About this Collection
The books archived in this Georgia Southern Commons collection are published or edited by the faculty of the Department of Writing and Linguistics.Faculty Research in Georgia Southern Commons
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Publishing Information
GS Commons is an open-access digital repository. Copyright and licensing agreements for works published by GS Commons protect the author's rights while facilitating the sharing of research. The works in this gallery were originally published or presented under agreements with entities external to this repository. Records for each work provide the access permitted by the original copyright and licensing agreement. For additional access or questions about a work, please contact the authors or email the GS Commons team.
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The Anxiety Workbook
Christina Olson, Georgia Southern University
1-2023
Georgia southern faculty member, Christina Olson published The Anxiety Workbook.
The Anxiety Workbook explores contemporary anxiety, grief in its multitude of forms, and complicated familial dynamics via the lens of science and history while utilizing the language of therapy. These poems grapple with the ever-evolving collective and individual trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as seek answers and lessons from the natural world. The termination of a pregnancy, a distant father, the untimely death of a friend, our society’s obsession with Dateline and missing white girls, the estivation of the West African lungfish—The Anxiety Workbook covers these topics ... Read more
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Journal of Second Language Writing: Special Issue on L2 Writing Assessment in the Digital Age
Jinrong Li, Georgia Southern University and Mimi Li, Texas A & M University - Commerce
2022
The Special Issue on L2 Writing Assessment in the Digital Age was edited by Georgia Southern faculty member Jinrong Li and Mimi Li.
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After Life as a Human
Laura Valeri, Georgia Southern University
11-1-2020
Located off of Florida's Forgotten Coast, Dog Island is a wild twin of St. George Island, a popular resort destination. Unlike St. George, however, Dog Island hosts less than 100 residents and a large nature preserve. Accessible only by boat or airplane, the island's pristine state attracts those who seek reprieve from the noise of modern life and those drawn to an ancient paradise untouched by commercial enterprises. Yet, with sea-level rising, industrial spills poisoning the wildlife, and climate change increasing the frequency of hurricanes, Dog Island is swiftly becoming a paradise lost, another casualty of humanity's reluctance to acknowledge ... Read more
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American Public Memory and the Holocaust: Performing Gender, Shifting Orientations
Lisa A. Costello, Georgia Southern University
10-2019
The recent rise of global antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and American white nationalism has created a dangerous challenge to Holocaust public memory on an unprecedented scale. This book is a timely exploration of the ways in which next-generation Holocaust survivors combine old and new media to bring newer generations of audiences into active engagement with Holocaust histories. Readers have been socialized to expect memorialization artifacts about the Holocaust to come in the form of diaries, memoirs, photos, or documentaries in which gender is often absent or marginalized. This book shows a complex process of remembering the past that can positively shift ... Read more
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The Last Mastodon
Christina Olson, Georgia Southern University
2019
In summer of 2017, Christina Olson was invited to serve as poet-in-residence for apaleontology conference and exhibition (“The Valley of the Mastodons”) at the Western Science Center in Hemet, California. These poems, exploring the nature of history, assembly, and ownership, were inspired by that time spent among the paleontologists as well as Olson’s observations of the museum’s collections of fossils, particularly Max the Mastodon.
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L’Isola del Silenzio
Laura Valeri, Georgia Southern University
2019
Non occorre spostarsi troppo per viaggiare molto. Sette miglia, appena, nelle acque verdeazzurre del Golfo del Messico, a bordo di un traghetto che fa la spola tra il villaggio costiero di Carrabelle e la sottile striscia di terra di Dog Island. In questo lembo quasi intatto della Florida meridionale, battuto da ricorrenti uragani, privo di negozi, refrattario a connessioni internet e abitato da un centinaio di coraggiosi residenti, approdano una scrittrice americana di antica stirpe mediterranea e il suo compagno fotografo. È il contesto ideale per lasciarsi alle spalle l’esasperato efficientismo del Sogno Americano e ascoltare il silenzio, scoprendo quel ... Read more
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Assessment Across Online Language Education
Stephanie Link, Oklahoma State University and Jinrong Li, Georgia Southern University
2-26-2018
Georgia Southern faculty member Jinrong Li co-authored Assessment Across Online Language Education.
