Tarfia Faizullah, Seam (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014): Faizullah’s searing debut collection is a hybrid between reporting and poetry. In 2010 she traveled to her parents’ native Bangladesh and interviewed birangona, women who survived mass rapes by the Pakistani army during the 1971 Liberation War. The book won the 2012 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award; Slate called it “unusually honest and exceptionally rich.” Catch her at Observable Readings on March 9.
Carol Ferring Shepley, St. Louis: An Illustrated Timeline (Reedy Press, 2014): It’s filled with lush photos, but it’s anything but a dimwit coffee table book. As historian Esley Hamilton asks in the forward, “When it comes to history, what’s important?” Shepley bucks the usual answer (“dead white men,” as she puts it), instead writing about African-American dressmaker Elizabeth Keckley’s time here (she became Mary Todd Lincoln’s couturier), the founding of Paraquad, and the arrival of the first Bosnian immigrants in the ’90s.
Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule (Dutton, March 2015). Speaking of Keckley, Chiaverini hit The New York Times’ bestseller list with Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker, which delved into Keckley’s experiences in the White House and on the front lines of the Civil War. In her new book Chiaverini explores the complex relationship between St. Louis–born Julia Dent and her slave Jule, who only saw freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation—despite Dent’s marriage to Ulysses S. Grant, a staunch abolitionist and Union general.
