Nonfiction
Reefs of Time
What Fossils Reveal About Coral Survival
By Lisa S. Gardiner, M.F.A. ’13
Princeton University Press
June 10, 2025
A Scientific American Staff Favorite Book of the Year
How fossilized reefs hold clues to the survival of corals in the Anthropocene.
With rising global temperatures, pollution, overfishing, ocean acidification, and other problems caused by humans, there’s no question that today’s coral reefs are in trouble. As predictions about the future of these ecosystems grow increasingly dire, scientists are looking in an unlikely place for new ways to save corals: the past. The reefs of yesteryear faced challenges too, from changing sea level to temperature shifts, and understanding how they survived and when they faltered can help guide our efforts to help ensure a future for reefs.
Lisa Gardiner weaves together the latest cutting-edge science with stories of her expeditions to tropical locales to show how fossils and other reef remains offer tantalizing glimpses of how corals persisted through time, and how this knowledge can guide our efforts to ensure a future for these remarkable organisms. Gardiner takes readers on an excursion into “the shallow end of deep time”—when marine life was much like today’s yet unaffected by human influence—to explore the cities of fossilized limestone left behind by corals and other reef life millennia ago. The changes in reefs today are unlike anything ever seen before, but the fossil record offers hope that the coral reefs of tomorrow can weather the environmental challenges that lie ahead.
A breathtaking journey of scientific discovery, Reefs of Time reveals how lessons from the past can help us to chart a path forward for coral reefs struggling for survival in an age of climate crisis and mass extinction.
The Fight for Sex Ed
The Century-Long Battle Between Truth and Doctrine
By Margaret Myers, M.F.A. ’18
Beacon Press
August 12, 2025
The first comprehensive trade history of sex ed in American schools—and an impassioned call to reform sex ed into a powerful tool for reproductive justice and social equality.
The U.S. has some of the highest rates of STIs and teen pregnancies in the industrialized world. A comprehensive sex education curriculum—which teaches facts on contraception, prophylactics, consent, and STIs—has been available since the ’90s. Yet the majority of states require that sex education stress abstinence, and 22 states do not require sex ed in public schools at all.
In The Fight for Sex Ed, writer, advocate, and historian Margaret Myers shows us how we got here. While the earliest calls for sex ed came from a coalition of religious leaders and doctors at the turn of the century who sought to control the prevalence of STIs, the advent of antibiotics and modern condoms meant that abstinence was no longer good public health policy. The religious right, however, continued to frame it as such, using its impressive machinery to replace scientific facts with conservative Christian values.
Because sex ed is not mandated at the federal level, these battles have played out locally throughout the decades: through rigged school boards, administrative oustings, court cases, unjust firings, scare tactics, and threats. Myers also shows how the religious right has worked to narrow the discourse around sex ed, often dictating the terms of debate almost entirely.
What we teach young people has serious ramifications for reproductive justice, LGBTQ+ rights, gender equality, and public health. Sex education lies at the intersection of these hugely important cultural forces, yet it has been largely invisible. This book illuminates its potential—and its power.
Boss Brooks
A True Story of Fraud, Family, and Forgiveness From Tennessee to Texas
By Kathy Bingham Turner and Leon Alligood, M.F.A. ’07
University of Tennessee Press
November 25, 2025
True crime meets family memoir in this gripping story of faked death.
In 1931, Boss Bingham, the head cashier of Hardin County Bank in Saltillo, TN, faked his death from a fiery auto accident and fled west to escape allegations of fraud and embezzlement. While his three children believed he was dead, Bingham reinvented himself as Marvin Lester Brooks, a rancher in Sherwood, TX, where he married and raised a second family. Upon his death four decades later, he became a man with two tombstones.
In Boss Brooks: A True Story of Fraud, Family, and Forgiveness From Tennessee to Texas, Bingham’s granddaughter Kathy Bingham Turner and journalist Leon Alligood uncover the truth about Boss’s deception and explore the impacts on both his families. Through meticulous research and personal reflections, the authors delve into the history of rural Tennessee and Texas, revealing the complex legacy of a man whose final confession came only after suffering a stroke in 1972.
A gripping memoir of family secrets revealed, Boss Brooks offers a compelling blend of historical context and personal discovery. Turner and Alligood have produced a captivating saga that helps us understand the multifaceted nature of family legacies.
