Interview with Divya Kumar, an independent clinical social worker and psychotherapist from Boston, Massachusetts. Kumar discusses getting a certification in perinatal mental health from PSI, becoming a co-founder of the Perinatal Mental Health Alliance for People of Color, Postpartum Progress, PSI trainings, issues, becoming an advisor, defining identity as a mother and as a person, and advocacy for diversity in leadership.

Interview with Wendy Davis, the executive director of Postpartum Support International from Portland, Oregon. Davis discusses her background in psychotherapy/psychology, becoming involved in the perinatal mental health field through her own experience with postpartum depression and anxiety, being helped by a doula, getting involved in maternal mental health groups, PSI and DAD, and the growth and development of PSI over time.

Interview with Jabina Coleman, a reproductive psychotherapist and certified lactation consultant from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Coleman discusses her involvement in supporting maternal health, from running Life House Lactation & Perinatal Services to founding groups like Breastfeeding Awareness and Empowerment, the Perinatal Mental Health and Alliance for People of Color, and the Maternal Wellness Village in Philadelphia. Coleman discusses her own pregnancy, postpartum depression, education, and motivation to become an advocate in her field.

Interview with Joy Burkhard, a mother and founder/executive director of the nonprofit organization 2020 Mom, soon to be renamed the Policy Center for Maternal Mental Health, from Valencia, California. Burkhard discusses work in the health delivery system, her own experience with motherhood, Postpartum Support International, founding her organization, maternal mental health disorders, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and the importance of access to child care and support.

Interview with Susan Dowd Stone, a clinician, advocator, writer, family pillar, and educator at NYU from Englewood, New Jersey. Stone discusses working in business, transitioning to social work, the joint meeting between Depression After Delivery and Postpartum Support International, becoming PSI president, the Mothers Act, the DSM, and postpartum depression.

Interview with Nancy Byatt, a perinatal psychiatrist from Hopkinton, Massachusetts. Byatt discusses background, family, education, experiences with women who had postpartum depression, starting The Lifeline for Family Center and the Lifeline for Moms at UMass, founding The Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Access Program for Moms, securing funding for the programs, and a sense of identity as a physician/scientist who partners with activists and advocates.

Interview with Adrienne Griffen, the Executive Director of the Maternal Mental Health Leadership Alliance from Arlington, Virginia. Griffen discusses her family, time as an intelligence officer in the United States Navy, education, her own experience with postpartum depression, becoming an advocate, Postpartum Support International, other leaders and organizations in her field, postpartum psychosis, statistics, and treatments.

Interview with Carol Blocker, an activist from Chicago, Illinois. Blocker discusses postpartum activism, her experience with her daughter Melanie, the difference between postpartum psychosis and postpartum depression, the Melanie Blocker Stokes Act, and the lack of detailed information available about postpartum mental illnesses.

Interview with Jerry F. Price, a celebrated coach from Grandview, Missouri. Price discusses growing up in Denton, his sports background, teaching at Lincoln High School in Kansas City, becoming a football, basketball, track, and golf head coach, integration of schools, his football accomplishments, family, and his health. Documents are included in the Appendix to this interview.

Interview with Donald E. Francisco, a University of North Texas graduate and a University of North Carolina emeritus professor of Environmental Sciences and Engineering. Francisco discusses his background, education, his experience as a lab assistant at UNT, segregation and integration in Denton history, his involvement in the civil rights movement, working at a foundry, religion, teaching at and family.

On a cold, windy December night in 1926, hell was unleashed on a tenant farm near Farwell, the last Texas town before the New Mexico border. Prone to the bottle and fits of rage, the burly man with the smiling blue eyes was in no mood to quarrel with his third wife over his bootleg whisky and sexual abuse of his stepdaughter. He went from room to room in the house, killing his wife and each child with primitive cutting tools and his bare hands. By the time he concluded his bloody work, he had taken the lives of nine family members ranging in age from 2 to 41, committing what one local reporter called “the blackest crime” in the history of the West Texas Panhandle. Husband, father, uncle, embezzler, serial mass murderer, philanderer, child molester, convict, and military deserter, George Jefferson Hassell was many things to many people, most of them bad. His pattern of familicide crime had begun in 1917, when he slaughtered his common-law wife and her three kids in Whittier, California. Later, in Texas, he married his brother’s wife and became stepfather to her eight children. Using Hassell’s confessions and his many interviews with reporters as …

