JCCC Writes: Celebrating JCCC Campus Authors

Hillary, Made Up provides an insightful view from the perspective of beauty products in an ode to Hillary Clinton. The beauty rituals that half of Americans take part in has never seen much poetry, but Marianne Kunkel delves into just that Hillary, Made Up brings to light the unfair standards to which Americans hold successful women, and shows Hillary Clinton's political career from its beginning in the 1970s to her run in the presidential campaign. The collection tells this story through the lens of sexism, allowing readers to see the role that gender discrimination played in Hillary Clinton's ultimate loss to President Trump.

Tracing the experiences of one neighborhood as they watch a nesting family of owls, Welcome, Baby Owls provides glimpses of three baby owls from January through May. Throughout the book, neighborhood children invite readers to share in the adventure. Parent owls protect and nurture the babies during the winter months, while the interaction of the small owls with other creatures of nature is also pictured.

These fourteen stories provide tantalizing glimpses of death and its impact on those left behind, the tedious grind of day-to-day living and the promise of escape through the magical and supernatural. Though the characters in each story are encapsulated by their own unique worldview, they are a composite reflection of the overarching experience of life lived, in all times and places.

Russell Capshaw is a successful New York advertising executive who tries to stave off his mid-life crisis with an extended drug binge in the Far East. After treatment in a detox facility in Dublin, Ireland, he pays a visit to his estranged uncle, who has recently experienced a spiritual reversion to Catholicism-a faith that Russell himself left behind in childhood. Caught up in the spell of his uncle's quiet devotion and the lush Irish landscape, Russell finds himself drawn to a new and very different life.

When the Civil War ended, hundreds of African Americans enlisted in the U.S. Army to gain social mobility and regular paychecks. Stationed in the West prior to 1898, these black soldiers protected white communities, forced Native Americans onto government reservations, patrolled the Mexican border, and broke up labor disputes in mining areas. African American men, themselves no strangers to persecution, aided the subjugation of Indian and Hispanic peoples throughout the West. It can hardly be surprising, then, that the relations among these groups became complex and often hostile-hardly surprising, but rarely examined. Despised by the white settlers they protected, many black soldiers were sent to posts along the Texas-Mexico border-- perceived to be a "safe place to put them." The interactions there among blacks, whites, and Hispanics during the period leading up to the Punitive Expedition and World War I offer the opportunity to study the complicated, even paradoxical nature of American race relations. James N. Leiker has applied the sophisticated perspectives of new social history to the experience of the buffalo soldiers and their legacy in southern and western Texas in an effort to gain new insight about race in the West. Racial Borders establishes the army's fundamental role in transforming the Rio Grande from a "frontier" into a "border" and shows how that transformation itself brought a tightening of racial and national categories. But more importantly, it warns about the dangers of simplifying history into groupings of "white and non-white," "oppressors and oppressed." Leiker draws on Mexican and U.S. military records and Texas state and black national newspapers to do more than provide an account of the shifting loyalties of race and nationalism along the Rio Grande over a fifty-year span; he reminds scholars and reformers about the tangled history of race relations in America.

When your life is a lie, how do you know what's real? Alexandra Gastone has a simple plan: graduate high school, get into Princeton, work for the CIA, and serve her great nation.

The definitive collection of art, poetry, and prose, celebrating fat acceptance Chubby. Curvy. Fluffy. Plus-size. Thick. Fat. The time has come for fat people to tell their own stories. The (Other) F Word combines the voices of Renée Watson, Julie Murphy, Jes Baker, Samantha Irby, Bruce Sturgell, and more in a relatable and gift-worthy guide about body image and fat acceptance. This dazzling collection of art, poetry, essays, and fashion tips is meant for people of all sizes who desire to be seen and heard in a culture consumed by a narrow definition of beauty. By combining the talents of renowned fat YA and middle-grade authors, as well as fat influencers and creators, The (Other) F Word offers teen readers and activists of all ages a tool for navigating our world with confidence and courage.

NIGHT FOREST Night Forest: Folk Poems and Stories Illustrated by artist Elka Trittel and featuring award-winning poets Katharyn Howd Machan and Gary Baumier, this collection fights for forgotten wonder and reaches into colorful truths with new bite. Reading this collection will make you want to take up the mythic path and find the heart of your inner hero. The collection contains works by over 50 international poets as well as six short stories: "Fomka" by Katie Sakanai, "Briefest Use" by Hayden Moore, "Swan Song" by Caroline Sidney, "Just a Pile of Stones" by Kevin Callahan, and "Eleventh Night" by Lauren Tunnell.

The Imperium is in turmoil! Seven centuries after the sleeper ships brought us to Andromeda, our human empire is plagued by war, intrigue, and a mysterious secret that may tear it apart! Black sheep of the Imperial family, Prince Alexander finds himself thrust into a conspiracy to overthrow his father. Torn between a family that doesn't trust him and a usurper from a family that wants him dead, the Prince must decide where his true loyalties lie.Professor Jessica Doric, fired from her university job, gets hired by playboy Lord Devlin Maycare to search for rare xeno artifacts before the mega corporation Warlock Industries gets its unscrupulous hands on them.

AASECT Book Award for General Audience 'A joy to read' ESSIE DENNIS 'A beautifully written collection' JUNO ROCHE We're here. We're queer. We're fat. This one-of-a-kind collection of prose and poetry radically explores the intersection of fat and queer identities, showcasing new, emerging and established queer and trans writers from around the world. Celebrating fat and queer bodies and lives, this book challenges negative and damaging representations of queer and fat bodies and offers readers ways to reclaim their bodies, providing stories of support, inspiration and empowerment. In writing that is intimate, luminous and emotionally raw, this anthology is a testament to the diversity and power of fat queer voices and experiences, and they deserve to be heard.

