Zanes: “He made this strange record right at a point where, career-wise, he could have gone from stardom to superstardom.”

For more than 50 years, Bruce Springsteen has been the people’s rock star. Hit songs like the hopeful “Promised Land” and the anthemic “Born in the U.S.A.” are homages to the working class from one of their own. But it’s Nebraska, the unfiltered, unapologetic, unyielding album recorded in a rented farmhouse on rudimentary equipment, on which Springsteen lays his humanity bare. In Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, musician and historian Warren Zanes MA’95 breaks down the record and follows the many lives it’s lived since its quiet 1982 debut.

“Nebraska was a recording that was really close to me,” Zanes says. “I would return to it particularly when there was trouble in my life, but it was a recording that I still didn’t understand.”

The follow up to Springsteen’s first number one album (The River) and first top 10 single (“Hungry Heart”), Nebraska was an anomaly. Recorded on convenience-store cassettes, it could not be mixed or mastered, much less played on FM radio. The songs were gray and gritty, with characters who sat in electric chairs instead of Cadillacs and pleaded with state troopers instead of “Sherry darling.” It was released without promotion and to much puzzlement.

“He made this strange record right at a point where, career-wise, he could have gone from stardom to superstardom,” Zanes says. In Deliver Me from Nowhere, Zanes interviews individuals whose lives were touched by Nebraska — from fellow artists who credit it as an inspiration to Springsteen himself — to answer the questions that have haunted the album for more than four decades.

Zanes’s book was adapted into a major motion picture, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. It premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in August and was released in theaters in October.

Benevolent spirits bring magical realism to Fajardo’s story of tracing one’s roots.

Dolores “Dorrie” Moore has always heard voices. It started with the death of her grandmother when Dorrie was a child, and at 35, Dorrie’s accrued a Greek chorus of deceased relatives opining on her life like omniscient narrators. In Anika Fajardo ’97’s The Many Mothers of Dolores Moore, these benevolent spirits guide Dorrie on a journey of self-discovery that brings her closer to her roots — and to the women who raised her.

“Mothers and mother figures are powerful, and that’s where the idea for this novel came from,” Fajardo said at an event at Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis. “[It was] born out of the memory of my own grandmother’s voice in my ear.”

It’s a deathbed promise to her mother — her last living rela- tive — that sends Dorrie from Minnesota, the only home she’s ever known, to Colombia, her birthplace, and a land as foreign to her as this new life alone. But since she’s recently laid off, newly single, and without family ties, there are few reasons for Dorrie not to trace her ancestry across the globe — and plenty of familiar voices to accompany her along the way.

“Sometimes we need to tunnel into the past in order to find our way forward,” writes author Lindsay Starck. “Anika Fajardo’s The Many Mothers of Dolores Moore is a vibrant, expansive, warm- hearted novel about the places that shape us, the loved ones who never leave us, and all the wrong turns that eventually bring us right back to where we belong.”

Fajardo is the author of Minnesota Book Award finalist Magical Realism for Non-Believers, a memoir of her own experience return- ing to her birthplace of Colombia and finding family. She’s also written the children’s books Meet Me Halfway and What If a Fish.

Butler’s novel was inspired by a conversation overheard in a Wisconsin bar.

Nickolas Butler ’02 was sitting at a bar in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, when he overheard the exchange — and witnessed the kiss — that inspired his most recent novel.

Butler may not have caught the names of the reunited couple at the bar, but in A Forty Year Kiss, they’re Charlie and Vivian, who married young and gave it four years before filing for divorce. Forty years later, Charlie is still battling old demons when he lands back in Wisconsin, intent on reconnecting with Vivian and righting the wrongs of their youth. Forty years is a lot of time to make up for — but how long is too long for true love, and what would you give up for it?

The romantic Forty Year Kiss is a thematic departure from Butler’s most recent work, 2021’s literary thriller Godspeed. But the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel Shotgun Lovesongs is no stranger to a love story, and the western-Wisconsin writer infuses as much local flavor into this novel as he does sincerity and care for his characters.

“I don’t need to do a lot of research to write a book about Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin,” he told the Chicago Review of Books. “It was going to be a book I could write passionately.”

According to reviewers, Butler’s confidence was not mis- placed: “Its Midwest is weathered and described with affection and restraint; its people are presented whole and in context, the seldom-seen brought into vivid focus, their yearnings and failings intact,” writes New York Times bestselling author Leif Enger. “A Forty Year Kiss has the courage to suggest it’s not too late — for romance, or transcendence, or just to be better.”

Fayne’s novel explores spirituality, sacrifice, and salvation.

Just before the introduction to his debut novel, The Devil Three Times, Rickey Fayne includes a Laurent family tree. To Fayne’s reader, this is a helpful tool for keeping track of the book’s characters across its timeline. To Fayne’s Devil, the family tree is a map to salvation.

The book opens with Yetunde, a young girl on a slave ship bound for the United States who strikes a bargain with the Devil in order to survive what lies ahead of her. For generations to come, the Devil continues to visit Yetunde’s descendants — the Laurent family — offering them his own version of redemption in their darkest moments in pursuit of his own reentry into heaven.

