Articles

Humanities Texas will host its seventh annual Holiday Book Fair at the historic Byrne-Reed House on Saturday, December 12, 2015, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. A number of noteworthy authors, including H. W. Brands, Ray Benson, Jan Jarboe Russell, Katherine Howe, Brandon Caro, Don Tate, Karen Olsson, Kirk Lynn, Sarah Cortez, Louisa Hall, Steven Moss, Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, Michael Barnes, Jacqueline Kelly, Chris Barton, David Gaines, Elizabeth Harris, Andrew J. Torget, Dave Oliphant, Javier Auyero, Chuck Bailey, Nikki Loftin, and Light Townsend Cummins, will visit with the public and sign copies of their latest books, which Humanities Texas will offer for purchase at a discounted price. Available titles include works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry with selections for both adult and youth readers.

Proceeds will benefit Texas libraries.

Park for free in the St. Martin's Evangelical Lutheran Church lot on the northwest corner of 15th and Rio Grande Streets, and enjoy coffee and a bake sale of donated and homemade treats.

Friends of Humanities Texas receive an additional 25% percent discount on Holiday Book Fair purchases!

Read below for more information about the authors and their books!

Reagan: The Life

H. W. Brands

In his magisterial new biography, H. W. Brands brilliantly establishes Ronald Reagan as one of the two great presidents of the twentieth century, a true peer to Franklin Roosevelt. Reagan conveys with sweep and vigor how the confident force of Reagan's personality and the unwavering nature of his beliefs enabled him to engineer a conservative revolution in American politics and play a crucial role in ending communism in the Soviet Union. Reagan shut down the age of liberalism, Brands shows, and ushered in the Age of Reagan, whose defining principles are still powerfully felt today. Employing archival sources not available to previous biographers and drawing on dozens of interviews with surviving members of Reagan's administration, Brands has crafted a richly detailed and fascinating narrative of the presidential years. He offers new insights into Reagan's remote management style and fractious West Wing staff, his deft handling of public sentiment to transform the tax code, and his deeply misunderstood relationship with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, on which nothing less than the fate of the world turned. Reagan is a storytelling triumph, an irresistible portrait of an underestimated politician whose pragmatic leadership and steadfast vision transformed the nation.

H. W. Brands, Reagan: The Life (Penguin Random House, 2015).

Comin' Right at Ya: How a Jewish Yankee Hippie Went Country, or, the Often Outrageous History of Asleep at the Wheel

Ray Benson

A Jewish hippie from Philadelphia starts a Western swing band in 1970, when country fans hate hippies and Western swing. It sounds like a joke, but—more than forty years, twenty-five albums, and nine Grammy Awards later—Asleep at the Wheel still draws crowds around the world. The roster of musicians who’ve shared a stage with the Wheel is a who’s who of American popular music—Van Morrison, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, George Strait, Vince Gill, Lyle Lovett, and so many more. And the bandleader who's brought them all together is Ray Benson. In this hugely entertaining memoir, Benson looks back over his wild ride with Asleep at the Wheel from the band’s beginning in Paw Paw, West Virginia, through its many years as a Texas institution. He vividly recalls decades in a touring band and describes the making of classic albums such as Willie and the Wheel and Tribute to the Music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. The ultimate music industry insider, Benson explains better than anyone else how the Wheel got rock hipsters and die-hard country fans to love groovy new-old Western swing. Decades later, they still do.

Ray Benson and David Menconi, Comin' Right at Ya: How a Jewish Yankee Hippie Went Country, or, the Often Outrageous History of Asleep at the Wheel (University of Texas Press, 2015).

The Train to Crystal City

Jan Jarboe Russell

Jan Jarboe Russell's The Train to Crystal City is the dramatic and never-before-told story of a secret FDR-approved American internment camp in Crystal City, Texas, during World War II, where thousands of families—many U.S. citizens—were incarcerated. During the course of the war, hundreds of prisoners in Crystal City, including their American-born children, were exchanged for other more important Americans—diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, physicians, and missionaries—behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany. Focusing her story on two American-born teenage girls who were interned, Russell uncovers the details of their years spent in the camp; the struggles of their fathers; their families' subsequent journeys to war-devastated Germany and Japan; and their years-long attempt to survive and return to the United States, transformed from incarcerated enemies to American loyalists. Their stories of day-to-day life at the camp, from the ten-foot high security fence to the armed guards, daily roll call, and censored mail, have never been told.