Pulse/Pulso is like a rama de olivo extending from first-time, emerging, and established writers. Written in the days and weeks following the shooting at Pulse nightclub on June 12, 2016—which killed 49 and wounded 53 of our own—Pulse/Pulso: In Remembrance of Orlando is just one sample of voices seeking to resist a toxic culture of unrestrained gun violence that has extinguished the lives of queer and trans people of color and indigenous peoples.

"State of Grace is, sadly, the last beautiful, moving achievement from a woman whose wit, intelligence, and loving humanity can be felt on every page of all her books." --George Hodgman, author of Bettyville Birdie Holloway is a typical eleven-year-old growing up in a small, corn-fed Kansas town in the early 1980s--that is until her best friend, Grace, is brutally murdered. Suddenly, everything changes for Birdie, and everything she believes she knows about her insulated small-town life is called into question. Obsessed in figuring out who killed her friend, Birdie spends years trying to find the murderer. Eventually, she connects with someone who is every bit as interested in the case as she is. Someone who knows how close she is to solving the murder. Someone who will kill again to keep her quiet . . . Sandra Moran was an author and assistant adjunct professor of anthropology. Her debut novel, Letters Never Sent, was a finalist for the 2013 Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. Revisions on State of Grace, her final novel, were completed in September 2015. Less than a month later, she was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer. She passed away on November 7, 2015.

It begins with a bus crash. Maggie is a funeral director from Indiana who lives a double life. Bug is a ten-year-old boy in the Pennsylvania foster care system who is sent to live with an aunt he doesn't know. Jimmy is a former paramedic and prescription drug addict on his way to meet a woman he met online who thinks he's a successful doctor. Helen is a Chicago insurance investigator who is leaving her marriage in search of the woman she wants to be. Four strangers, all traveling to Boston in search of better lives, are tied together in ways they don't even realize. Each are trying to fill the void of what's missing in their lives. Sometimes it takes a tragedy to overcome all that we lack.

New York advertising executive and lifelong atheist Sarah Sheppard is highly successful, in line for a partnership, and feeling on top of the world. When she's visited by a mysterious client who offers her a job to write and market a comprehensive addition to the world's religious texts, she thinks it's an elaborate joke and turns him down. But God works in mysterious ways and she quickly finds she has no choice but to take the assignment. Isolated at a remote estate in upstate New York, Sarah joins a group of scholars and theologians to compile The Addendum, but soon discovers that nothing and no one are what they appear to be. As more questions than answers mount up, Sarah has to decide whether to deny her natural skepticism or embrace that illusive idea of faith before she's nudged onto a path of no return.

Three women, united by love and kinship, struggle to conform to the social norms of the times in which they lived. In 1931, Katherine Henderson leaves behind her small town in Kansas and the marriage proposal of a local boy to live on her own and work at the Sears & Roebuck glove counter in Chicago. There she meets Annie--a bold, outspoken feminist who challenges Katherine's idea of who she thinks she is and what she thinks she wants in life. In 1997, Katherine's daughter, Joan, travels to Lawrence, Kansas, to clean out her estranged mother's house. Hidden away in an old suitcase, she finds a wooden box containing trinkets and a packet of sealed letters to a person identified only by a first initial. Joan reads the unsent letters and discovers a woman completely different from the aloof and unyielding mother of her youth-a woman who had loved deeply and lost that love to circumstances beyond her control. Now she just has to find the strength to use the healing power of empathy and forgiveness to live the life she's always wanted to live.

The exodus of the Northern Cheyennes in 1878 and 1879, an attempt to flee from Indian Territory to their Montana homeland, is an important event in American Indian history. It is equally important in the history of towns like Oberlin, Kansas, where Cheyenne warriors killed more than forty settlers. The Cheyennes, in turn, suffered losses through violent encounters with the U.S. Army. More than a century later, the story remains familiar because it has been told by historians and novelists, and on film. In The Northern Cheyenne Exodus in History and Memory, James N. Leiker and Ramon Powers explore how the event has been remembered, told, and retold. They examine the recollections of Indians and settlers and their descendants, and they consider local history, mass-media treatments, and literature to draw thought-provoking conclusions about how this story has changed over time. The Cheyennes' journey has always been recounted in melodramatic stereotypes, and for the last fifty years most versions have featured "noble savages" trying to reclaim their birthright. Here, Leiker and Powers deconstruct those stereotypes and transcend them, pointing out that history is never so simple. "The Cheyennes' flight," they write, "had left white and Indian bones alike scattered along its route from Oklahoma to Montana." In this view, the descendants of the Cheyennes and the settlers they encountered are all westerners who need history as a "way of explaining the bones and arrowheads" that littered the plains. Leiker and Powers depict a rural West whose diverse peoples--Euro-American and Native American alike--seek to preserve their heritage through memory and history. Anyone who lives in the contemporary Great Plains or who wants to understand the West as a whole will find this book compelling.

When advertising executive Sarah Sheppard was commissioned by God, also known as Infinity, to write and market a universal addendum to the world's religious texts, she was convinced the entire plan was an elaborate hoax. But as anyone who has read Sandra Moran's novel, Nudge, knows, the real story is much more complicated. Now for the first time, the actual text of The Addendum is available for anyone to read. And what exactly is The Addendum? It's a universal document that ties together history, religion, and the commonality of the human experience through stories of famous figures who, regardless of their belief systems, stand as testament to the ideals of living one's faith and making the world a better place. Its purpose is to help humanity celebrate and accept our differences, even as we embrace that which is common to all.