BAM!: John Madden, the NFL Explosion, and the Video Game that Changed Sports with Scott Howard-Cooper (Diversion Books, 2026)

What is the place of poetry in the modern world? In Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public (Columbia UP, 2025), Keegan Cook Finberg, an Associate Professor of English at University of Maryland, Baltimore County narrates the contemporary history of poetry as the emergence of a public literary form. The book shows poets' engagement with social and economic changes, such as the rise of bureaucracy and office jobs, suburbanisation, feminism, and neoliberalism, alongside changes in literary forms and literary practices In doing so, the analysis demonstrates both the importance of poetry to reflect social and economic change, as well as its potential as a critical force in our moment of social and economic crisis. Ranging widely across individual poets, artistic collectives, and performance activities, the book will be of interest across the humanities, as well as anyone interested in why poetry matters today.

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Jennifer LoveGrove about her poetry collection, The Tinder Sonnets (Book*hug Press, 2026).

In Rehearsing the Future: The Thought and Practice of James and Grace Lee Boggs (AK Press, 2026), Michael Doan explores the work and legacy of James and Grace Lee Boggs, two of the most influential American radical thinkers of the twentieth century. Grace Lee Boggs earned a PhD in philosophy in the 1940s, though facing obstacles to an academic career as a young Chinese American woman, she left and became a political organizer in Detroit, where she met and married James Boggs, a Black autoworker and labor organizer from Alabama who had moved North during the Great Migration. Over the course of more than forty years of partnership and participation in labor, civil rights, Black Power, anticolonial, and feminist movements, the Boggses articulated a philosophy of long-term revolutionary strategy they called “dialectical humanism.” Rejecting state socialism and traditional Marxism, dialectical humanism instead attributes social change to the conscious, collective activity of people engaged in place-based organizing with a view to transforming everyday life, with hallmark projects such as community gardens, daycare networks, and mediation programs. Above all, revolution is not a fixed program but must evolve as ideas, movements, and institutions are changed through collective practice.

American Amazigh: Remaking North African Indigeneity and Belonging in the Diaspora (NYU Press, 2026) by Dr. Heide Castañeda examines the complex identity negotiations of Amazigh people—also known as Berbers—as they build community and claim visibility in the American landscape. These distinct ethnic groups, whose histories predate the arrival of Arabs in North Africa, unsettle categories of race and ethnicity in the U.S., challenging dominant assumptions about what it means to be African, Indigenous, and Muslim. Their experiences also disrupt familiar immigration narratives, revealing the complexities and challenges of legal migration processes such as family reunification and the Diversity Immigrant Visa program.

Chekhov liked to joke that he was a doctor by profession and merely did literary work in his spare time. Behind the joke lies an intriguing truth. We remember Chekhov as a towering literary figure, but medicine and humanitarian work occupied much of his life and profoundly shaped the way he encountered human suffering.