Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Ships In Houston, Nadia Villafuerte, Julie Ann Ward

Undiscovered Americas

Ships in Houston by Nadia Villafuerte, translated by Julie Ann Ward, is a harrowing and heartrending collection of fifteen stories that bring to life characters who, though they exist independently from one another, inhabit the same world: Mexico’s southern border. Using acute attention to language, such as various dialects and slang, to create a nuanced and varied mood and setting, Villafuerte’s stories track exotic dancers, sex workers, truck drivers, drug dealers, immigration officials, and even a mayor’s daughter to create compelling fictions rooted in the harsh realities of borderlands that many choose to overlook. While the US’s southern border with …

Treading The Winepress; Or, A Mountain Of Misfortune, Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen, Gabrielle Brown, Eric Willey, Jean Macdonald

Undiscovered Americas

“Every life hath its chapter of sorrow. No matter how rich the gilding or fair the pages of the volume, Trouble will stamp it with his sable signet.”

So begins the novel Treading the Winepress; or, A Mountain of Misfortune by Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen, which, had it appeared in book form in 1885–1886 instead of serialized in The Boston Advocate, would have been the second novel published by a black woman in the United States. Instead, Allen has been mostly forgotten by literary history. Now, thanks to the painstaking efforts of editors Gabrielle Brown, Eric Willey, and Jean …