Bookshelf

Winner of the 2023 Bunny chapbook contest, Naughton’s slim book of poetry describes debt as something intensely private, yet significantly interconnected with global systems of power.

Through a series of compelling conversations with Lassoe, a psychotherapist, a woman named Diane shares the story of how she overcame significant hardships and abuse with unwavering resilience. Her intimate memories as a white woman who spends most of her life in an African American community also offer a fascinating perspective on race relations.

By trade, Worden is a lawyer who focuses on helping people and corporations reach fair settlements in high-stakes lawsuits. In this book he shares several surprising stories about individuals and events that led to the three pivotal American wars.

This collection features 12 stories (11 of which have been previously published in literary magazines) set in the Piedmont region of the Carolinas. Also included is the first chapter of one of two novels the author has written in the last six years.

The author, an associate professor of African American studies and history at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, shows how cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, as well as rural areas in the heartland, became central and enduring incubators of Marcus Garvey’s Black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and its offshoots.

(Northwestern University Press, 2025)

A study of how unusually bright comets appeared not only in the sky in 1664-65 and 1680-81, but also in ballets and theater, letters and journalism, architecture and institutions, theology and literary style. The author, a French literature and culture professor at the University of California Davis, discusses how these comets — considered at the time to appear in random and unpredictable locations — sparked curiosity, scrutiny, resistance, and doubt regarding the epistemological status of observation.

(Skyhorse Publishing, 2024)

For many families, homelessness is no longer someone else’s problem. It is right around the corner, a real threat in their own immediate future. The author goes on to maintain, “Our housing crisis is the result of a long history of government policies, court cases, and political manipulation. While these disparate causes make up a tangled web, they have one surprising root: the attack on private property rights. For more than a century, government policies and court decisions have attacked, undermined, and eroded private property rights. Whether it be exclusionary zoning, eminent domain abuse, rent control, or excessive environmental regulations, the cumulative impact of these assaults on private property is that it’s become increasingly difficult — or even impossible — to build adequate housing supplies to meet market demands. We are fast approaching a time when millions of typical Americans will, quite literally, have nowhere to live.” 
         

(Marrowstone Press, 2024)

In this, his fifth self-declared “last book” of poems (this time he probably means it!), Weltner devotes the first half to reflections on his time at Hamilton. The collection that fills the section “Late Winter Snow on College Hill” is dedicated to members of his Class of 1964 and in memory of his longtime friend Sam Crowl ’62.

(self-published, 2025)

The author draws on his financial and tax background to provide a survey into the growing monetization of today’s college athletics. He outlines what he calls the “brutal outcomes” of college sports becoming professionalized, including the loss of billions of dollars in tax breaks and foregone revenue that would permanently alter the student-athlete experience. “Massive cuts to the size, number, and quality of non-revenue sports will consequently rob thousands of students of scholarship opportunities and deny higher education to many in the college-enrolling population,” he adds.

(Delete Press, 2024)
Poet Dan Beechy-Quick shared this observation about Naughton's book of poetry: "Near the end of her stunning debut, Katie Naughton asks a simple question, not so simple at all: 'and what is mine?' The question tunes the ear to the undergirding ethic these poems explore, a frequency that cancels the static of capital’s all-too-easy 'time is money' to reveal the deeper economy, one that knows the real, letter by letter, is embedded within the ethereal, with an E as the only excess, calling out so quietly the heart’s inner urgent more. More what? More days, more time, more of the honest inheritance that makes a life — for any of us — mine. Naughton is a spare poet of life’s wild abundance, practicing poetry’s oldest motions, the garland and the crown, weaving together inner life with worldly experience, stitching day to day, asking what the hours are in hopes of honoring what the days bring. It is the worthiest kind of work I know, to play us the tune of 'time our oldest song the wind wilt blow.'”