Columbus State University Press

Published March 15, 2025: The Murmur of Everything Moving by Maureen Stanton

Maureen Stanton’s The Murmur of Everything Moving, a superb memoir won the 2024 Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence.

Maureen Stanton’s memoir, The Murmur of Everything Moving shares with readers the most sincere and bravest of love stories. Stanton brings us back to a fateful time in her twenties, when life was filled with aspirations and dreams, until her passionate relationship with Steve, a hard-working electrician and recent divorcee, is intruded upon by serious illness. From there we are led into a finely-wrought exploration of devotion and hope, leaving us to wonder who we are ourselves as family members and caregivers.

Published March 15, 2025: Salmon Weather: Writing From the Land of No Return by CMarie Fuhrman

CMarie Fuhrman’s Salmon Weather: Writing From the Land of No Return is the second title in The Nature Series at DLJ Books.

CMarie Fuhrman’s Salmon Weather: Writing From the Land of No Return invites readers on a journey of introspection and connection through lyrical prose and intimate stories from the heart of Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains and other rural landscapes of the West.  Drawing on a lifetime of witnessing the rhythms and transformations of these lands, Fuhrman invokes themes of grief and healing; explores the land’s complicated history, her struggle to find peace after the drowning of her husband, and shares her deep connection to nature.  Her essays remind us of the urgency of protecting these landscapes and the enduring power of love in the face of loss.

Published  November 21, 2024: Cartographic America by David Owings and Eric Spears.

Cartographic America, selections from the J. Kyle Spencer Map Collection, charts nearly three hundred years of American historical geography from the late 1500s to the late 1800s.  It uses the unique J. Kyle Spencer Map Collection at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia, as a lens to illuminate some of the most pivotal years of American history. Housed in the Columbus State University Archives and Special Collections, the collection contains over one hundred antiquarian maps, of which approximately fifty are featured in this book. The Spencer Map Collection documents the emergence and evolutions of the American colonies, specifically Georgia, and the formation of the United States as a whole, ranging from the late 1500s to the late 1800s. Each of the maps has its own incredible story, and as such, this book strives to contextualize each in its original historical time period, providing readers a unique way to discover and revisit the past.

Published March 15, 2024: Beware the Tall Grass by Ellen Birkett Morris

Beware the Tall Grass won the 2023 Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence.

Beware the Tall Grass weaves the stories of the Sloans, a modern family struggling with their young son Charlie’s troubling memories of a past life as a soldier in Vietnam, and Thomas Boone, a young man caught up in the drama of mid-sixties America who is sent to Vietnam. Eve Sloan struggles as a mother to make sense of Charlie’s increasing references to war, and her attempts to get to the bottom of Charlie’s past life memories threaten her marriage, while Thomas struggles with loss and first love, before being thrust into combat and learning what matters most. Beware the Tall Grass explores the power of love and mercy with grace and artful sensitivity in a world where circumstances often occur far beyond our control.

Published March 15, 2024: Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment, by Renata Golden.

Renata Golden’s Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment was the inaugural title for DLJ Books’ The Nature Series.

Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment brings us close to the Chiricahua Mountains and explores the fascinating lives of humans and other creatures. These finely crafted essays focus on our need to be attentive in heart and mind, and to ponder natural sites on broader scopes, confronting migration, extinction, land ownership, and who we are at this crucial juncture in history. As Golden shares her personal and ethical challenges in a harsh and isolated environment, lessons are evoked on the borders of Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico. This is essential reading for those who seek to know more about “thin” places, helping us to better understand our place in an increasingly fragile world.

While It Lasts by Scott Nadelson

CSU Press’s second publication is Scott Nadelson‘s short story collection, While It Lasts, which won the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence in 2022. The publication date is March 15, 2023

This award-winning short story collection brings us moments of tenuousness, in which characters seek out or struggle to hold on to what’s most precious in the face of change and loss. The stories take us from suburban New Jersey to prewar Vienna to Western Oregon, chronicling the lives of, among others, a suburban teenage boy taking revenge with a stolen Revolutionary War bayonet; a woman adrift, literally and figuratively, amid a workplace affair; a nearly forgotten and destitute musician attempting to reclaim his creative spark; and a young Mark Rothko finding his way after several early failures. While It Lasts speaks to how we are all bound by limited time to achieve what we must despite our own knowledge of how everything is fleeting.

Close-Up by Michelle Herman

CSU Press’s first publication is Michelle Herman’s novel Close-Up, which won the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence in 2020. The publication date is March 15, 2022.

Close-Up artfully renders how the lives of a young magician, and his father, a famous novelist, intertwine with the lives of a young poet and the single poet who raised her. Close-Up reveals what drives and complicates and undermines our most important relationships. This is a robust novel about friendship, romance, marriages and the ties between parents, children, and grandchildren. The novel follows five fully rendered characters—Jacob, Martin, Caroline, Jeanie, and Jill—through their rifts and reconciliations, as their whole story brings us through loneliness, longing, missed connections and grievances, and ultimately to a desirable place of understanding.