Jan Jarboe Russell, The Train to Crystal City (Scribner, 2015).

The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

Katherine Howe

It's July in New York City, and aspiring filmmaker Wes Auckerman has just arrived to start his summer term at NYU. While shooting a séance at a psychic’s in the East Village, he meets a mysterious, intoxicatingly beautiful girl named Annie. As they start spending time together, Wes finds himself falling for her. There's just something about her that he can’t put his finger on, something faraway and otherworldly that compels him to fall even deeper. Annie's from the city, and yet she seems just as out of place as Wes feels. Lost in the chaos of the busy city streets, she’s been searching for something—a missing ring. And now Annie is running out of time and needs Wes's help. As they search together, Annie and Wes uncover secrets lurking around every corner, secrets that will reveal the truth of Annie's dark past.

Katherine Howe, The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, 2015).

Conversion

Katherine Howe

It’s senior year at St. Joan's Academy, and school is a pressure cooker. College applications, the battle for valedictorian, deciphering boys' texts: Through it all, Colleen Rowley and her friends are expected to keep it together. Until they can't. Only Colleen—who’s been reading The Crucible for extra credit—comes to realize what nobody else has: Danvers was once Salem Village, where another group of girls suffered from a similarly bizarre epidemic three centuries ago. Inspired by true events—from seventeenth-century colonial life to the halls of a modern-day high school—Conversion casts a spell. With her signature wit and passion, New York Times bestselling author Katherine Howe delivers an exciting and suspenseful novel, a chilling mystery that raises the question, what's really happening to the girls at St. Joan's?

Katherine Howe, Conversion (Penguin Random House, 2014).

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane: A Novel

Katherine Howe

A crime lost to time. A secret buried deep. One book unlocks an unimaginable truth. Salem, Massachusetts, 1681. Fear and suspicion lead a small town to unspeakable acts. Marblehead, Massachusetts, 1991. A young woman is about to discover that she is tied to Salem in ways she never imagined.

Katherine Howe, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane: A Novel (Hatchette Book Group, 2010).

Old Silk Road

Brandon Caro

Norman "Doc" Rodgers suspects he won't make it out of this one alive. He's a young combat medic in Afghanistan, eager to avenge his father's death in the World Trade Center and make sense of a new world that feels like it's fallen to pieces. Haunted by hallucinatory encounters, his only solace is a barely concealed addiction to the precious opiates he's supposed to dole out sparingly to those beyond aid. In this tautly plotted debut novel, Brandon Caro, a veteran who served in Afghanistan, tells the story of a soldier's undoing in raw, incendiary, hypnotic prose that forces us to ask ourselves what we know about the futility of war–and what other outcome we can expect?

Brandon Caro, Old Silk Road (Post Hill Press, 2015).

Poet: The Remarkable Story of George Moses Horton

Don Tate

In the nineteenth century, North Carolina slave George Moses Horton taught himself to read and earned money to purchase his time, though not his freedom. Horton became the first African American to be published in the South, protesting slavery in the form of verse.

Don Tate, Poet: The Remarkable Story of George Moses Horton (Peachtree Publishers, 2015).

The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch

Chris Barton and Don Tate, illus.

John Roy Lynch spent most of his childhood as a slave in Mississippi, but all of that changed in 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation. Suddenly, people like John Roy could have paying jobs and attend school. While many people in the South were unhappy with the social change, John Roy thrived in the new era. He was appointed to serve as justice of the peace and was eventually elected into the United States Congress. This biography, with its informative appendix and splendid illustrations, gives readers an in-depth look at the Reconstruction period through the life of one of the first African American congressmen.

Chris Barton and Don Tate, illus., The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch (Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2015).