Our Stories: Black Families in Early Dallas enlarges upon two pubLications by the late Dr. Mamie McKnight’s organization, Black Dallas Remembered—First African American Families of Dallas (1987) and African American Families and Settlements of Dallas (1990). Our Stories is the history of Black citizens of Dallas going about their lives in freedom, as described by the late Eva Partee McMillan: “The ex-slaves purchased land, built homes, raised their children, erected their educational and religious facilities, educated their children, and profited from their labor. “ Our Stories brings together memoirs from many of Dallas’s earliest Black families, as handed down over the generations to their twentieth-century descendants. The period covered begins in the 1850s and goes through the 1930s. Included are detailed descriptions of more than thirty early Dallas communities formed by free African Americans, along with the histories of fifty-seven early Black families, and brief biographies of many of the early leaders of these Black communities. The stories reveal hardships endured and struggles overcome, but the storytellers focus on the triumphs over adversity and the successes achieved against the odds. The histories include the founding of churches, schools, newspapers, hospitals, grocery stores, businesses, and other institutions established to nourish and …

Identified with Texas is the first published biography of Texas Governor Elisha Marshall Pease (1812-1883), presented by historian Elizabeth Whitlow as a dual biography of Pease and his wife, Lucadia Niles Pease (1813-1905). Pease volunteered to fight in the first battle of the Revolution at Gonzales, and he served with the Texan Army at the Siege of Bexar. Pease served in the first three state legislatures after Texas joined the Union in 1845, was elected governor in 1853 and re-elected in 1855, and returned to the governorship as an interim appointee from 1867 to 1869 during Reconstruction. His achievements in all these positions were substantial. Lucadia Niles Pease was known as the Governor’s “Lady.” Moreover, her early, independent travel and her stated position as a “woman’s rights woman” in the 1850s, as well as her support for sending a daughter away to college in the 1870s to earn a degree, all serve as markers of her intelligence and the strength of her convictions. To tell their story, Whitlow mined thousands of letters and papers saved by the Pease family and housed in the Austin History Center of the Austin Public Library, as well as in the Governor’s Papers at the …

“There are some poets we admire for a mastery that allows them to tell a story, express an epiphany, form a conclusion, all gracefully and even memorably— yet language in some way remains external to them. But there are other poets in whom language seems to arise spontaneously, fulfilling a design in which the poet’s intention feels secondary. Books by these poets we read with a gathering sense of excitement and recognition at the linguistic web being drawn deliberately tighter around a nucleus of human experience that is both familiar and completely new, until at last it seems no phrase is misplaced and no word lacks its resonance with what has come before. Such a book is Austin Segrest’s Door to Remain.”— Karl Kirchwey, author of Poems of Rome and judge

Utilizing many sources new to publication, James L. Haley delivers a most readable and enjoyable narrative history of Texas, told through stories—the words and recollections of Texans who actually lived the state’s spectacular history. From Jim Bowie’s and Davy Crockett’s myth-enshrouded stand at the Alamo, to the Mexican-American War, and to Sam Houston’s heroic failed effort to keep Texas in the Union during the Civil War, the transitions in Texas history have often been as painful and tense as the “normal” periods in between. Here, in all of its epic grandeur, is the story of Texas as its own passionate nation.

After he died, Townes Van Zandt found the success that he sabotaged throughout his short life despite the release of sixteen brilliant albums. Since his death, numerous albums both by and in honor of him have been released and many critical articles published, in addition to several books (including Robert Hardy’s A Deeper Blue by UNT Press). For the Sake of the Song collects ten essays on Townes Van Zandt from a variety of approaches. Contributors examine his legacy; his use of the minor key; his reception in the Austin music scene; and an exploration of his relationship with Richard Dobson, with whom he toured as part of the Hemmer Ridge Mountain Boys. An introduction by editors Ann Norton Holbrook and Dan Beller- McKenna provides an overview of Van Zandt’s literary excellence and philosophical wisdom, rare among even the best songwriters.

America’s Wild West created an untold number of notorious characters, and in southwestern Texas, John King Fisher (1855– 1884) was foremost among them. To friends and foes alike, he insisted he be called “King.” He found a home in the tough sun-beaten Nueces Strip, a lawless land between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. There he gathered a gang of rustlers around him at his ranch on Pendencia Creek. For a decade King and his gang raided both sides of the Rio Grande, shooting down any who opposed them. Newspapers claimed King killed potential witnesses—he was never convicted of cattle or horse stealing, or murder. King’s reign ended when he was arrested by Texas Ranger Captain Leander McNelly. In no uncertain terms he advised Fisher to change his ways, so King became deputy sheriff of Uvalde County. But his hard-won respectability would not last. On a spring night in 1884, King made the mistake of accompanying the truly notorious gambler and gunfighter Ben Thompson on a tour of San Antonio, where several years prior Thompson shot down Jack Harris at the latter’s saloon and theater, the Vaudeville. Recklessly, King Fisher accompanied Thompson back to the theater, where assassins were …