Two MSU Press authors were featured on radio and podcast programs earlier this month to talk about their latest projects with MSU Press.
Phyllis Michael Wong was featured on Stateside on Michigan Radio to discuss We Kept Our Towns Going: The Gossard Girls of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, winner of a Michigan Notable Book Award. In it, she tells the stories of the Gossard Girls, women who sewed corsets and bras at factories in Ishpeming and Gwinn from the early twentieth century to the 1970s. As the Upper Peninsula’s mines became increasingly exhausted and its stands of timber further depleted, the Gossard Girls’ income sustained both their families and the local economy. From cutting cloth and distributing materials to getting paid and having fun, Wong gives us a rare ground-level view of piecework in a clothing factory from the women on the sewing room floor. Learn more
Author Marion Starling Boyer was featured on Art Beat on WMUK, Public Radio from Western Michigan University. She discussed her book Ice Hours, the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize winner. Ice Hours is a suite of poems set in majestic and severe Antarctica, chronicling the nearly forgotten story of the Ross Sea party. Weaving historical and scientific research into lilting verse, Marion Starling Boyer follows the adventurers who sailed on the Aurora at the beginning of World War I to support Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1914–1917 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Through lyric and formal poetic forms, Ice Hours brings to life the close of a heroic period interwoven with the brooding voice of the Antarctic continent, evoking themes of what occurs when humanity engages with the sublime. Learn more