Poetry
World of Dew
By Lindsay Stuart Hill ’09
University of Wisconsin Press
November 11, 2025
Winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry
How do we make sense of our suffering? World of Dew grapples with this question by embracing impermanence—the death of a loved one, the transmutation of an old belief, the adoption of a new culture. Moving from the tide pools of Maine to the streets of Hyderabad, Lindsay Stuart Hill entwines grief and awe, beauty and violence, truth and delusion. These poems form a scrapbook of missing girls, clothes drying on a line, and lingering romances. This is the world of dew—a gorgeous and fragile cosmos where we know nothing lasts, and yet we remain—questioning, dreaming, hoping.
America’s Future
Poetry & Prose in Response to Tomorrow
Edited by Jona Colson ’01 and Caroline Bock
Washington Writers’ Publishing House
September 9, 2025
America’s Future: poetry and prose in response to tomorrow features the work of 164 bold, thought-provoking writers, including an opening speech, published here for the first time, by Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland; poetry by master poet E. Ethelbert Miller in collaboration with Miho Kinnas; essays by Marvin Kalb and Bethanne Patrick; and short stories by Mary Kay Zuravleff, Kathleen Wheaton, and more. The anthology arrives at an urgent moment in our nation’s history, when many are anxiously questioning: What are the possibilities for the future? Some pieces turn to our past, reckoning with the wounds we still carry in today’s scars before questioning the future. Others turn their gaze forward, imagining the ways hope and reinvention can carve new paths.
Fiction
The Winter of the Dollhouse
By Laura Amy Schlitz ’77, Honorary Doctor of Letters ’13
Candlewick Press
September 2, 2025
This captivating coming-of-age story is touching, funny, and beautifully layered, with a fairy-tale ending that only Newbery medalist Laura Amy Schlitz could deliver.
On a gloomy November night, 11-year-old Tiphany Stokes saves an old lady from collapsing in the street. An antique doll named Gretel watches them, longing for Tiph to rescue her from life in a shop window. Though none of these three characters realizes it, their worlds are about to change: Gretel will no longer be a precious prisoner. The old lady—is she a witch?—will discover the secret hidden in her long-neglected dollhouse. And Tiph—whose parents rejoice that she is “never any trouble”—will become a thief, a dog walker, an actor, and, best of all, a friend.
Bethlehem Road
Stories of Immigration and Exile
By Judy Lev, M.F.A. ’01
She Writes Press, distributed by Simon & Schuster
October 21, 2025
For fans of André Aciman, Omer Friedlander, and Ayelet Tsabari, these 12 stories convey the power, magic, and pain of place—one iconic street in Jerusalem where immigrants young and old struggle to find themselves between the years 1967 and 1999.
Jerusalem’s Bethlehem Road—between “the mountain of the Lord” and the manger—provides the stage for Judy Lev’s post-1967 immigrant characters. On this main artery the protagonists of these 12 stories work through their quandaries of who they are, what they left behind, and who they can become by immigrating to Israel. A pregnant woman walks to Bethlehem because she believes she is carrying a savior. A single woman buys an apartment on Bethlehem Road and, through a surprising meeting, learns the property comes with a tragic political history. Both the binding of Isaac and the Holocaust echo on Bethlehem Road and its biblically named side streets, confounding and confusing immigrants to Israel from English-speaking countries. Some leave. Those who stay struggle with the challenges of belonging and longing, of immigration and exile.
Faculty Book Chapter
“‘To Call It a Zoo Would Be Unkind to Animals’: How Cable Television Came to Miami”
By Professor of Communication and Media Studies Daniel Marcus, in Local TV: Histories, Communities, and Aesthetics, edited by Lauren Herold and Annie Laurie Sullivan
University of Georgia Press
October 15, 2025
Local TV offers critical analyses of an expansive range of practices, policies, and debates in local television histories from the United States. “To Call It a Zoo” explores the creation of the cable television system in Miami, FL, in 1981, a sequence of events so ridden with scandal that the political machinations and financial shenanigans that pervaded the granting of cable franchises across the country were for once made visible to the public. The piece also explores the difficulties of researching and writing on local media policies and regulations.