Franklin Pierce to Host Authors Panel Oct. 6

Tomorrow, Franklin Pierce University will host an Authors Book Panel featuring five Pierce faculty members who have recently published books in their respective fields, according to a press statement.

The panel is tomorrow, Tuesday, Oct. 6, from 12:15 to 1:30 p.m. in the Marulli Welcome Center in Peterson Manor.The Authors Book Panel will allow the authors to share their research, publication process, and professional development expertise.

The panel is free and open to the public.
About the authors:

Pam Bernard, MFA, Part-Time Faculty

Esther, CavanKerry Press, 2015

Fusing a poet’s voice with a novelist’s narrative craft, Pam Bernard’s ESTHER (Order on Amazon or CavanKerry Press), is an affecting novel-in-verse that tells the harrowing and transcendent story of a young woman’s struggle against violence and loneliness. Set before a vividly-drawn backdrop that sweeps across the American landscape and recreates a particularly vibrant time in our history, this daringly original work—from an acclaimed poet whose work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Spoon River Review, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, and many other journals—is about family, place, incest, love, hate, survival, and salvation. Exquisitely wrought and profoundly moving, ESTHER is a singular book-length poem about memory, loss, and redemption, and how language, incremental and pure, can hold the key to the truths that help us live.

Donna Decker, Ph.D., Professor of English

Dancing in Red Shoes Will Kill You, Inanna Publications and Education, Inc., 2015.

The novel focuses on the lives of Deirdre, a first-year female engineering student at Aquitaine, who takes a Women’s Studies course as an elective and Marin, a student at Cantech who ponders what it means to be a female engineering student in such a chilly gendered climate. Everyone wants Marin at her party. Bohemian and beautiful, she is as passionate about constructing sets for theater and opera as she is about Trey, the one man she can finally trust. Deirdre is earnest and perceptive, but too naïve to know that frat boys can be dangerous, and she is drugged and raped at a party in an infamous men’s residence. Jenean, a francophone female journalist working in both languages, is feisty and urbane, a feminist who longs for peace between the sexes even as she ponders splitting from her live-in partner. She finds herself on the killer’s list of 19 women he would have liked to kill.
Set in that tragic historic moment, on two college campuses fraught with gendered antagonisms, this novel tells the story of the victims, following the imagined lives of these women as they happen headlong into the December 6 tragedy — a story disarmingly accurate that explores the profundity of deepest love and unimaginable loss. It follows them through a semester of college, from the crisp autumnal beginnings to that tragic winter. It does not end there. It then takes up with the families and survivors, examining the enduring effects of the massacre’s 24 minutes of inarticulate inhumanity.

Melinda Marie Jette, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History

At the Hearth of the Crossed Races: A French-Indian Community in Nineteenth-Century Oregon, 1812-1859, Oregon State University Press, 2015.

Despite the force of Oregon’s founding mythology, the Wilamette Valley was not an empty Eden awaiting settlement by hardy American pioneers. Rather, it was, as Melinda Jetté explores in At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, one of the earliest sites of extensive intercultural contact in the Pacific Northwest.

Jetté’s study focuses on the “hearth” of this contact: French Prairie, so named for the French-Indian families who resettled the homeland of the Ahantchuyuk Kalapuyans. Although these families sought a middle course in their relations with their various neighbors, their presences ultimately contributed to the Anglo-American colonization of the region. By establishing farming and husbandry operations in the valley, the French-Indian settlers enhanced the Wilamette Valley’s appeal as a destination of choice for the Anglo-Americans who later emigrated to the Pacific Northwest via the Oregon trail.

Upon these emigrants’ arrival, the social space for the people of the “crossed races” diminished considerably, as the Anglo-Americans instituted a system of settler colonialism based on racial exclusion. Like their Native kin, the French-Indian families pursued various strategies to navigate the changing times and Jetté’s study of French Prairie takes on the relationships among all three: the French-Indian families, the indigenous peoples, and the Anglo-American settlers.

With At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, Jetté delivers a social history that deepens our understanding of the Oregon Country in the nineteenth century. This history of French Prairie provides a window into the multi-racial history of the Pacific Northwest and offers and alternative vision of early Oregon in the lives of the biracial French-Indian families whose community challenged notions of white supremacy, racial separation, and social exclusion.

Mary C. Kelly, Ph.D., Professor of History

Ireland’s Great Famine in Irish-American History: Enshrining a Fateful Memory, Rowman & Littlefield, 2014

Ireland’s Great Famine in Irish-American History: Enshrining a Fateful Memory offers a new, concise interpretation of the history of the Irish in America. Professor Mary C. Kelly’s book is the first synthesized volume to track Ireland’s Great Famine within America’s immigrant history, and to consider the impact of the Famine on Irish ethnic identity between the mid-1800s and the end of the twentieth century. Moving beyond traditional emphases on Irish-American cornerstones such as church, party, and education, the book maps the Famine’s legacy over a century and a half of settlement and assimilation. This is the first attempt to contextualize a painful memory that has endured fitfully, and unquestionably, throughout Irish-American historical experience.

John Lund, Ph.D., Part-Time Faculty

U.S. History textbook, Rice University OpenStax College, 2015 (e-book)

U.S. History covers the breadth of the chronological history of the United States and also provides the necessary depth to ensure the course is manageable for instructors and students alike. U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most courses. The authors introduce key forces and major developments that together form the American experience, with particular attention paid to considering issues of race, class, and gender.

The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience).