Scholastic for Grown-Ups: The 2023 COLA Book Fair Catalog

The tip of the proverbial iceberg, if the iceberg was a list of exciting new books

If you, like me, attended elementary school in the U.S. sometime between the 80s and today, you’re almost certainly familiar with the magic of the Scholastic Book Fair. For those who missed out, the Book Fair was (and is) the semi-annual invasion of school libraries and gymnaiums across the country by pure children’s-bookstore magic: think tables stacked with bestsellers, fuzzy notebooks, and glow-in-the-dark erasers.

Alas, growing up is full of hardship and sacrifice, and there are no more Scholastic Book Fairs (for us, anyway). But here at UT Austin COLA, we’ve decided to launch our take on a truly scholastic book fair in order to highlight the dozens of volumes our hardworking and world-renowned faculty publish each year. Today marks the second annual appearance of our COLA Book Fair, featuring books released over the last 12 months, and what we lack in fluffy pencils we’re making up for in breadth and depth of research, expertise, and artistry.

That said, no book fair, Scholastic or academic, would be complete without a catalog. So, below are highlights from the COLA Book Fair titles list, paired with profiles, interviews, and press releases featuring our college authors. Out of deference for mature-r design sensibilities, we haven’t replicated the full glory of the Scholastic catalogs of yore, but just know they were pretty awesome and we were sorely tempted.

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2023 COLA Book Fair Catalog – Selections

Powerful Devices: Prayer and the Political Praxis of Spiritual Warfare by Abimbola Adelakum

Powerful Devices studies spiritual warfare performances as an apparatus for disestablishing structures of power and knowledge and establishing righteousness in their stead. Drawing on performance studies’ emphasis on radicality and breaking of social norms as devices of social transformation, the book demonstrates how Christian groups with dominant cultural power but who perceive themselves as embattled wield the ideas of performance activism.

Further reading: This time last year, COLA Public Affairs director Daniel Oppenheimer talked with Adelakum about her life as a political columnist, politics in the extraordinarily diverse and complex context of Nigeria, and what it’s like to live a bi-national existence in “Huge in Nigeria”

Plagues and Pencils: A Year of Pandemic Sketches by Edward Carey

In March 2020, as lockdowns were imposed around the world, author and illustrator Edward Carey raced home to Austin, Texas. The next day, he published on social media a sketch of “A Very Determined Young Man.” The day after, he posted another drawing. One year and 150 Tombow B pencil stubs later, he was still drawing. Breonna Taylor, the Brontë sisters, John Lewis, King Lear, and even the portraits that mark the progress of the year for the Very Determined Young Man combine into a remarkable document of the pandemic and its politics.

Further reading: For more on Carey’s writing and illustrations — and his tendency to collect pencil nubs — we heartily recommend the Life & Letters profile, “Drawing Inspiration”

The Hero of This Book: A Novel by Elizabeth McCracken

A taut, groundbreaking new novel from award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken, about a writer’s relationship with her larger-than-life mother—and about the very nature of writing, memory, and art. The Hero of This Book is a searing examination of grief and renewal, and of a deeply felt relationship between a child and her parents. What begins as a question of filial devotion ultimately becomes a lesson in what it means to write. At once comic and heartbreaking, with prose that delights at every turn, this is a novel of such piercing love and tenderness that we are reminded that art is what remains when all else falls away.

Further reading: Did we mention McCracken is very, very good with words? Case in point: The excellent title of last spring’s feature story on The Hero of This Book — “The McCrackenaissance” — was taken straight from one of her tweets

Dark Days: Fugitive Essays by Roger Reeves

In his debut work of nonfiction, award-winning poet Roger Reeves finds new meaning in silence, protest, fugitivity, freedom, and ecstasy. Braiding memoir, theory, and criticism, Reeves juxtaposes the images of an opera singer breaking the state-mandated silence curfew by singing out into the streets of Santiago and a father teaching his daughter to laugh out loud at the planes dropping bombs on them in Aleppo. He describes the history of the hush harbor—places where enslaved people could steal away to find silence and court ecstasy, to the side of their impossible conditions. In other essays, Reeves highlights a chapter in Toni Morrison’s Beloved to locate common purpose between Black and Indigenous peoples; he visits the realities of enslaved people on McLeod Plantation; and he explores his own family history, his learning to read closely through the Pentecostal church tradition, and his passing on of reading as a pleasure, freedom, and solace to his daughter, who is frightened the police will gun them down.

Further reading: A full breakdown of all the awards Reeves has won for his most recent poetry collection, Best Barbarian, would threaten to overwhelm this newsletter. For the sake of brevity, we’ll simply point you to our profile of both Reeves and his gorgeous, deeply important work

Living Toward Virtue: Practical Ethics in the Spirit of Socrates by Paul Woodruff

In Living Toward Virtue, Woodruff shows how we can set about living ethically on the basis of what Socrates called “human wisdom,” which centers on recognizing the limits of our moral knowledge. Using real-life examples, Woodruff shows how we can nurture our souls, enjoy a virtuous happiness, and avoid moral injury as much as possible. This is in the spirit of Socrates, who urged everyone to commit to a lifelong activity of nurturing the moral health of the soul through self-examination.

Further reading: UT Austin and COLA were deeply saddened to report the passing of Woodruff just last month. For a brief intro to all that he did and meant for our university and students, this is a good start.