The Devil Three Times is deeply rooted in Fayne’s personal experience as the born-and-raised West Tennesseean draws on Black spiritual traditions and the oral histories of the Black diaspora.

“With a voice and rhythm that zip and twang like our best-loved Black folktales, this epic family saga unfurls with tender precision, illuminating the dark and light of our very human natures to profound effect,” writes Dantiel Moniz MFA’18, UW assistant professor of English and author of Milk Blood Heat.

“This is a page-turning, rollicking novel that is both an intimate family saga and an elegy for the American experience,” writes New York Times bestselling author Nathan Harris. “This is what literature is all about.”

Fayne is a faculty member in the UW’s Department of English.

The Cates Family Farm is an example of how people and places can thrive together.

What started with good earth and elbow grease has grown into a lifelong lesson in gratitude for Richard Cates PhD’83. In A Creek Runs through This Driftless Land: A Farm Family’s Journey toward a Land Ethic, Cates tells the story of the place that has cared for his family for generations and their commitment to returning the favor.

Cates’s father purchased the farm in Spring Green, Wisconsin, in 1967, and Cates and his siblings grew up working the land and making bucolic memories in their Driftless-region valley. After leaving Wisconsin for his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, Cates and his wife, Kim MS’83, landed at the UW, where he completed his doctorate in soil sciences before returning to the soil that raised him.

In A Creek Runs through This Driftless Land, Cates reflects on the 30-year process of transforming his family farm from a “110-acre thistle patch to a beautiful perennial grassland.” He recounts the history that predates his family’s residency, from the Indigenous peoples who first called the valley home to the European settlers who displaced them, before delving into the Cates family’s commitment to conservation and the philosophies that guide their stewardship.

As a result of their efforts, the Cates Family Farm is decorated with eco-friendly accolades. In 2006, they were the first beef farm in the country to receive certification from the Animal Welfare Institute. In 2013, they received the Leopold Conservation Award from the Sand County Foundation and Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation. They are founding members of two local watershed protection groups, and in 2020, Lowery Creek, which flows for three-and-a-half miles through the Cates farmland, was elevated to a Class 1 trout stream.

“There could not be a more important time to revisit the process of restoring ourselves and each other by learning to understand, care for, and restore land,” wrote Jed Meunier MS’05, an ecologist and great-grandson of conservationist Aldo Leopold. “This book gives us a beautiful example of this process and reminds us that a land ethic is not simply a concept or philosophy, but a process of humanity, care, and hope.”

Small’s message to fellow adoptees is rooted in experience and empathy.

Cameron Lee Small ’12, MS’16 wants you to know that he was a son before he was adopted. He wants you to know that when he left Korea for an upbringing in Wisconsin, he left behind histories, connections, and cultures whose absences he would feel throughout his life, even when he didn’t have the language to describe them. And he wants you to know that while no two adoptee stories are the same, his experiences and emotions are all too common in the adoptee community — so he wrote a book about it.

In The Adoptee’s Journey: From Loss and Trauma to Healing and Empowerment, Small creates space for adoptees to process the lifelong experience of carrying “multiple stories” by highlighting the dissonance between the overwhelmingly positive narrative around adoption and the fraught realities of those affected by it.

“From the moment we are ‘adopted into a loving family,’ to when we embrace our own meanings and relationships as adults, adoptees might be objectified, scrutinized, infantilized, and later criticized for asking questions and forming thoughts that don’t conform to the traditional pattern of ‘adoption is love,’ ” Small writes in the book’s prologue. “To be an adoptee is to be separated from someone and something. Our journey includes the process of learning how to sit with that discomfort.”

He draws heavily upon his own life, including his search for and reunion with his birth mother in Korea, along with testimonies from his work as a therapist, camp counselor, and advocate in the adoptee community. He presented his concept of “adoption literacy,” a way for communities to better support adoptees, in a 2024 TEDx talk titled “Why Adoptees Need a New Kind of Village.” Small is the founder of Therapy Redeemed in Minneapolis.

Schuettpelz explores a Native American person’s questions about belonging.

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz MFA’18 is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, and she has the card to prove it. But for some Native Americans, claiming their tribal identity can be far more complicated. In The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America, Schuettpelz examines the disparity between the number of Americans who claim Native heritage and those enrolled in tribes; the qualifications for tribal membership according to federal guidelines; and the challenges of identity within Indigenous communities.

Schuettpelz analyzes the ways in which the federal government controls membership in sovereign tribal nations by imposing standards, such as blood quantum, that effectively serve as tools of Native erasure. She interviews other Indigenous people about their efforts to develop their Native identity outside of the bureaucratic definitions of belonging and reflects on her own experiences with enrollment for herself and her children.

“Every person carries multiple identities. … And I know that blood cannot be divided into fractions like an apple — clean-cut and cored; separate and distinct pieces of a whole,” Schuettpelz writes. “But the validation; the evidence: I can’t shake the feeling that this is unique to Native people. That we, uniquely, have been forced into needing to constantly prove our identities to ourselves and others.”