The Nutcracker Comes to America: How Three Ballet-Loving Brothers Created a Holiday Tradition

Chris Barton

Every December, The Nutcracker comes to life in theaters all across the United States. But how did this nineteenth-century Russian ballet become such a big part of the holidays in twenty-first-century America? Meet William, Harold, and Lew Christensen, three small-town Utah boys who caught the ballet bug from an uncle in the early 1900s. They performed alongside elephants and clowns on vaudeville, immersed themselves in the New York City dance scene, and even put on a ballet featuring gangsters at a gas station. Russian immigrants shared the story of The Nutcracker with them, and during World War II—on a shoestring budget and in need of a hit—they staged their own Christmastime production in San Francisco. It was America's first full-length version and the beginning of a delightful holiday tradition.

Chris Barton and Cathy Gendron, illus., The Nutcracker Comes to America: How Three Ballet-Loving Brothers Created a Holiday Tradition (Millbrook Press Trade, 2015).

All the Houses

Karen Olsson

After her father has a heart attack and subsequent surgery, Helen Atherton returns to her hometown of Washington, DC, to help take care of him and, perhaps more honestly, herself. She's been living in Los Angeles, trying to work in Hollywood, slowly spiraling into a depression fueled by hours spent watching C-SPAN—her obsession with politics a holdover from a childhood interrupted by her father's involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal. Though the rest of the world has forgotten that scandal, the Atherton family never quite recovered. While living with her father in her childhood home, Helen tries to piece together the political moves that pulled her family apart. All the Houses is, at its heart, a father-daughter story. With razor-sharp prose, an alluring objectivity, and a dry sense of humor, Karen Olsson writes about how our family relationships shift when outside forces work their way in, how Washington turns people into unnatural versions of themselves, how problematic and overbearing sisters can be, and how familial nostalgia that sets in during early adulthood can prove counterproductive to actually becoming an adult.

Karen Olsson, All the Houses (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015).

Rules for Werewolves

Kirk Lynn

Kirk Lynn's Rules for Werewolves is a visionary debut novel about shelter, escape, family, violence, and dumpster-diving. It's the story of a restless group of young squatters. They've run away from their families and their pasts, questing after knowledge of their most wild selves, roaming the half-empty suburbs of America, occupying the homes of the foreclosed or vacationing, never staying in one place long enough to attract attention, while shoplifting beer at the local Speedy Stop. They’re building a new society with new laws, and no one will stand in their way. But utopias are hard work, and as Rules for Werewolves unfolds, these young revolutionaries discover that it's much easier to break laws than to enforce them. Narrated in the shifting perspectives of the pack, Rules for Werewolves follows a community of drifters on the move, who seek a life in a wilderness that, by definition, has no room for them, and a freedom for which they may not be entirely prepared.

Kirk Lynn, Rules for Werewolves (Melville House, 2015).

Goodbye, Mexico: Poems of Remembrance

Sarah Cortez, ed.

This anthology gathers the strong voices of accomplished poets reaching into and beyond nostalgia to remember, to honor, and to document through figurative imagery their experiences of Mexico and the vibrant border areas before the ravages of narco-violence.

Sarah Cortez, ed., Goodbye, Mexico: Poems of Remembrance (Texas Review Press, 2015).

We Could Not Fail: The First African Americans in the Space Program

Steven Moss

We Could Not Fail tells the inspiring, largely unknown story of how shooting for the stars helped to overcome segregation on earth. Richard Paul and Steven Moss profile ten pioneer African American space workers whose stories illustrate the role NASA and the space program played in promoting civil rights. They recount how these technicians, mathematicians, engineers, and an astronaut candidate surmounted barriers to move, in some cases literally, from the cotton fields to the launching pad. The authors vividly describe what it was like to be the sole African American in a NASA work group and how these brave and determined men also helped to transform southern society by integrating colleges, patenting new inventions, holding elective office, and reviving and governing defunct towns. Adding new names to the roster of civil rights heroes and a new chapter to the story of space exploration, We Could Not Fail demonstrates how African Americans broke the color barrier by competing successfully at the highest level of American intellectual and technological achievement.

