Derek Krissoff

@derekkrissoff.bsky.social

Publishing worker in Pittsburgh. Editor-at-large with @oupress.bsky.social and @ksupress.bsky.social. Email me at dkrissoff at gmail dot com. More at derekkrissoff.com and derekkrissoff.substack.com.

Secret Lives of Church Ladies being pulled from a bookstore shelf.

Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw, book cover with woman in bowtie.

Five book covers from the Teaching and Learning in Higher Ed series.

If you have been teaching this past semester, you are probably exhausted right now and want a breather, maybe to not even think about things for some period of time. After that breather, I suggest picking up one or all of these books as a way to help infuse fresh oxygen into your work.

$Announcing the highly anticipated follow-up to Resurrection of the Wild, winner of the 2020 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay Ghosts of an Old Forest Essays on Midwestern Rural Heritage Deborah Fleming April 2025 232 pages 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 Hardback $24.95 ISBN 978-1-60635-493-3 Contact: Derek Krissoff, Kent State University Press, dkrissoff_gst@kent.edu In the Ohio counties of the Allegheny Plateau, 19th-century barns hewn from old-growth wood rest near remnant forests, reminders of the state’s deep agricultural roots and rich ecological past. Through fourteen linked, meditative essays, Deborah Fleming, author of the award-winning Resurrection of the Wild: Meditations on Ohio’s Natural Landscape, persuasively and passionately argues for protecting these vestiges of the region’s natural and rural history. Fleming describes domesticated and wild nature on her farm, delves into Ohio’s rich history of agriculture, tackles the issues of litter and pollution, decries the practice of hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”), and reflects on changes in communities bordering rivers, which are often the most exploited by extraction industries. The result is an evocative collection, which traces Ohio’s natural and cultural history―and serves as an urgent call to preserve its splendor. Praise for Resurrection of the Wild From the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay judges’ citation (Jelani Cobb, Daniel Menaker, Judith Thurman) “In a field of writers eloquent about the pathologies of selfhood and modern life, Deborah Fleming’s Resurrection of the Wild stood apart. It is a collection of essays about the nature and natural history of her native Ohio: on its indigenous inhabitants and their fate; on the settlers who displaced them, or who, like John Chapman—’Johnny Appleseed’—tried to protect their way of life$