisons-compared with the 150,000 who made a similar journey 30 years ago. Sadly, in the intense political debate over America’s punishment policies, the impact of these returning prisoners on families and communities has been largely overlooked. In But They All Come Back, Jeremy Travis continues his pioneering work on prisoner reentry. He describes the new realities of punishment in America and explores the nexus of returning prisoners with seven policy domains: public safety, families and children, work, housing, public health, civic identity, and community capacity. Travis proposes a new architecture for our criminal justice system, organized around five principles of reentry, that will encourage change and spur innovation. It is a Herculean synthesis and an invaluable resource for anyone interested in prisoner reentry and social justice.

Pedagogical narratives written by secondary teachers and thoughtful responses to these narratives by experienced teachers and teacher educators form the... heart of this text. Alsup and Bush also include concise summaries of related theory and research and controversies in the field, through annotated bibliographies for continued reading, discussion questions, and suggested learning activities for preservice teachers.Beginning with narratives about teaching literature, writing, language/grammar, second language learners in the English classroom, management, discipline, technology, and standardized testing, the authors contextualize these stories within the larger discipline of secondary English language arts teaching and provide a framework for teacher professional identity development by prompting continued thinking about curricular choices, teaching philosophies, and personal pedagogies.Alsup and Bush include a final chapter describing how a secondary English teacher can use narrative action research in his or her class to become a critically reflective practitioner.

You are one of seven billion people on Earth. Whatever you or I do personally—eat tofu in a Hummer or hamburgers in a Prius—the planet doesn’t... notice. In our confrontation with climate change, species preservation, and a planet going off the cliff, it is what several billion people do that makes a difference. The solution? It isn't science, politics, or activism. It's smarter economics.  The hope of mankind, and indeed of every living thing on the planet, is now in the hands of the dismal science. Fortunately, we’ve been there before. Economists helped crack the acid rain problem in the 1990's (admittedly with a strong assist from a phalanx of lawyers and activists). Economists have helped get lead out of our gas, and they can explain why lobsters haven’t disappeared off the coast of New England but tuna is on the verge of extinction. More disquietingly, they can take the lessons of the financial crisis and model with greater accuracy than anyone else the likelihood of environmental catastrophe, and they can help save us from global warming, if only we let them.

Back in print: an extraordinary first novel by'a writer to watch and to enjoy.'*Told in the voice of a girl as she moves from childhood into... adolescence, Buxton Spice is the story the town of Tamarind Grove: its eccentric families, its sweeping joys, and its sudden tragedies. The novel brings to life 1970s Guyana-a world at a cultural and political crossroads-and perfectly captures a child's keen observations, sense of wonder, and the growing complexity of consciousness that marks the passage from innocence to experience.