Winner of the Vernice Quebodeaux “Pathways” Poetry Prize

Passion Seeds is a love story of an American woman and a Burkinabe man that addresses intercultural and interracial love. Richard Harteis notes,“Ondrus contemplates how love ‘seeds bring invisible to visible.’ The poems trace a history of transcontinental desire from Burkina Faso, to Benin, to Russia, to Ohio; they dispel the notion that we live in a post-racial world. Ondrus shows how racism and prejudice are some of our invisible seeds. Love and desire become an invisible power that can transcend the space between America and Burkina Faso.” Poet Joyce Ashuntantang says that this collection, “will continue to seduce readers over and over again, and the only voodoo Ondrus is guilty of, is her relentless use of imagery that plants passionate seeds in our bodies, letting us discover new reasons to love and love again!”

The history of public health has focused on direct relationships between problems and solutions: vaccinations against diseases, ad campaigns targeting risky behaviors. But the accelerating pace and mounting intricacies of our lives are challenging the field to find new scientific methods for studying community health. The complexities of place (COP) approach is emerging as one such promising method.

Place and Health as Complex Systems demonstrates how COP works, making an empirical case for its use in for designing and implementing interventions. This brief resource reviews the defining characteristics of places as dynamic and evolving social systems, rigorously testing them as well as the COP approach itself. The study, of twenty communities within one county in the Midwest, combines case-based methods and complexity science to determine whether COP improves upon traditional statistical methods of public health research. Its conclusions reveal strengths and limitations of the approach, immediate possibilities for its use, and challenges regarding future research. Included in the coverage:

• Characteristics of places and the complexities of place approach.
• The Definitional Test of Complex Systems.
• Case-based modeling using the SACS toolkit.
• Methods, maps, and measures used in the study.
• Places as nodes within larger networks.
• Places as power-based conflicted negotiations.

Place and Health as Complex Systems brings COP into greater prominence in public health research, and is also valuable to researchers in related fields such as demography, health geography, community health, urban planning, and epidemiology.

"Polynesia" includes thousands of islands, most of them arranged in a rough triangle bounded by Hawai'i, Easter Island, and New Zealand. Outside the Polynesian Triangle, in areas commonly designated Micronesia and Melanesia, lie about two dozen islands, most of them small and widely separated, whose inhabitants speak Polynesian languages and share other characteristics with triangle Polynesians. These islands are collectively termed the Polynesian outliers. The great Polynesian centers endured major change before trained observers had an opportunity to record their lifeways. In contrast, owing largely to their remote location, the outliers were spared much of the trauma suffered by their larger and more accessible neighbors, making them particularly interesting for anthropologists, and critical for the comparative study of Polynesia. Who are these peoples? Where did they originate, and how did they come to settle in these remote islands? What is their relationship to the better-known Polynesian societies? Can they, in some way, be thought of as representing Polynesian society before it became permanently altered by contact with Europeans? This volume explores these and other questions and provides the first synthetic, comparative treatment of these unique islands.

Part of the Ethnology Monographs Series

Many students struggle with the transition from high school to the next stage of their lives. For deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students, that struggle can be intensified by barriers and discriminatory attitudes they face in their communities, schools, and workplaces. Though much progress has been made, they are often underemployed and underpaid, and they receive postsecondary training at lower rates than other disability groups. Author Pamela Luft explores the reasons for these statistics and offers strategies and resources that can improve outcomes.

Promoting Positive Transition Outcomes is the most comprehensive discussion of transition planning and results for DHH students now available. Luft begins with an overview of the historical and current challenges to DHH students and their academic and vocational potential. She explores the importance of forming an identity and building foundational social and problem-solving skills. She then reviews the history of rehabilitation and workforce legislation, which now mandates that every student with an individualized education plan (IEP) have a transition plan in place by the age of 16. Most schools, however, are not equipped to meet the needs of a population as diverse as DHH students. She examines the services that are currently available in high schools and offers recommendations for strengthening transition team planning by reaching out to external experts. The volume concludes with suggestions for creating a framework to address the challenges of transition planning for deaf and hard of hearing students and offers guidance on building effective plans.

This book demonstrates how the roles of “author,” “marketer,” and “reviewer” are being redefined, as online environments enable new means for young adults to participate in the books they love.

Prior to the expansion of digital technologies around reading, teachers, parents and librarians were the primary gatekeepers responsible for getting books into the hands of young people. Now publishers can create disintermediated digital enclosures in which they can communicate directly with their reading audience.
This book exposes how teens contribute their immaterial and affective labor as they engage in participatory reading experiences via publishers’ and authors’ interactive websites and use of social media, and how in turn publishers are able to use such labor as they get invaluable market research, peer-to-peer recommendations, and even content which can be used in other projects — all virtually free-of-charge.

Claude Monet was not only the creator of what we now view as French Impressionist painting, he was also its last major practitioner. By the time he passed away in 1926, he had outlived all the other painters--Renoir, Morisot, Pissarro, Sisley, and the others whom we now group together under that heading. Yet when André Suarès, one of the four directors--along with Gide, Valéry, and Claudel--of the influential Nouvelle Revue Francaise, summed up the movement that year, he did not give Monet pride of place. Rather, he wrote, "Far more than Sisley, Claude Monet, or the Goncourt brothers, Loti was the great Impressionist."

As this shows, that Pierre Loti, the once world-renowned French novelist, developed a remarkably Impressionist style was recognized early on. It continues to be acknowledged in France today. Franck Ferrand, a contemporary historian known for his appearances on French radio and television, recently wrote that "Pierre Loti [is] the only truly impressionist writer of French literature." Yet while those who know his work in France continue to see him as an Impressionist artist on the level of Monet and Renoir, no one has ever asked how he achieved this in literature, how he went about creating novels that resembled the work of Monet.

That is the subject of this book. Examining certain of Loti's important novels, this study shows how he managed to reproduce with words what Monet was doing in oils. It also shows how the author came to theorize about the effects of Impressionism on the reader-viewer. Finally, it demonstrates how and why, in one of his last novels, Loti undertook to reproduce the style of one of the painters most admired by Monet: Rembrandt van Rijn, whom the nineteenth-century French rediscovered in part because they could present his sketchy biography as a demonstration of many of the things liberal art historians and painters believed the ideal artist should be.