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.”

Camilla “Ylla” Koffler got animals ready for their close-ups.

Nowhere are the words shoot and capture more benevolently applied to animal life than in the work of photographer Camilla “Ylla” Koffler. During her short but prolific career, she celebrated her subjects as individuals with souls and personalities rather than portraying them as objects to be ogled like hunters’ trophies. Author Pryor Dodge ’71 offers the iconic photographer an equally flattering and well-deserved spotlight in Ylla: The Birth of Modern Animal Photography.

Ylla (EE-lah) was born in 1911 to Hungarian parents in Vienna. She began her artistic career studying sculpture, but an aptitude for photography and a penchant for rescuing stray animals led to her capturing their very best angles. At the outset of her career, she primarily photographed house pets or exotic species in zoos, eschewing the gender norms of the day by getting up close and personal with animals typically only approached by male zoo handlers. Her fearlessness eventually took her to Africa, where she discovered a passion for photographing animals in the wild.

Ylla’s appetite for adventure brought her to India in 1955. While riding in a speeding jeep to photograph a bullock cart race, she fell from the vehicle and died from her injuries.

“Ylla’s pictures brought animals into the living rooms of America and Europe in such a way that they conveyed a feeling of sharing in wonderful adventures,” Sports Illustrated nature columnist John O’Reilly wrote upon her death.

Her work also lives on in several books, including two children’s books that became instant classics: The Sleepy Little Lion by Margaret Wise Brown (of Goodnight Moon fame) and The Two Little Bears.

Dodge is also the author of The Bicycle, a history of bicycles and cyclists that features his own extensive collection of antique bikes and cycling memorabilia.

Attending a Shakespeare-recitation party in college got Ephraim more than she bard-gained for.

In literary analysis, a “green world” is a whimsical realm that provides respite from and resolution to characters’ real-world dilemmas. In Green World: A Tragicomic Memoir of Love and Shakespeare, Michelle Ephraim MA’93, PhD’98 reflects on how discovering the Bard gave her scattered life a new direction — and a green world of her very own.

As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Ephraim was frequently subjected to her parents’ volatile emotions and overprotective tendencies. Eager to escape her oppressive upbringing, she pursued a degree in poetry and, eventually, a doctorate in literature. But grim reality haunted Ephraim: her boyfriend dumped her, and she struggled to keep up with her studies. Hope was nearly lost for our headstrong heroine until she stumbled upon a Shakespeare- recitation party and dedicated her career to studying his works.

Green World chronicles Ephraim’s journey to becoming a Shakespeare scholar, a winding path riddled with humor and heartbreak that rivals the best of the Bard’s stories. Ephraim even finds a kindred spirit in Jessica, the strong-willed Jewish daughter of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, and she finally achieves the ever-elusive peace of a green world right here in Wisconsin.

“In a culture where artificial intelligence is ever-encroaching, Green World reaffirms our love of reading, enforcing how vastly literature can transform us,” writes author Jennifer Gilmore. “It changed Michelle Ephraim, and the joy and urgency of that discovery, shown through her own life, is breathtaking.”

Green World received the 2023 Juniper Prize in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Massachusetts. Ephraim is a professor of English at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.

Py-Lieberman examines an iconic airplane, an artist’s love letter, and a storied stone.

Did you know that the Hope Diamond, perhaps the world’s most prized and priceless jewel, once hung around the neck of a 20th-century socialite’s dog? Do you know where you can find both Chuck Berry’s red 1973 Cadillac Eldorado and Dorothy’s ruby-red slippers? In The Object at Hand: Intriguing and Inspiring Stories from the Smithsonian Collections, Beth Py-Lieberman ’83 shares tales and tidbits that piece together a complex American history.

While Py-Lieberman’s collection of 86 artifacts is only about 0.00005 percent of the Smithsonian’s collection of more than 150 million, it is representative. Some of her highlights are a love letter from artist Frida Kahlo to her husband and fellow artist Diego Rivera, the plane in which Amelia Earhart made her historic solo flight across the Atlantic, a panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt that honors activist Roger Gail Lyon, a Bible belonging to preacher and rebellion leader Nat Turner, and the life-sized model of a megalodon shark that looms above diners in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

In delving into more detail than museum placards allow and organizing the artifacts by themes, Py-Lieberman’s book is elevated from a mere catalog of the Smithsonian’s collection to an anthology of interconnected histories.

“From priceless treasures to simple ephemera, these selections prove that in a hectic, digital world, it is still the humble object that has the power to transport us on journeys of the imagination,” writes New York Times best-selling author Geraldine Brooks.

Py-Lieberman is a senior editor of museums for Smithsonian magazine online and has been with the magazine for more than 30 years.

Leckrone tells the story behind the music that all Badgers know by heart.

In music, the directive D.C. al fine instructs a musician to return to the beginning of a piece and play through it again. In Moments of Happiness: A Wisconsin Band Story (UW Press), Mike Leckrone does the very same in reminiscing on his sequin-studded career.

For 50 years, Leckrone not only led the UW Marching Band —made legendary under his direction — but also helped generations of Badgers share their love for the UW through song. With the help of Madison journalist Doug Moe ’79, Leckrone invites readers to open up the story behind the music that all Badgers know by heart.

From the moment he set foot on campus in 1969, Leckrone discovered an undeniable destiny at the UW. He transformed the band, bolstering its dwindling numbers and establishing its dynamic “stop at the top,” high-stepping style. He invented the Fifth Quarter to infuse even more spirit into Badger football games, and he turned a lackluster spring band concert into the hottest ticket in town.

Leckrone was bold in pushing the limits of possibility in his performances — he made entrances on an airborne motorcycle and a live elephant — and he is honest about the hard work and hard-learned lessons that made these iconic moments possible.

Following the score of Leckrone’s career from its inevitable missed notes through the magnum opus of his UW tenure, Moments of Happiness is “written with decided and joyful expectation that everything’s gonna be all right,” writes Broadway actor and fellow UW showman André De Shields ’70. “With this memoir, I can share a moment of happiness anytime I want with Mike Leckrone.”