For her work on The Indian Card, Schuettpelz was awarded a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, which recognizes ambitious and essential nonfiction book projects. She is an associate professor of practice and director of undergraduate studies at the University of Iowa’s School of Planning and Public Affairs and was previously a policy adviser in the Obama administration focusing on homelessness and tribal policy.

The book sheds light on the enduring consequences of slavery and systemic racism.

When Lee Hawkins was young, he witnessed his father’s rage in response to wrongdoing. Thirty years later, Hawkins recognizes it as a product of the fear and violence that have followed his family for generations. In I Am Nobody’s Slave: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free, Hawkins identifies the brutality and oppression imposed upon each generation of his family and their undeterred pursuit of the American dream.

As a child in suburban Minnesota, Hawkins knew about the hardships his father faced growing up in Jim Crow–era Alabama. But his research uncovered the violent deaths that occurred in every generation of his family since slavery, including the murder of his great-grandfather when his grandmother was just nine years old. Using genetic testing and historical data, he saw how systemic racism and chronic stress shortened the lives of his ancestors, how the weight of these collective tragedies was passed down, and how his family forged a life in America despite it.

“It was really the ancestors, people who are now ancestors who passed away after giving these interviews, that pushed me along and said it’s important for you to do this,” Hawkins told Minnesota Public Radio in May 2024. “And mainly because of [my great-grandfather] and the fact that he was murdered 100 years ago … by a white man who was never brought to justice. Now I’m a journalist, and I have the power to tell this story.”

Hawkins is also the creator of What Happened in Alabama?, a limited-series podcast in which he examines the intergenerational effects of slavery in his family and his efforts to heal from them. He spent nearly two decades with the Wall Street Journal, where he was most recently a news editor and on-camera reporter. In 2022, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist as the lead reporter on a story series about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

From rambutan to waffles, the book’s bounty invites readers to a feast of food for thought.

In her latest essay collection, Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees, Aimee Nezhukumatathil greets her readers, takes their coats, and pulls up a chair. She welcomes them to indulge in a smorgasbord of stories that start with food and that spill into every other facet of life that’s nourished by it. Naturally, she starts at home.

“For what is home if not the first place you learn what does and does not nourish you?” Nezhukumatathil asks in the introduction to Bite by Bite. “The first place you learn to sit still and slow down when someone offers you a bite to eat?”

From here, she guides her readers through a gastronomic examination of the unparalleled power of food and flavor to create associations, evoke memories, trace histories, and tell stories. Rambutan is unruly, much like the author’s curly tresses and her teenage rebellion. Mango is a family tree with roots that cross oceans. Through vignettes steeped in sentiment and finished with thoughtful reflection, Nezhukumatathil invites us to eat, taste, and remember with her.

“[Bite by Bite] uses food to talk about what it means to be human — to love, to learn, to laugh, to lose,” writes Clint Smith, author of the 2022–23 Go Big Read book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America. “Nezhukumatathil’s writing has changed the way I look at food and made me infinitely more grateful for those whom I share it with.”

Nezhukumatathil was the 2000–01 Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow in the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and is the author of the New York Times best-selling essay collection World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments. She is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Mississippi.

The contents of a kid’s pockets after a day of play become works of art.

For Mary Jo Hoffman ’87, morning walks aren’t times to zone out, but rather to pay attention. In Still: The Art of Noticing, Hoffman compiles more than a decade’s worth of found objects and keen observations in a volume that invites readers to stop and stay a while in its pages, and to do some noticing of their own.

Still began on January 1, 2012. After leaving her 17-year career in aerospace engineering, Hoffman committed to capturing one image per day of an object in nature, which she shared on her blog, stillblog.net. Her photos celebrate the varied ecosystems of her Shoreview, Minnesota, home: a radiant ladder of sumac branches, a summer windowsill’s worth of dead insects, a gradient of dried flowers, and a mesmerizing arrangement of fruit pits.

“Dear Universe,” the pit post begins, “I’ve got a lot on my plate right now. And you seem to want to keep adding more. Please know that I will do my best, but that [at] the moment my plate [is] full. … If your needs are urgent, you may want to find another solution.”

Over 12 years, Hoffman’s blog has garnered the attention of Martha Stewart, Better Homes & Gardens, and Midwest Living. It has inspired collaborations with Target, West Elm, the United States Botanic Garden, and the Scottish National Opera. Now in print, Still brings Hoffman’s sharp eye and earthy wisdom to home libraries.

“What four thousand images (and counting) have shown me is that the daily discipline of looking at the world eventually becomes the habit of living in the world,” Hoffman writes.

In Still’s insightful essays, topics range from the philosophies behind her work to “The 72 Microseasons of the North,” based on a concept from an ancient Japanese seasonal calendar.

“The images are stunning. … But don’t skip past the words,” writes Hannah Agran of Midwest Living. “Hoffman’s intimate, engaging essays opened my mind to new ways of thinking about the natural world and the creative process.”