ShelfLife@Texas

Allan Gurganus, author of “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All,” “Plays Well with Others,” and other works of fiction, will teach on campus as Michener Residency Author this February for three weeks.  He is slated to meet with MFA students in weekly craft seminars and to hold manuscript conferences to discuss their work individually.

He will also read at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 9, 2012 in the Avaya Auditorium, ACE 2.302, on the southeast corner of Speedway and 24^th Street on campus.  The event
Read More …

As far as historical presidential power couples go, the Tafts aren’t likely among the first to come to mind, but based off of Lewis Gould’s edited collection of their personal correspondence during William Taft’s most trying years in office, perhaps they should be.

“My Dearest Nellie: The Letters of William Howard Taft to Helen Herron Taft, 1909-1912″ consists of 113 letters that “not only reveal the inner workings of a presidency at decisive moments but also humanize a chief executive to
Read More …

On January 26, 2012,  UT’s Michener Center for Writers will host a visit by one of America’s premier poets, Mark Strand.  In a career spanning six decades, Strand has been recognized with the highest honors the poetry world has to bestow:  he was U.S. Poet Laureate in 1990-91, served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and has won such distinguished awards as a MacArthur Fellowship, the Bollingen Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Bobbit Prize, and in 2009, the
Read More …

“Science shows clearly that smart thinking is not an innate quality,” says Art Markman, psychology professor and director of the Human Dimensions of Organizations program at The University of Texas at Austin. He claims that the ability to think like the great innovators of our time is a skill that can actually be developed. “Each of the components of being smart is already part of your mental toolbox,” Markman says.

How, you ask?

Here’s the formula: “Smart Thinking” requires developing Smart Habits to acquire High
Read More …

A book about the Great Meltdown written before the Great Meltdown, “The Acquisitors: Too Titanic to Let Sink” (BookSurge Publishing, Jan. 2010) offers a jarring account of the negligence and greed that pushed the country into a financial crisis.

Drawing from his experiences as a counsel to the House Antitrust Subcommittee, Winslow (B.A. History ‘56/JD Law ’60) based the book upon the findings of the committee’s investigation of unbridled corporate takeovers. And, in the wake of the Meltdown of 2008-09, he decided
Read More …

Do you ever wonder why radio stations play the same tired songs over and over again? Or why we’re forced to listen to talk shows while we’re stuck in rush-hour traffic? In “Early ‘70s Radio: The American Format Revolution” (Continuum, July 2011), University of Texas at Austin alumnus Kim Simpson (Ph.D. American Studies, ‘05) shares insight into how commercial music radio evolved into what it is today.

Providing a comprehensive analysis of a transformative era in pop music, Simpson describes how radio
Read More …

The South has always been celebrated for its food. From collard greens and okra to heaping plates of biscuits and gravy, Southern food is as much a state of mind as it is a matter of geography.

Combining the study of food culture with gender studies, Elizabeth Engelhardt, associate professor of American studies, explores the many hidden culinary contours of Southern life below and beyond the Mason-Dixon Line.

Digging deep into community cookbooks, letters, diaries, and other archival materials, Engelhardt describes the
Read More …

Nina Godiwalla’s memoir of working on Wall Street begins with a sweaty walk to work through New York City, catching her heel in a grate, begging for help from a nearby blood-soaked fishmonger and eventually arriving at the JP Morgan office only to discover that she was at the wrong building.

Little did she know that temperamental high heels would be the least of her troubles in the years ahead.

Godiwalla, BBA ’97, chronicles the rest of her harrowing finance career in
Read More …

Since the days of the American Revolution, nation-building has been deeply embedded in America’s DNA. Yet no other country has created more problems for itself and for others by pursuing impractical reconstruction efforts in war-torn nations, argues Jeremi Suri, professor in the Department of History and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.

In his new book “Liberty’s Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama,” Suri examines more than 200 years of U.S. policy to explain the successes and failures
Read More …

The accent is still there, made faint by long years away from Australia.

Dominic Smith, a 2003 alumnus of the Michener Center’s MFA program in writing, was born in Brisbane and grew up in Sydney, but his education and work have taken him far from the continent since—he earned his B.A. in Iowa and worked in the dotcom boom in Europe before coming to The University of Texas at Austin for graduate school.  Smith seems to have found Texas to his liking,
Read More …