Richard Paul and Steven Moss, We Could Not Fail: The First African Americans in the Space Program (University of Texas Press, 2015).

Speak: A Novel

Louisa Hall

In a narrative that spans geography and time, from the Atlantic Ocean in the seventeenth century, to a correctional institute in Texas in the near future, and told from the perspectives of five very different characters, Louisa Hall's Speak considers what it means to be human, and what it means to be less than fully alive. A young Puritan woman travels to the New World with her unwanted new husband. Alan Turing, the renowned mathematician and code breaker, writes letters to his best friend's mother. A Jewish refugee and professor of computer science struggles to reconnect with his increasingly detached wife. An isolated and traumatized young girl exchanges messages with an intelligent software program. A former Silicon Valley wunderkind is imprisoned for creating illegal lifelike dolls. Each of these characters attempts to communicate across gaps—to estranged spouses, lost friends, future readers, or a computer program that may or may not understand them. In dazzling and electrifying prose, Louisa Hall explores how the chasm between computer and human—shrinking rapidly with today’s technological advances—echoes the gaps that exist between ordinary people.

Louisa Hall, Speak: A Novel (Ecco, 2015).

Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850

Andrew J. Torget

By the late 1810s, a global revolution in cotton had remade the U.S.-Mexico border, bringing wealth and waves of Americans to the Gulf Coast while also devastating the lives and villages of Mexicans in Texas. In response, Mexico threw open its northern territories to American farmers in hopes that cotton could bring prosperity to the region. Thousands of Anglo Americans poured into Texas, but their insistence that slavery accompany them sparked pitched battles across Mexico. An extraordinary alliance of Anglos and Mexicans in Texas came together to defend slavery against abolitionists in the Mexican government, beginning a series of fights that culminated in the Texas Revolution. In the aftermath, Anglo Americans rebuilt the Texas borderlands into the most unlikely creation: the first fully committed slaveholders' republic in North America. Seeds of Empire tells the remarkable story of how the cotton revolution of the early nineteenth century transformed northeastern Mexico into the western edge of the United States and how the rise and spectacular collapse of the Republic of Texas as a nation built on cotton and slavery proved to be a blueprint for the Confederacy of the 1860s.

Andrew J. Torget, Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

Barefoot Dogs: Stories

Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

On an unremarkable night, José Victoriano Arteaga—the head of a thriving Mexico City family—vanishes on his way home from work. The Arteagas find few answers; the full truth of what happened to Arteaga is lost to the shadows of Mexico's vast and desperate underworld, a place of rampant violence, kidnappings, and government corruption. But soon packages arrive to the family house, offering horrifying clues. Fear, guilt, and the prospect of financial ruination fracture the once-proud family and scatter them across the globe, yet delicate threads still hold them together: In a swimming pool in Palo Alto, Arteaga's young grandson struggles to make sense of the grief that has hobbled his family; In Mexico City, Arteaga's mistress alternates between rage and heartbreak as she waits, in growing panic, for her lover's return; In Austin, the Arteagas' housekeeper tries to piece together a second life in an alienating and demeaning new land; In Madrid, Arteaga's son takes his ailing dog through the hot and unforgiving streets, in search of his father's ghost. Antonio Ruiz-Camacho offers an exquisite and intimate evocation of the loneliness, love, hope, and fear that can bind a family even as unspeakable violence tears it apart.

Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, Barefoot Dogs: Stories (Scribner, 2015).

Indelible Austin: Selected Histories

Michael Barnes

Indelible Austin: Selected Histories collects several dozen historical columns written by Michael Barnes and originally published by the Austin American-Statesman. The notion of publishing a book grew out of frequent reader requests for a collected version of these stories, which have not been covered in standard histories of Austin. The columns connect old Austin with new Austin and almost always bring the historical record into the present. Themes include the city's natural settings, built environments, older neighborhoods, ancestral families, and park gems; the meeting of politics, cultures, and charity; and interpretations of how old and new Austin relate. Stories from African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and the LGBT community are all featured.

Michael Barnes, Indelible Austin: Selected Stories (Waterloo Press, 2015).

