Michael Waters

Ever since Eve plucked a tempting apple in the Garden of Eden, the fruits of the earth have been essential to human culture and the stories we tell about our world. Poets from ancient times to the present have celebrated the harvest of our gardens, fields, and orchards. The delectable cornucopia of poems harvested in this volume includes many beloved old chestnuts, such as Robert Frost's 'After Apple-Picking', Emily Dickinson's 'Forbidden Fruit a flavor has', Gwendolyn Brooks's 'The Bean Eaters', and the famous chilled plums in William Carlos Williams's 'This Is Just to Say'.

Sign & Breath is a new critical anthology that takes a different approach to exploring these questions: What is poetry? What defines voic? eaturing a range of contemporary artists, many of whom work across different mediums and genres, Sign & Breath introduces the reader to one page that sings in any genre - prose, fiction, poetry, spoken word, hybrid forms, and song - across diverse traditions. Rather than define poetry as a genre with conventions, traditions, codes, and modalities, this book features poetry as a faculty that thrums in all written and spoken art. Readers are introduced to a text followed by a discussion with the author about creating the piece, ties to creative lineage, and the definition of voice through their practice. This anthology contributes to the dialogue among genres which will reframe understanding of poetry as an aesthetic experience of language. With one page that sings in any genre, Sign & Breath presents a new, inclusive perspective on poetry while two questions remain: Do we have a clearer understanding of what defines poetry? Do we have a clearer understanding of voice?

In December 1935, Zdenek Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women's sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. And in the wake of their transitions, what could have been a push toward equality became instead, through a confluence of bureaucracy, war, and sheer happenstance, the exact opposite: the now all-too-familiar panic around trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming athletes. In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era. With dogged research and cinematic flair, Waters also tracks how International Olympic Committee members ignored Nazi Germany's atrocities in order to pull off the Berlin Games, a partnership that ultimately influenced the IOC's nearly century-long obsession with surveilling and cataloging gender. Immersive and revelatory, The Other Olympians is a groundbreaking, hidden-in-the-archives marvel, an inspiring call for equality, and an essential contribution toward understanding the contemporary culture wars over gender in sports.