American Tensions

Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice

  • Edited by William Reichard
  • Foreword by Ted Kooser
  • With contributions by Elizabeth Alexander
  •  , Linda Hogan
  •  and Sherman Alexie

336 pages

April, 2011

ISBN: 9780981559384

$19.95

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Authors

William Reichard is the author of four collections of poetry: Sin Eater (2010); This Brightness: Poems (2007); How To: Poems (2004), which was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and An Alchemy in the Bones: Poems (1999), which won a Minnesota Voices Prize.

Ted Kooser is one of the the most highly regarded poets in the US and served as the United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004 to 2006.

Elizabeth Alexander is a professor in the English and African American Studies Departments at Yale University.

Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), writer in residence for The Chickasaw Nation, is an internationally recognized public speaker and writer of poetry, fiction, and essays.

Sherman Alexie Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, Sherman J. Alexie, Jr. grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, WA.

 This new anthology of contemporary American poetry, short fiction and nonfiction, explores issues of identity, oppression, injustice, and social change.
 
This anthology of contemporary American poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction, explores issues of identity, oppression, injustice, and social change. Living American writers produced each piece between 1980 and the present; works were selected based on literary merit and the manner in which they address one or more pressing social issues. William Reichard has assembled some of the most respected literary artists of our time, asking whose voices are ascendant, whose silenced, and why. The work as a whole reveals shifting perspectives and the changing role of writing in the social justice arena over the last few decades.