The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate

Jacqueline Kelly

Callie Vee, Travis, Granddaddy, and the whole Tate clan are back in this charming follow-up to Newbery Honor-winner The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. Travis keeps bringing home strays. And Callie has her hands full keeping the wild animals—her brother included—away from her mother's critical eye. Whether it's wrangling a rogue armadillo or stray dog, a guileless younger brother or standoffish cousin, the trials and tribulations of Callie Vee will have readers laughing and crying and cheering for this most endearing heroine.

Jacqueline Kelly, The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate (Henry Holt and Company, 2015).

In Dylan Town: A Fan's Life

David Gaines

For fifty years, the music, words, story, and fans of Bob Dylan have fascinated David Gaines. A passionate lover of the literary in all its guises, he has pursued the poetic fusion of knowledge and emotion all his life. More often than not, Dylan's lyrics and music have expressed that fusion for him. Gaines's personal journey toward creating communities of passionate knowledge encompasses his own coming of age and marriages, fatherhood, and teaching. As a devoted fan who is also a professor of American literature, questions about teaching and learning are central to his experience. When asked, "Why Dylan?" he says, "He’s the writer I care about the most. He's been the way into the best and longest running conversations I have ever had." Talking with students, exchanging Dylan trivia with fellow fans, or cheering on fan-musicians doing Dylan covers during the Dylan Days festival, Gaines shows that, for many people, being a fan of popular culture couples serious critical and creative engagement with heartfelt commitment. Here, largely unheralded, the ideal of liberal education is realized every day.

David Gaines, In Dylan Town: A Fan’s Life (University of Iowa Press, 2015).

Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman

Elizabeth Harris

Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman is a literary novel with a historical setting that engages issues of gender, vigilantism, recovery from trauma, and nostalgia for the rural and small-town past. Two stock-farmers in 1936 Texas are accused of castrating a neighbor. Mayhem is the story of their crime and its consequences—the violent past and standard gender relations that enable it and its economic displacement of the modest, well-connected woman who occasions it. Around the edges of the story, an authorial narrator admits why she fictionalizes this past and shapes the novel as she does.

Elizabeth Harris, Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman (Gival Press, 2015).

Generations of Texas Poets

Dave Oliphant

Dave Oliphant is widely considered the finest poetry critic ever produced by Texas. This volume brings together some forty years of essays, articles, and reviews on the topic of Texas poetry—addressing its history as well as individual poets and their books. In 1971, Larry McMurtry famously decried the lack of good Texas poetry; Oliphant has spent a lifetime nurturing it, publishing it, and has become its best critic.

Dave Oliphant, Generations of Texas Poets (Wings Press, 2015).

Invisible in Austin: Life and Labor in an American City

Javier Auyero

Austin, Texas, is renowned as a high-tech, fast-growing city for the young and creative. But as in many American cities, rich and poor residents lead increasingly separate lives as growing socioeconomic inequality underscores residential, class, racial, and ethnic segregation. In Invisible in Austin, award-winning sociologist Javier Auyero and a team of graduate students explore the lives of those at the bottom of the social order: house cleaners, office-machine repairers, cab drivers, restaurant cooks and dishwashers, exotic dancers, musicians, and roofers. Recounting their subjects' life stories with empathy and sociological insight, the authors show us how these lives are driven by a complex mix of individual and social forces. These poignant stories compel us to see how poor people who provide indispensable services for all city residents struggle daily with substandard housing, inadequate public services and schools, and environmental risks. Timely and essential reading, Invisible in Austin makes visible the growing gap between rich and poor that is reconfiguring the cityscape of one of America’s most dynamic places, as low-wage workers are forced to the social and symbolic margins. Contributors Caitlyn Collins and Katherine Jensen will join Javier Auyero at the Holiday Book Fair.

Javier Auyero, Invisible in Austin: Life and Labor in an American City (University of Texas Press, 2015).

