Books

Good Eats: 32 Writers on Eating Ethically 

Edited by Jennifer Cognard-Black and Melissa A. Goldthwaite
New York University Press, forthcoming 2024

Featuring a highly diverse ensemble of award-winning writers, activists, educators, chefs, farmers, and journalists, Good Eats invites readers to think about what it means to eat according to our values. These essays are not lectures about what you should eat, nor an advertisement for the latest diet. Instead, the contributors tell the stories of real people—real bellies, real bodies—including the writers themselves, who seek to understand the experiences, families, cultures, histories, and systems that have shaped their eating and their ethics.

From gardening as an alternative to factory farming, to the indigenous cultures surrounding salmon and the corporate cultures surrounding chocolate, the topics featured in this collection expand our understanding of what ethical eating can be. Poets like Ross Gay and Nikky Finney muse lyrically on the role of sustenance in their lives. Other contributors describe efforts to change how food is made. Farmer and food sovereignty activist Leah Penniman celebrates both ancestral seeds and wisdom when discussing her Afro-Indigenous farming and forestry practices. In the high desert, Michael P. Branch details his frustrating-yet-humorous attempts to grow a garden in the high desert with his young daughters. And professional chef Thérèse Nelson shows how hot sauce represents joy, expression, and magic for many Black people. Each contributor offers insightful discussions of the role food plays in our lives.

The essays in Good Eats turn mundane meals into remarkable symbols of how we live, encouraging each of us to find food that is both sustaining and sustainable.

From Curlers to Chainsaws: Women and Their Machines

Edited by Joyce Dyer, Jennifer Cognard-Black, and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls
Michigan State University Press, 2016

The twenty-three distinguished writers included in From Curlers to Chainsaws: Women and Their Machines invite machines into their lives and onto the page. In every room and landscape these writers occupy, gadgets that both stir and stymie may be found: a Singer sewing machine, a stove, a gun, a vibrator, a prosthetic limb, a tractor, a Dodge Dart, a microphone, a smartphone, a stapler, a No. 1 pencil and, of course, a curling iron and a chainsaw.

From Curlers to Chainsaws is a groundbreaking collection of lyrical and illuminating essays about the serious, silly, seductive, and sometimes sorrowful relationships between women and their machines. This collection explores in depth objects we sometimes take for granted, focusing not only on their functions but also on their powers to inform identity. For each writer, the device moves beyond the functional to become a symbolic extension of the writer’s own mind—altering and deepening each woman’s concept of herself.

Books that Cook: The Making of a Literary Meal 

Edited by Jennifer Cognard-Black and Melissa A. Goldthwaite, with a foreword by Marion Nestle
New York University Press, 2014

Whether a five-star chef or beginning home cook, any gourmand knows that recipes are far more than a set of instructions on how to make a dish. They are culture-keepers as well as culture-makers, both recording memories and fostering new ones. 

Organized like a cookbook, Books that Cook: The Making of a Literary Meal is a collection of American literature written on the theme of food: from an invocation to a final toast, from starters to desserts. All food literatures are indebted to the form and purpose of cookbooks, and each section begins with an excerpt from an influential American cookbook, progressing chronologically from the late 1700s through the present day, including such favorites as American Cookery, the Joy of Cooking, and Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The literary works within each section are an extension of these cookbooks, while the cookbook excerpts in turn become pieces of literature—forms of storytelling and memory-making all their own. 

Kindred Hands: Letters on Writing by British and American Women Authors, 1865-1935 

Edited by Jennifer Cognard-Black and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls
Iowa University Press, 2006

Kindred Hands, a collection of previously unpublished letters by women writers from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Jessie Redmond Fauset and Rebecca Harding Davis, reveals a multiplicity of perspectives on female authorship that would otherwise require visits to archives and special collections. Representing some of the most important female writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—including transatlantic correspondents, women of color, canonical writers, regional writers, and women living in the British empire—Kindred Hands enlivens scholarship on a host of topics, including reception theory, feminist studies, social history, composition theory, modernism, and nineteenth-century studies. 

Advancing Rhetoric: Critical Thinking & Writing for the Advanced Student

by Jennifer Cognard-Black and Anne Cognard
Kendall Hunt, 2006

Co-authored by an honors English professor and an award-winning high-school AP teacher, Advancing Rhetoric: Critical Thinking and Writing for the Advanced Student, by Dr. Jennifer Cognard-Black and Dr. Anne M. Cognard, is a composition textbook geared for high-ability learners in both college-level honors and advanced high-school classes, such as Advanced Placement (AP) classes in both Language and Literature.

Narrative in the Professional Age: Transatlantic Readings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and George Eliot 

By Jennifer Cognard-Black
Routledge, 2004

Challenging previous studies that claim anxiety and antagonism between transatlantic Victorian authors, Jennifer Cognard-Black uncovers a model of reciprocal influence among three of the most popular women writers of the era. Combining analyses of personal correspondence and print culture with close readings of key narratives, this study presents an original history of transatlantic authorship that examines how these writers invented a collaborative aesthetics both within and against the dominant discourse of professionalism.