The University Times welcomes information about new books, journals, plays and musical compositions written or edited by faculty and staff.

Newly published works can be submitted through this link. Please keep the book descriptions short and accessible to a general audience.

Journals should be peer-reviewed. Self-published works will not be accepted. The listings also are restricted to complete works, because individual chapters, articles, works of art and poems would be too numerous.

We’ll also be highlighting some books and book talks with connections to Pitt.

If you have any questions, please contact editor Susan Jones at suejones@pitt.edu or 412-648-4294.

Book events

“The Black Ecstatic”
7 p.m. Oct. 25, Frick Fine Arts Auditorium

Three contemporary black poets, Airea D. Matthews, Roger Reeves, and Safiya Sinclair, and filmmaker Jamal T. Lewis will consider how “the ecstatic” functions in their artistic work and personal lives. The program, which will include poetry performances, a brief film screening and a discussion moderated by Rickey Laurentiis, the inaugural Fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.

6 p.m. Oct. 24: Matthews and Sinclair will share work in progress. Cathedral of Learning, Suite 501

Chinelo Okparanta, author of “Happiness, Like Water” and “Under the Udala Trees”
7:30 p.m. Oct. 18, Frick Fine Arts Building Auditorium

Okparanta, assistant professor of English and creative writing at Bucknell University, has won a Lambda Literary Award and an O. Henry Prize, and was a nominee for both the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award and the NAACP Image Award in Fiction. The talk is part of the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series,

Literature over Lunch Faculty Reading: Anjali Sachdeva, “All the Names They Used for God: Stories”
Noon Oct. 25, Hillman Library, ground floor, Cup & Chaucer cafe

Sachdeva, a lecturer in the English department of the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences has had works of fiction appear in The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, The Yale Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Literary Review, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and also has taught writing at the University of Iowa, Augustana College and Carnegie Mellon University. This is her first book.

Julian Gill-Peterson, “Histories of the Transgender Child” book launch
4-5:30 p.m. Oct. 23, 501 Cathedral of Learning

The Gender, Sexuality, & Women’s Studies Program and the Children's Literature Program are hosting a book launch for Julian Gill-Peterson’s “Histories of the Transgender Child.” The book argues that contrary to the current consensus in the media and medical establishment, transgender children have a long history that stretches across the entire twentieth century. Visiting Fellow Mary Zaborskis and GSWS Lecturer Julie Beaulieu will offer responses to the book, followed by commentary by Gill-Peterson and a Q&A session

New books, journals and more

“Diaspora, Disasters, and the Cosmos” (2018, Carolina Academic Press), co-authored by Pamela J. Stewart, senior research associate in Anthropology, and Andrew Strathern, professor of Anthropology

This book discusses diasporic/migratory movements of peoples; precarity as a contemporary construct and as a long standing organic reality in the life of those on planet Earth; environmental disasters and climatic events; healing practices and the cosmos. Combining environmental issues with aesthetics and healing and ritual practices, “Diaspora, Disasters, and the Cosmos” shows the inter-relations of cultural patterns in the lives of indigenous people in the Pacific and elsewhere.