By Ross West, MFA ’84 (creative writing)
 

Climate change, food insecurity, carbon footprints, environmental justice, global warming—these are all issues with staggering consequences that inflame emotions, generate fierce debate, and resist quick fixes and easy answers. Ross West tackles these complicated issues through fifteen timely and thought-provoking tales that explore how the problem affects everyone—from businesses and industry, to workers, families, and endangered species—in big and small ways. The Fragile Blue Dot hits bookstores on Earth Day, April 22.

Read more about The Fragile Blue Dot and Ross West in Oregon Quarterly.

By Barbara F. Luebke, MS ’72 (journalism)
 

More than a memoir, not quite an autobiography, My Life With Words is a love letter to reading, writing, journalism and learning. Barbara Luebke tells a complex story as she explores her decades of struggling with self-image and personal identity. Woven throughout the book are examples from her own reporting, editing and writing—chosen to illuminate the people, places, schools, newspapers, books and more that have been central to her professional and personal life. That context defines her journey from politically conservative high school editor to liberal college editor, professional reporter and editor committed to journalism that makes a difference, and educator determined to have a positive impact on students and journalism. She invites readers interested in journalism, history, sociology, women’s studies, LGBTQ+ issues, or writing to join this journey.

By Guy Maynard, BS ’84 (journalism)
 

It's Boston 1969 and nineteen-year-old Ben Tucker lives in a funky apartment on Mountfort Street with his tribe of fellow long-haired freaks. Together they mix radical street politics and a love of rock of roll in their desperate search for lives that make sense in a world distorted by war, racism, and bankrupt values. This book takes you on a passionate, lyrical six-week ride through confrontation and confusion, courts and cops, parties and politics, school and the streets, revolution and reaction, and, of course, love through it all.

By John A. Heldt, BS ’85 (journalism, history)
 

In Duties and Dreams, the epic conclusion of the Second Chance trilogy, several young adults find love, heartbreak, and redemption in a world of war, pandemics, and social unrest. 

As World War I rages in Europe, the Carpenters and the Lees make a home in Southern California. Bill and Cassie add to their family. Andy and Annie start one of their own. Paul, a bachelor, enters the world of business. All find peace in a turbulent time. Then draft notices arrive, illness strikes a child, and the lives of two intertwined families take a troubling turn. Years later, Emilie Perot, a beautiful resistance fighter, and Steve and Shannon Taylor, an American couple with ties to Paul Carpenter, conspire to escape Nazi occupation. Each seeks freedom and a new life in France's Vosges Mountains. As events unfold in the different eras, the participants march on. All are unaware of the forces that seem determined to throw them together.
 

Trilogy by C.J. Adrien, BA ’09 (history)
 

Join author and historian C.J. Adrien on an adventure that explores the early life of the Viking Hasting, his first love, his first great trials, and his first triumphs. A supposed son of Ragnar Lodbrok, his life exemplified the qualities of the ideal Viking. This trilogy, made up of The Lords of the Wind, In the Shadow of the Beast, and The Kings of the Sea, will take you on an epic adventure about the making of legend. 
 

By Sara Sebastian, BA ’13 (history, journalism) 
 

This debut poetry collection is a meditation on love and the emotions built up against it: desire, need, and grief. The book, Sara Sebastian says, “is inspired by life events where I confused other feelings for love and by my desire for readers to feel their power and witness their beauty.” 
 

By Rodger Moody, BA ’76 (English), MFA ’78 (creative writing); Carol Durak, MFA ’81 (English); and John P. Harn, MFA ’82 (creative writing) 
 

Alumni Rodger Moody, Carol Durak, and John P. Harn studied poetry together at the UO, where they were advisees of the late Ralph Salisbury, a beloved professor and prolific author. Now, 45 years later, they have gathered a selection of their diverse work into a single volume. 

“Each of these diverse, superbly-crafted chapbooks brim with intimacy,” writes Michael Spring, author of dentro do som / into the sound and Kahlo's Widow. “Moody's work, written in sevenlings, offers probing, witty, and sometimes dark observations of rural America where the countryside belongs to the swallows. Durak's work, intelligent and introspective, leads us to a fabled crossroads where she contemplates, what is more diligent than dust, and asks, what is more within you / than your path beyond compass? Harn's poems, full of philosophical investigations, claim that sometimes we need to see the marrow splayed to understand our place in the universe, that we face our mortality lips parted, about to say something / to the wind. Like a jazz trio, each chapbook is a distinct instrument, unique but in sync with the others, and the beat is never lost.”
 

By Christina Lux, MA ’01 (French), PhD ’07 (romance languages)
 

War Bonds is a book of poems about survival in the face of conflict, from Iraq and Afghanistan, to the Black Lives Matter movement, the war in Ambazonia and Cameroon, and gang violence in California's Central Valley. The book jumps back in time 100 years to the archive of a Chicago pianist and painter, Edna Cookingham, who worked with the YMCA in France to entertain the troops at the end of World War I. Her letters, telegrams, diary, photographs, and war papers serve as source material for these poems. While Europe may have experienced demobilization and a peace process in 1919, the echoes of that conflict continue to be felt around the world, binding us still. The book explores how we move forward, bound together, after conflict, violence, terror, or mass trauma.
 

By Shauna C. Murphy, MS ’21 (multimedia journalism)
 

On an icy peninsula near the Arctic, there is a school where select students from around the world are taught the secrets of the Victorian-era world. The school’s programs are: Apothecary—for pharmacists; Warbringer—for warriors; Machinist—for inventors; Artisan—for artists; and Animalia—for animalists. Thirteen-year-old Sunday Gråe wants to follow in her late father's footsteps and become Animalia—the way of working with animals' unique abilities that is taught only at the prestigious and secretive Svalbard School. Sunday's dreams come true when she is admitted, but the school is more dangerous than she thought. The Animalia students are mysteriously going missing . . . and she could be next.
 

By Douglas Killingtree (graduate student)
 

Say, “bye-bye, see ya later” with Gator to all the hate they encounter as they find themselves and choose to live their truth in the face of intolerance and bigotry. Don’t Say Gator speaks to staying true and authentic to yourself despite the hurtful things others may say.