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The Dead Still Here
Laura E. Valeri, Georgia Southern University
6-5-2018
Book Summary: Mapping stories set in Europe and America, The Dead Still Here skillfully paces through eleven short stories about friends-with-benefits typed relationships, vicious divorces and thievery, the loss of a child, the loss of a mother, and the Coast Guard and the Navy rescuing refugees from a bad storm at sea. Laura Valeri writes one single breathtaking sentence about sex, Dear John emails, and Christmas presents in “Liabilities of a Love Misguided” and displays a sharp sense of paranoia based on everyone looking at the narrator, laughing, whispering in “What They Know.” Along with characters that are irrevocably locked ... Read more
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The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage
Jared Yates Sexton, Georgia Southern University
8-15-2017
"An impressionistic and often disturbing account of the 2016 presidential race . . . Sexton grapples with the Trump campaign from the perspective of the crowds reveling in the candidate's presence and message. It is a useful vantage point given the increasingly blatant bigotry in the months since the election . . . This book reveals the incremental nature of public displays of hatred, growing from harsh chants and bumper stickers to, say, an open and unmasked gathering of white supremacists in Charlottesville . . . His] dispatches are bracing." --The Washington Post
When he agreed to cover the 2016 ... Read more
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I Am the Oil of the Engine of the World
Jared Yates Sexton, Georgia Southern University
2-23-2016
Narcissism. Sexism. Consumerism and technological fetishism. The cult of media and the rot of war. In his third collection of stories, Jared Yates Sexton turns his eye to the ravages of the American Disease with twenty-five of his wildest and most experimental pieces. Told in raving mad prose fit for these savage times, Sexton skewers every sacred cow in an attempt to diagnose the sickness of Now.
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WOVENText: Georgia Tech’s Custom Bedford Book of Genres
Lisa Dusenberry, Georgia Southern University
8-2015
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Bring Me The Head of Yorkie Goodman
Jared Yates Sexton, Georgia Southern University
2-19-2015
“Who’s Yorkie Goodman?” asks Wallace, an enforcer for an East Coast drug cartel. “Just a fella” says his boss, who goes by the name Boss. Just a fella … but Boss wants Yorkie Goodman taken out. He wants it so badly, he’ll risk sending Wallace into Wallace’s own past where a beautiful woman he abandoned years before still holds a bewitching power over him like some ancient siren song. He wants it so badly, he's sending along his deadliest assassin, Carp, to make sure the job is done right. And he wants proof … proof in the form of Goodman’s ... Read more
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The Hook and The Haymaker
Jared Yates Sexton, Georgia Southern University
1-5-2015
In the follow-up to his critically lauded debut An End To All Things, Jared Yates Sexton presents twenty-three new stories that pick up where his first book left off. Whether they're set in a sweat-saturated sparring ring, the backroom of a gas station speakeasy, or in the kitchen of the house down the street, these are glimpses into an America that too-often goes unseen. Witness here the untold tales of the losers and the should've-beens, the dreamers and the hustlers, all of them just spoiling for their turn at glory or the inevitable one-two punch that puts them down for ... Read more
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Safe in Your Head
Laura E. Valeri, Georgia Southern University
8-2-2013
Book Summary: A middle class Italian family finds reason to immigrate to America when Italy is threatened by the Red Brigades’ terrorist movement of the 1970s. The family patriarch manages a transfer to the United States, certain of better prospects and of a more secure future for his family, but each of the family members experiences a deeper kind of upheaval, negotiating personal losses and estrangement. A grandmother, a mother, and a granddaughter each discovers the many insidious ways in which war warps and defines life, even at a distance of decades.
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An End to All Things
Jared Yates Sexton, Georgia Southern University
12-21-2012
When Jared Yates Sexton finished his MFA and returned to his hometown in Indiana, he found a population plagued by the kind of turmoil and tension usually reserved for fiction. Unemployment and uncertainty lurked everywhere he looked. In his debut story collection, this pervasive turbulence tilts into the fantastical as we observe the inspired, absurd, and even horrific moments in the lives of lost and luckless Midwesterners looking for something to believe in.
Through language that's both striking and unassuming, Sexton creates a dangerous and disturbing world in which everything and everyone teeters precariously on the edge of total chaos; ... Read more
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Motives for Metaphor in Scientific and Technical Communication
Timothy D. Giles, Georgia Southern University
2008
Examination of the work of scientific icons-Newton, Descartes, and others-reveals the metaphors and analogies that directed their research and explain their discoveries. Today, scientists tend to balk at the idea of their writing as rhetorical, much less metaphorical. How did this schism over metaphor occur in the scientific community? To establish that scientists should use metaphors to explain science to the public and need to be conscious of how metaphor can be useful to their research, this book examines the controversy over cloning and the lack of a metaphor to explain it to a public fearful of science's power.The disjunction ... Read more
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The Kind of Things Saints Do
Laura E. Valeri, Georgia Southern University
8-21-2002
Book Summary: “I believe that what people yearn for in love is to have their lives made numinous by the immortal vision of their gods,” writes Laura Valeri, winner of the 2002 John Simmons Short Fiction Award. The yearning desires, stifling limitations, and hard consequences of human affection are all realities explored in The Kind of Things Saints Do, Valeri's chronicle of men and women overwhelmed in their loneliness and isolation.
From the Anglo-American woman who makes a spectacle of herself trying to be Cuban in Miami to the estranged son leading his father on a hostile hike in New ... Read more
