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UMass Press Podcast

UMass Press Podcast

Auteur(s): New Books Network
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 Interviews with authors of University of Massachusetts Press books.New Books Network Art Monde
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  • Patrick Parr, "Malcolm Before X" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

    Patrick Parr, "Malcolm Before X" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
    Oct 26 2025
    Drawing upon interviews, correspondence, and nearly 2000 pages of never-before-used prison records, Malcolm Before X is the definitive examination of the prison years of civil rights icon Malcolm X. The book was a Kirkus Nonfiction Book of the Year for 2024, a Spectator best book of the year, and a finalist for the 2025 ASALH book prize. In February 1946, when 20-year-old Malcolm Little was sentenced to eight to ten years in a maximum-security prison, he was a petty criminal and street hustler in Boston. By the time he was paroled in August 1952, he had transformed into a voracious reader, joined the Black Muslims, and was poised to become Malcolm X, one of the most prominent and important intellectuals of the civil rights era. While scholars and commentators have exhaustively detailed, analyzed, and debated Malcolm X’s post-prison life, they have not explored these six and a half transformative years in any depth. Paying particular attention to his time in prison, Patrick Parr’s Malcolm Before X provides a comprehensive and groundbreaking examination of the first twenty-seven years of Malcolm X’s life (1925–1965). Parr traces Malcolm’s African lineage, explores his complicated childhood in the Midwest, and follows him as he moves east to live with his sister Ella in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, where he is convicted of burglary and sentenced. Parr utilizes a trove of previously overlooked documents that include prison files and prison newspapers to immerse the reader into the unique cultures—at times brutal and at times instructional—of Charlestown State Prison, the Concord Reformatory, and the Norfolk Prison Colony. It was at these institutions that Malcolm devoured books, composed poetry, boxed, debated, and joined the Nation of Islam, changing the course of his life and setting the stage for a decade of antiracist activism that would fundamentally reshape American culture. In this meticulously researched and beautifully written biography, the inspiring story of how Malcolm Little became Malcolm X is finally told. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    26 min
  • Carlene Kucharczyk, "Strange Hymn: Poems" (U Mass Press, 2025)

    Carlene Kucharczyk, "Strange Hymn: Poems" (U Mass Press, 2025)
    Oct 25 2025
    "I'll tell you everything I know. Though there might not be much to tell," confesses the speaker in Strange Hymn: Poems (U Mass Press, 2025) by Carlene Kucharczyk, in a meticulously crafted lyrical journey exploring morality and humanity. The poems here grapple with understanding physical loss: "I wanted / to know at once and definitively our animal bodies / were not all we were. It is shameful to be this fragile." They also engage with the more abstract slipping away of memory and time: "Since I was born, I have been forgetting. Forgetting what I have wanted to remember." Kucharczyk's insightful poems blur the lines between history and myth, love and grief, song and silence.Caught between lamenting the passage of time and rejoicing in small beauties, she writes, "I tell you, I wish we could stay here longer / in this hotel of lost grandeur, this palace of interesting disarray, / and stay here with these pieces of the impersonal past / that have somehow not yet outlasted their small lights." Each moment reflects on our ephemeral lives from musings on art and nature to reflections on the self, asking "Is a mirror a sort of glass house? / And, is there a way to see ourselves besides through the glass?"As readers traverse this collection, they learn how the body sings, the many iterations of Mary, what sirens truly think of Odysseus, how a Morning Glory unfurls, and lessons in orthodontics, but most importantly, how to live with absence. Kucharczyk is a master of manipulating time and space through her dynamic use of form, creating a narrative that begs, "After I'm gone, don't bury my body-- / Burn it, and turn it into song." Source: Publisher Kavya Sarathy is a Linguistics student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Marketing Intern for the University of Massachusetts Press. She is currently a political Staff Writer at The Massachusetts Daily Collegian. Kavya has always enjoyed reading, writing, and engaging with literature in any form, and is thrilled to be in conversation with these authors through the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    22 min
  • Christa Kuljian, "Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race, and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

    Christa Kuljian, "Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race, and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
    Jul 30 2025
    When Christa Kuljian arrived on the Harvard College campus as a first-year student in the fall of 1980 with copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves and Ms. magazine, she was concerned that the women's movement had peaked in the previous decade. She soon learned, however, that there was a long way to go in terms of achieving equality for women and that social movements would continue to be a critical force in society. She began researching the history of science and gender biases in science, and how they intersect with race, class, and sexuality. In Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race, and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024), Kuljian tells the origin story of feminist science studies by focusing on the life histories of six key figures--Ruth Hubbard, Rita Arditti, Evelyn Fox Keller, Evelynn Hammonds, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and Banu Subramaniam. These women were part of a trailblazing network of female scientists in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s who were drawn to the Boston area--to Harvard, MIT, and other universities--to study science, to network with other scientists, or to take a job. Inspired by the social and political activism of the women's movement and organizations such as Science for the People, the Genes and Gender Collective, and the Combahee River Collective, they began to write and teach about women in science, gender and science, and sexist and racist bias and exclusion. They would lead the critiques of E. O. Wilson's sociobiology in 1975 and Larry Summers' comments about women in science thirty years later. Drawing on a rich array of sources that combines published journal articles and books with archival materials and interviews with major luminaries of feminist science studies, Kuljian chronicles and celebrates the contributions that these women have made to our collective scientific knowledge and view of the world. Christa Kuljian grew up in the Boston area, and has lived in Johannesburg, South Africa for the past thirty years. She is a science writer and the author of Sanctuary and Darwin's Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins, which was short listed for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for Non-Fiction. Currently a Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) at Wits University, she is also a fellow with the Consortium for History of Science, Medicine and Technology (CHSMT) in Philadelphia. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h et 1 min
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