Julia Spicher Kasdorf

Jesus Girls

Women

“Since the Puritans, spiritual autobiography has thrived in the New World. These women show that the American conversion testimony is endlessly resilient, as they break and remake it again and again. There's a wild range of piety here, but the authors do believe in the possibilities of narrative. Intelligent and sensitive, their essays brilliantly shatter the born-again-bimbo stereotype!”

Scape

Arts & Literature

“'The maples drop their syllables until / the grass burns with words.' Once again, Luci Shaw, master of the deceptively simple lyric, captures the 'glory leaking through' ordinary experience. Spun in wonder, freighted with feeling and faith, these poems dart with the grace of small birds or drift like brilliant leaves from old trees. Such a pleasure to read this fine collection!”

Silentium

Arts & Literature

“‘In the aftermath of violent histories, telling stories and listening to stories are acts of peace,’ writes this daughter of World War II refugees. Seeking family memories and public records, Braun engages a range of writers, and returns to Poland three times, on ‘grief’s long migration,’ to claim the lost homelands of the Mennonites, Jews and Catholics. With beauty and skill, she renders the implications of a history that reaches from the Crusades to the concentration camps, determined to trace its imprint on the generation born into elegiac silence. This book is essential to any quest to make emotional sense of the displacement, dispossession, and holocausts of the last century.”