Writing on Napkins at the Sunshine Club includes a poet laureate of Georgia and of the United States¿and the poet who read at President Clinton¿s second inauguration. The oldest was born in 1905 and the two youngest in that ominous year of American history, 1968. The Pulitzer-winning Stanley Kunitz wrote a famous poem about the Indian Mounds. Miller Williams, father of the Grammy winning Lucinda Williams, lived in Macon in the early 1960s and became a friend of Flannery O¿Connor. In the late 1970s, soon after his Mercer days, David Bottoms writes the poems for Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump and wins the Walt Whitman Award. Jud Mitcham wins the Devins Award for his first book, Somewhere in Ecclesiastes, and Seaborn Jones is doing his stint with Mister Rogers¿ Neighborhood and would later connect, in San Francisco, to one of the last pure lines of surrealism in American expression. Several poets came out of Macon or arrived in Macon soon after. Between Mercer University and Macon State College the activity of poetry in Macon thrived. Adrienne Bond wrote her seminal poems and started up the Georgia Poetry Circuit. Judith Ortiz Cofer passed through Macon State at the brink of her position at the University of Georgia and in American letters as an important artistic spokesperson for women¿s experience. From Bruce Beasley and his hybrid poetics, to Stephen Bluestone and his learned craft in the lyric poem, this book presents a selection for all students of Southern Literature some of the best poems of other poets, too, like Anya Silver, Amanda Pecor, Marjorie Becker, and the late Reginald Shepherd who was as well-known at his early death as any poet of his generation. Many of these poets studied with and knew the important poets of their time. The poems, nevertheless, speak for themselves.

On March 1, 1966, the voters of Tucson approved the Pueblo Center Redevelopment Project—Arizona’s first major urban renewal project—which targeted the most densely populated eighty acres in the state. For close to one hundred years, tucsonenses had created their own spatial reality in the historical, predominantly Mexican American heart of the city, an area most called “la calle.” Here, amid small retail and service shops, restaurants, and entertainment venues, they openly lived and celebrated their culture. To make way for the Pueblo Center’s new buildings, city officials proceeded to displace la calle’s residents and to demolish their ethnically diverse neighborhoods, which, contends Lydia Otero, challenged the spatial and cultural assumptions of postwar modernity, suburbia, and urban planning. Otero examines conflicting claims to urban space, place, and history as advanced by two opposing historic preservationist groups: the La Placita Committee and the Tucson Heritage Foundation. She gives voice to those who lived in, experienced, or remembered this contested area, and analyzes the historical narratives promoted by Anglo American elites in the service of tourism and cultural dominance. La Calle explores the forces behind the mass displacement: an unrelenting desire for order, a local economy increasingly dependent on tourism, and the pivotal power of federal housing policies. To understand how urban renewal resulted in the spatial reconfiguration of downtown Tucson, Otero draws on scholarship from a wide range of disciplines: Chicana/o, ethnic, and cultural studies; urban history, sociology, and anthropology; city planning; and cultural and feminist geography.