Picturing Texas Politics: A Photographic History from Sam Houston to Rick Perry

Chuck Bailey

Over the course of nearly two centuries, Texas politicians have provided reliable, often dramatic, and sometimes larger-than-life subjects for photographers. Picturing Texas Politics presents the first photographic album of Texas politicians and political campaigns ever assembled. Chuck Bailey has searched archives, museums, libraries, and private collections to find photographs that have never been published, as well as iconic images, such as Russell Lee's pictures of one of Ralph Yarborough's campaigns. These photographs are arranged into four chronological sections, each one introduced by historian Patrick Cox, who also provides informative photo captions. The photographs display power and political savvy from the early Republic to Lyndon Johnson and Bob Bullock; unmatched dedication to Texas in the Hobby and Bush families; and the growing influence of women in politics, from Miriam "Ma" Ferguson to Barbara Jordan, Ann Richards, and Kay Bailey Hutchison. With Sam Houston's jaguar vest, W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel's hillbilly band, a famous governor with an ostrich, and prominent Texans eating watermelons, shooting guns, and riding horses, this is Texas politics at its liveliest and best.

Chuck Bailey, Picturing Texas Politics: A Photographic History from Sam Houston to Rick Perry (University of Texas Press, 2015).

Wish Girl

Nikki Loftin

A dying girl gives a boy the strength to live in this lyrical novel that will break your heart and lift your spirit. Peter Stone's parents and siblings are extroverts, musicians, and yellers—and the louder they get, the less Peter talks, or even moves, until he practically fits his last name. When his family moves to the Texas Hill Country, though, Peter finds a tranquil, natural valley where he can, at last, hear himself think. There, he meets a girl his age: Annie Blythe. Annie tells Peter she's a "wish girl." But Annie isn’t just any wish girl; she’s a "Make-A-Wish Girl." And in two weeks she will begin a dangerous treatment to try and stop her cancer from spreading. Left alone, the disease will kill her. But the treatment may cause serious, lasting damage to her brain. Annie and Peter hatch a plan to escape into the valley, which they begin to think is magical. But the pair soon discovers that the valley—and life—may have other plans for them. And sometimes wishes come true in ways they would never expect.

Nikki Loftin, Wish Girl (Razorbill, 2015).

Nightingale's Nest

Nikki Loftin

Twelve-year-old John Fischer Jr., or "Little John" as he's always been known, is spending his summer helping his father with his tree removal business, clearing brush for Mr. King, the wealthy owner of a chain of Texas dollar stores, when he hears a beautiful song that transfixes him. He follows the melody and finds, not a bird, but a young girl sitting in the branches of a tall sycamore tree. There's something magical about this girl, Gayle, especially her soaring singing voice, and Little John's friendship with Gayle quickly becomes the one bright spot in his life, for his home is dominated by sorrow over his sister's death and his parents' ever-tightening financial difficulties. But then Mr. King draws Little John into an impossible choice—forced to choose between his family's survival and a betrayal of Gayle that puts her future in jeopardy. Inspired by a Hans Christian Andersen story, Nightingale's Nest is an unforgettable novel about a boy with the weight of the world on his shoulders and a girl with the gift of healing in her voice.

Nikki Loftin, Nightingale's Nest (Razorbill, 2014).

Allie Victoria Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas

Light Townsend Cummins

At Fair Park in Dallas, a sculpture of a Native American figure, bronze with gilded gold leaf, strains a bow before sending an arrow into flight. Tejas Warrior has welcomed thousands of visitors since the Texas Centennial Exposition opened in the 1930s. The iconic piece is instantly recognizable, yet few people know about its creator: Allie Victoria Tennant, one of a notable group of Texas artists who actively advanced regionalist art in the decades before World War II. Light Townsend Cummins follows Tennant's public career from the 1920s to the 1960s, both as an artist and as a culture-bearer, as she advanced cultural endeavors, including the arts. A true pathfinder, she helped to create and nurture art institutions that still exist today, most especially the Dallas Museum of Art, on whose board of trustees she sat for almost thirty years. Tennant also worked on behalf of other civic institutions, including the public schools, art academies, and the State Fair of Texas, where she helped create the Women's Building. Allie Victoria Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas sheds new light on an often overlooked artist.

Light Townsend Cummins, Allie Victoria Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas (Texas A&M University Press, 2015).