Teaching Miss Destiné

Sally Connolly

Maine Authors Publishing

Mimi Destiné, a young, Caribbean woman, is excited to try the new educational strategies she’s learned in college. But her student-teaching assignment is a one-room schoolhouse in Western Maine. It’s 1938, money is tight, supplies are limited, and her mentor is an elderly teacher who disapproves of Mimi and her new methods. Times are changing. Kerosene is giving way to electricity; outhouses to indoor bathrooms, horses with wagons to automobiles. Schools are changing, too. Will the small village of Woodson Mills accept this newcomer? Will the children respect her? This historical account of Maine during The Depression, of the surprising diversity in Oxford County in the 1930’s, and of Miss Destiné’s lively classroom activities makes for engaging and nostalgic reading. Pour a cup of tea and settle in for a peek into the past.

The River That Made Texas: A Forgotten History of the Trinity

Scot McFarlane

The University of North Carolina Press

In the first history of this vital river, historian Scot McFarlane illuminates how the Trinity has defined Texas history. Its floods enriched the soil and destroyed crops, its channel served as both a route and barrier to freedom, and its once-polluted waters now sustain a significant portion of the state. McFarlane’s captivating narrative brims with stories of the people who called the Trinity home over the centuries: the Comanche, steamboat pilots, enslaved and freed people, sharecroppers, inmates, and millions of urban residents. The result is a fresh perspective on economic development, slavery, and the environment—revealing the Trinity not as a backdrop to Texas history but as a force that shaped it.

Transformational: Ken Curtis, Maine’s Reform Governor

Douglas Rooks

Buxton Books

Ken Curtis was the nation’s youngest governor when elected in 1966 at age 35. The first to serve eight years, he transformed Maine as a liberal Democrat working with a Republican Legislature. Among countless achievements, he created a state income tax, established the University of Maine System, reformed public schools, conserved wilderness and expanded public lands. Curtis championed economic development and the rights of labor, industrial growth and cleaning up polluted rivers, with some of the nation’s toughest environmental laws. To Curtis, these seemingly contrary aims represented balance, “conservation through development,” that produced increased prosperity and bipartisan breakthroughs. Says U.S. Senator and former Governor Angus King, Curtis was “the most consequential governor in recent Maine history.” This new biography tells the story with breadth and depth, making provocative connections to our own fractious times.

Compositions: A Memoir in 42 Essays by 1 Kid on Her 8 Years in Catholic School, Handed in 60 Years Late

Suzanne Strempek Shea

PAHA Books

The author's 12th book covers her early years in a close-knit 1960s and ‘70s Polish-American, Massachusetts grade school and community, detailing a life that revolves in a circle of faith and family. Written in the author’s voice and point of view from her first eight years of school, the humorous and poignant essays show a past still fully present. Graduation photos lining the walls include students’ parents who once sat in the same classrooms with the same wooden desks, same windows, same blackboards, and some of the same nuns. Strempek Shea learns new words—bubbler for water fountain, sodality for club, lavatory for bathroom, Father for priest even if he wasn’t hers. The miracles in Compositions that Strempek Shea prays for—a pony, her grandfather’s health—never take place. Yet something no less tender and beautiful does as she spins childhood in a kaleidoscope of close-to-the-bone observations.

Soft Bird That I Am

Anna Grey Bergstrom

The Telling Room

How does one measure pain? What is it to live in a body that reintroduces itself every morning? What would you write in the margins of your own medical report? Calling on sources from ancient philosophers to etymology and ornithology, debut poet Anna Grey Bergstrom sets out to answer these questions and more. Soft Bird That I Am powerfully dissects the particular experiences and strange contradictions of growing up with a chronic illness, while reminding us that every body is a collection of wonders.

Let Me Correct Myself

E.C. Jay

The Telling Room

Poet E.C. Jay writes from the space between who one is and who one is still becoming. His debut poetry collection, written while incarcerated in juvenile detention for two years, from age sixteen to eighteen, addresses confinement, not only as a place but also as a state of mind. Jay writes of the agony, claustrophobia, and isolation of a place where grief echoes off white brick walls. These carefully written words, however, are what led the poet to grow, heal, and rise above the hopeless feeling of never gaining back his freedom. Let Me Correct Myself is to be read with much thought, by other incarcerated youth inspired to express themselves creatively or by anyone interested in how the correctional system impacts youth.

The Play's The Thing

Lily Jessen

The Telling Room

For centuries, the female characters of Shakespeare's plays have famously struggled with love, anger, death, motherhood, and marriage on the greatest stages of the world. However, for the most part, they remain the object, rather than the subject, of their stories. Just as women in the real world are confined by the expectations of society, they have no choice but to perform. How can these characters, through their performer--and, simultaneously, their performer through them--find their own words beyond the stories that are told about them? A novel in verse, The Play's The Thing journeys into many layers of womanhood through the eyes of five Shakespearean women and the actress playing them.

Universal Language

Len Sienko Harrison

The Telling Room

In the fall of 2024, high school junior Len Sienko Harrison ventured from Maine for a semester of introspection and exploration at The Mountain School of Milton Academy in Vermont. Universal Language is their intimate chronicle of those four months. Weaving classic themes of self-discovery and friendship with pressing reflection on climate justice, Harrison calls humankind back to conversation with the natural world. Where do we end, and where does the forest begin? What do we owe to each other and to the planet we inhabit? More than answers, these poems offer meditations that inspire readers in their own seasons of profound change.

Waiting for Spring

Erik M. Stumpfel

Genthner House Publishing Co.

Waiting for Spring is a celebration of life in one of America’s most unforgiving and beautiful corners — southern Piscataquis County, Maine. Written by a self-described man “from away,” these poems chronicle the experience of making a home in a place where winter arrives uninvited and stays far too long, where neighbors measure trust in decades, and where spring, when it finally comes, feels like a gift earned rather than given.

Cruelty Free

Francis Walsh

Lost Penny Press

The poems of Cruelty Free by Francis Walsh have the directness of a childhood friend, and the wry intimacy of an inside joke. Clean, spare language unfolds gently into surprising truths and tight endings. The playful tension between titles and poems creates a delicious frisson in the reader, a moment of meaning that the body recognizes even if language does not.