University of Arkansas Press

Now Available! In the Shade of the Pine: Artists, Writers, and Trees in America, 1825-1876 by Christiana Payne “In the Shade of the Pine is an important book. In concise essays on the practices of close observation shared by five nineteenth-century landscape painters and two naturalist writers, the author interrogates ideas and cultural attitudes that persist today in our era of acute climate awareness. Newly settled and absent of the Old World’s monuments, the vast forests still to be found in America were embraced as a claim to national identity, venerated as spiritual retreats, and recognized as complex ecological environments. Well-written and well-documented, Payne’s book presents iconic works freshly perceived with ecocritical insights.” —Linda S. Ferber

Now available! The Metal of a Thousand Uses: Mercury Mining in Arkansas, 1930–1946 by Terry S. Reynolds The Metal of a Thousand Uses is a definitive history of an industry that once seemed so promising, yet totally collapsed in just a decade and a half. The text moves beyond events in the Ouachita Mountains to examine mercury mining around the world, demonstrating how the Great Depression, World War II, and shifting quicksilver markets shaped the fate of a mineral district in a poor state seeking industrial growth. Terry S. Reynolds’s book tells us how enthusiasm can be thwarted in many ways, ending up in disappointment and failure.” —Larry Lankton

Now Available! “The Weather Inside is a beautiful and incisive collection. I love how patient the poems of Stevie Edwards are, how closely they attend to image and the unfolding of the heart. This book is teeming with moments that function as mirrors.” —Hanif Abdurraqib /product/the-weather-inside/

Now Available! Rogue Astronaut by Mitchell Jacobs, a finalist for the 2026 Miller Williams Poetry Prize. “In Mitchell Jacobs’s stunning debut, Rogue Astronaut, we’re invited to ask what the future holds for us in this age of ‘the earth’s vendetta / against flesh, which it punishes / and punishes then decomposes.’ These poems are meditations on the nature of the body as we struggle with our corporeal pleasures and failures even while imagining some future deliverance of a newly forged incorporeal self. These remarkable poems of human reckoning with fear and desire stand at the intersection of David Bowie’s Space Oddity and Frank Bidart’s The Book of the Body. The raw inner spaces of Jacobs’s poems are by turns both luminous and ominous, yet his vision is deeply intimate, and the universe he travels remains irreducibly human.” –David St. John /product/rogue-astronaut/

Now Available! Domestica by Samuel Piccone, winner of the 2026 Miller Williams Poetry Prize. “Samuel Piccone’s debut collection, Domestica, is a field study of the quiet, (extra)ordinary labors that hold a family together. With a voice at once tender and devastatingly funny, Domestica lays bare the grit that is commitment beyond the dress and party: the urgent loneliness of marriage, the metamorphic bewilderment of fatherhood, the ferocious mundanity of love, love that exhausts and endures, love that is all. These poems illuminate the private realm as it is, as it really is, with radiant honesty—to read them is like looking into a house at night with its windows lit up.” —Leila Chatti, author of Wildness Before Something Sublime /product/domestica/

Hot off the press! If you're at AWP, stop by Booth 731 to pick up your copy of The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. Not at AWP? Visit /product/battlefield/ to order.

“The book offers an excellent tour through the life of Moroles and her community. It often reads like a history of the community, and that is not a bad thing. Historians who work on the modern Ozarks will find this book indispensable, and non-specialists will find it fascinating.” —Brian McGowan, Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Spring/Summer 2024 (published February 2026) “Águila is an important contribution and the text’s candor, and collaboration, will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students within religious studies and anthropology. Águila’s story is powerful, as is its pedagogy, demonstrating how women have always played a vital role in shamanism.” —Tarryl Janik, Nova Religio, vol. 29, no. 3 (2026)

Who is heading to AWP this week? Stop by UA Press Booth 731 on Friday, March 6 to meet this year's Miller Williams Poetry Prize winners and pick up signed copies of their books!

Available for the first time in paperback! Originally published in 1924 and long out of print, this book tells the story of the Mosaic Templars of America (MTA), a famous Black fraternal organization that was founded by John E. Bush and Chester W. Keatts (both former slaves) in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the late-nineteenth century. The organization originally provided illness, death, and burial insurance during an era of segregation when few basic services were available to Black people, and grew to include an insurance company, a building and loan association, a publishing company, a business college, a nursing school, and a hospital. By 1905 it had a number of lodges across the state of Arkansas with thousands of members. In 1913 a handsome new headquarters building opened and Booker T. Washington delivered the dedication speech. In the 1920s they claimed chapters in twenty-six states and six foreign countries, making it one of the largest Black organizations in the world. However, in the 1930s the MTA began to feel the effects of the Great Depression and eventually ceased operations except for a single chapter in Barbados. Tragically, the original Little Rock headquarters building burned down in 2005. This replica edition of History of the Mosaic Templars of America, with a new introduction by John William Graves, was published to coincide with the grand opening in 2008 of a completely rebuilt structure that houses the new Mosaic Templars Cultural Center.

Do it. (And come grab a button from us at AWP.)

Available in paperback for the first time! “Jean Sizemore begins her study on the traditional dwellings of Arkansas Ozarks with the painful observation that ‘time is running out for the ordinary and unpretentious houses’ of the region. With the loss of buildings comes the loss of an irreplaceable body of historical evidence, with the potential for providing unparalleled insight into the society and culture of a distinctive American landscape. Thus, Sizemore’s exploration of Ozark architecture provides both a survey of vernacular houses and an attempt to interpret the significance of those buildings within a larger landscape context. Based on extensive fieldwork and oral history interviews, Sizemore’s contribution increases our sense of the building traditions of a still little understood area of the upland South.” —Bernard Herman, American Historical Review

The Arkansas Gazette began with a printing press being floated up the Arkansas River in 1819. Until its demise following a long, bitter, and very public newspaper war in 1991, it was inextricably linked with the state’s history, reporting on every major Arkansas event. Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette, knowledgeably and intimately edited by longtime Gazette reporter Roy Reed, comprises interviews from over one hundred former Gazette staffers recalling the stories they reported on and the people they worked with from the late forties to the paper’s end. The result is a nostalgic and justifiably admiring look back at a progressive newspaper that, after winning two Pulitzers for its brave rule-of-law stance during the Little Rock Central High Crisis, was considered one of the country’s greatest. The interviews, collected from archives at the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History at the University of Arkansas, provide fascinating details on renowned editors and reporters such as Harry Ashmore, Orville Henry, and Charles Portis, journalists who wrote daily on Arkansas’s always-colorful politicians, its tragic disasters and sensational crimes, its civil rights crises, Bill Clinton, the Razorbacks sports teams, and much more. Full of humor and little-known details, Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette is a fascinating remembrance of a great newspaper. Available in paperback, April 2026.