Your November 2025 reads

Alumni authors

11/25/2025

This month’s featured titles include, by A&S alumni: poetry, scary tales based on true stories, and a biography of an early 20th-century journalist, activist, and educator.

Naked Ladies

Julie Kane ’74

Kane is a former poet laureate of Louisiana, a professor emerita at Northwestern State, and a current faculty member at Western Colorado University. Her sixth volume of poetry includes selections from her five previous books and other award-winning work.

“The title of this milestone collection acknowledges Kane’s place in the tradition of women confessional poets, evokes the nickname of a common Louisiana flower, and nods to the honesty and frankness that characterize her poems’ speakers,” states the publisher, Louisiana State University Press.

The publisher describes the Arts & Sciences alum as “steeped in both Boston Irish-American and New Orleans cultures”; the former is reflected in such works as a poem titled “The Good Women”:

“Three out of four / are named Mary, / these good Irish women / who surface at wakes / like earthworms after rain. / Death makes them bake / turkeys, casseroles, / applesauce cakes. / They breathe the thick / incense of flowers / for strength, dispense / prayers like milk / from each massive breast.”

Hubert Harrison

Brian Kwoba ’04

Kwoba’s nonfiction work, subtitled Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism, explores the life and work of the early 20th-century journalist, activist, and educator.

Harrison emigrated to the U.S. from the West Indies as an orphaned teenager and—exposed for the first time to the nation’s stark racial and economic divides—became an advocate for socialism and racial justice.

“He witnessed staggering luxury for the few alongside crushing poverty for the many,” states the publisher, University of North Carolina Press.

“White mob violence continually haunted Black communities, while imperial conquest and world wars wrought wanton destruction upon entire nations of people. These conditions sparked a global political awakening to which Harrison gave voice as a leading figure in cutting-edge struggles for socialism, internationalism, free love, freethinking, and free speech.”

A former philosophy major in Arts & Sciences, Kwoba is an associate professor of history and director of African and African American studies at the University of Memphis.

Haunted USA

Heather Alexander ’89

Alexander has published more than 70 works of fiction and nonfiction—from activity books to chapter books to novels for middle-grade readers. Her latest, subtitled Spine-tingling Stories from All 50 States, offers (slightly) scary tales based on true stories, folklore, and legends.

Like many of Alexander’s publications, it’s geared toward middle-grade readers, aged nine through 12. (She has also produced dozens of chapter books for six-to-nine-year-olds.)

“Have you ever seen pictures of playful otters frolicking in a river or ocean?” She writes in the book’s Alaska installment, about the Inuit legend of a shape-shifting creature. “These tiny, furry marine mammals couldn’t be more adorable if they tried. But don’t be fooled by all the cuteness—something sinister is afloat!”

Read the full story on the Cornellians website.