Faculty recital performed at the UNT College of Music Winspear Hall.

Symphony orchestra concert performed at the UNT College of Music Winspear Hall.

Concert Orchestra performance at the UNT college of music Winspear Hall.

Wind Symphony concert performed at the UNT College of Music Winspear Hall.

Wind Symphony concert performed at the UNT College of Music Winspear Hall.

Wind Orchestra concert performed at the UNT College of Music Winspear Hall.

University Band and Concert Band performance at the UNT College of Music Winspear Hall.

This anthology collects the nine winners of the 2021 Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest at UNT’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. First-place winner: Greg Jaffe and his three-part series on the pandemic, beginning with “The Pandemic Hit and This Car Became Home for a Family of Four” (The Washington Post). Second place: Hannah Dreier with “The Worst- Case Scenario” (The Washington Post). Third place: Leonora LaPeter Anton, Kavitha Surana, and Kathryn Varn with “Death at Freedom Square” (Tampa Bay Times). Runners-up include Rory Linnane, “Maricella’s Last Breath” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel); Hannah Dreier, “Tatiana’s Luck” (The Washington Post); Deborah Vankin, “This 81-Year-Old was L.A.’s Most Devoted Museum-Goer until COVID-19” (Los Angeles Times); Lauren Caruba, “Night Shift” (San Antonio Express News); Mark Johnson, “Saving Raynah’s Brain” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel); and John Woodrow Cox, “They Depended on Their Parents for Everything” (The Washington Post).

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 …

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 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.

This anthology collects the ten winners of the 2022 Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest at UNT’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. First place winner: Jason Fagone, “The Jessica Simulation: Love and Loss in the Age of A.I.,” about one man’s attempt to still communicate with his dead fiancée (San Francisco Chronicle). Second place: Jenna Russell, Penelope Overton, and David Abel, “The Lobster Trap” (The Boston Globe and Portland Press Herald). Third place: Jada Yuan, “Discovering Dr. Wu” (The Washington Post). Runners-up include Lane DeGregory, “Who Wants to Be a Cop? (Tampa Bay Times); Christopher Goffard, “The Trials of Frank Carson” (Los Angeles Times); Evan Allen, “Under the Wheel” (The Boston Globe); Mark Johnson, “A Wisconsin Mom Gave Birth in a COVID-19 Coma before Slipping to the Brink of Death” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel); Annie Gowen, “A Dance, Not a War” (The Washington Post); Peter Jamison, “They’d Battled Addiction Together. Then Lockdowns became a ‘Recipe for Death’” (The Washington Post); and Douglas Perry, “The Obsession” (The Oregonian / Oregon Live).

Two Counties in Crisis offers a rare opportunity to observe how local political cultures are transformed by state and national events. Utilizing an interdisciplinary fusion of history and political science, Robert J. Dillard analyzes two disparate Texas counties—traditionalist Harrison County and individualist Collin County—and examines four Reconstruction governors (Hamilton, Throckmorton, Pease, Davis) to aid the narrative and provide additional cultural context. Commercially prosperous and built on slave labor in the mold of Deep South plantation culture, East Texas’s Harrison County strongly supported secession in 1861. West Texas’s Collin County, characterized by individual and family farms with a limited slave population, favored the Union. During Reconstruction, Collin County became increasingly conservative and eventually bore a great resemblance to Harrison County. By 1876 and the ratification of the regressive Texas Constitution, Collin County had become firmly resistant to all aspects of Reconstruction.