ShelfLife@Texas

Laura Byerley shares this Q&A from the College of Communication.

Robert Jensen, professor in the School of Journalism at The University of Texas at Austin College of Communication, is the author of “Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialog,” (City Lights Publishers, March 2013). The book explores issues with public discourse, trust in the leadership of elected officials and what Jensen calls an “Age of Anxiety.” It also offers strategies for addressing these crises.

In late April, Jensen spoke…

Kurt Heinzelman, English professor, founding co-editor of The Poetry Miscellany and advisor and editor-at-large for Bat City Review, has been publishing poetry for 30 years in such journals as Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Massachusetts Review and Southwest Review.

Recently, Heinzelman was invited as a featured author to Adelaide Writers’ Week, an important part of the larger Adelaide Arts Festival held annually in the South Australian capital of Adelaide and considered to be one of the world’s greatest celebrations of the arts.…

“Arnold Newman: At Work” highlights archival materials from the Harry Ransom Center’s Arnold Newman archive to reveal a glimpse into the work of the photographer who created iconographic portraits of some of the most influential innovators, celebrities and cultural figures of the twentieth century. Written by Ransom Center Senior Research Curator of Photography Roy Flukinger, the book was published by University of Texas Press this spring.

A bold modernist with a superb sense of compositional geometry, Newman is known for a crisp, spare…

In “The Rise of Liberal Religion” historian and University of Texas at Austin alumnus Matthew Hedstrom attends to the critically important yet little-studied area of religious book culture, paying special attention to the popularization of religious liberalism in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.

By looking at book weeks, book clubs, public libraries, new publishing enterprises, key authors and bestsellers, wartime reading programs and fan mail, among other sources, Hedstrom provides a rich, on-the-ground account of the men, women and organizations that…

Art Markman, author of several books on analogical reasoning, categorization, decision-making and motivation, has written a new book, “Habits of Leadership” (Perigee, Jan. 2013). In the e-book, now available online, Markman addresses how aspects of personality influence the habits one brings to leadership situations. He does this by demonstrating the correlation of personality and habits, and the impact they have on leadership potential and innovation success.

In a recent interview on Fox 7 Good Day Austin, Markman shared insight into how people with highly…

Article and photos provided by the editors of Know

Kevin Powers, MFA ’12, has written one of the best books of the year, according to The New York Times and The Guardian, the British national daily newspaper that gave Powers its Guardian First Book Award. The prize, awarded in late November, is the latest of several accolades for “The Yellow Birds,” Powers’ debut novel about two young soldiers in the Iraq War.

“It’s really quite incredible,” Powers said in an interview with…

Humanities Texas will host its annual Holiday Book Fair in Austin at the historic Byrne-Reed House, 1410 Rio Grande on Saturday, December 8, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Noteworthy authors, including H.W. Brands, Jan Reid, Sarah Bird, John Spong, Mark Updegrove, David Dettmer, Katherine Catmull, Paul Woodruff, George Bristol, Jacqueline Kelly, Gilbert Garcia, Shana Burg, Peter LaSalle, Sarah Cortez, Martha Braniff, Diana Untermeyer, John Kerr, Jenna McEachern, Arturo Madrid, David Bush and Jim Parsons, will visit with holiday shoppers and sign copies…

The 2012-13 Texas Institute for Literary & Textual Studies (TILTS) symposia on the “Fate of the Book” will host a conversation with novelist Paul La Farge about how the Internet can expand the formal possibilities for fiction and engage new readership. La Farge is the author of “The Artist of the Missing,” “Haussmann, or the Distinction,” “The Facts of Winter” (under the pseudonym Paul Poissel); and the hypertext fiction, “Luminous Airplanes.”

Co-sponsored by the Department of English and the Harry…

Harvard University professor and award-winning author, Elaine Scarry, will share insight into how society thinks and talks about beauty and social justice at an event hosted by the Humanities Institute. The talk will take place on Wednesday, Nov. 28 at 7 p.m. in ACES, AVAYA amphitheater, room 2.302.

In her book, “On Beauty and Being Just,” (Princeton University Press, 2001) Scarry not only defends beauty from the political arguments against it but also argues that beauty does indeed press us toward a greater…

Posted by Molly Wahlberg, College of Liberal Arts

“Extrañeza, Extranjería, Migración / Estrangement, Foreignness, Migration,” a graduate seminar in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese that convened between Sept. 25 and Nov. 9, recently coordinated with the department’s annual poetry event “Poéticas para el Siglo XXI / Poetics for the 21st Century.” The centralizing theme for both the seminar and the event, which took place on Oct. 27 and was free and open to the public, was the ways in which…