Live Nude Girl on Huffington Post

Kathleen Rooney and her book Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object. In a forest of somber literary magazines and grad students at the Associated Writing Programs conference in Chicago, it stopped us cold.

LNG is a memoir of Rooney's career as an art model that wrestles with the headier issues of the naked form as inspiration, objectification for the sake of art, and the role of a muse throughout history. Since Rooney has 3 other books (including a cultural study of Oprah's Book Club) to her credit, we felt sure that her latest effort wasn't of the "I'm hot and wrote about it" efforts we've been seeing too much of lately.

Like many authors who get that there's a 21st century going on, Rooney is rolling out Live Nude Girl on a long carpet of sass. The second half of her 25 city "traveling literary circus" rolls through Arkansas, Memphis, Campaign, IL and Ann Arbor over the next few weeks with guest appearances by a cabal of young writertly talent.

Given the subject, we shudder to imagine what flavor of loon and goofball will show up. Sadly, not us as Ms. Rooney's closest west coast gig is an imposing 5 hours south of TST HQ. But we'll be watching as Ms. Rooney seems as compelling a talent in her future off the pedestal as on.

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"an important contribution"

From the Journal of Southern History, November 2008

Wiley Austin Branton is an often overlooked personality in the history of the civil rights movement. Judith Kilpatrick highlights the contributions of this Arkansas native son and in doing so reveals the complexity of race and race relations in the Natural State as African Americans straggled for first-class citizenship in the twentieth century.

Branton was bom in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in 1923. At the time African Americans composed one-third of the town's population, and from the time of Reconstruction the black community had benefited from limited political and economic advantages. Although the members of the Branton family enjoyed middle-class status due to their entrepreneurial ventures and fair complexions, the Brantons were not immune to racial prejudice in Pine Bluff. Wiley's earliest experiences with racism left him determined to fight against its ravages. Such was the case when, after being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943, he and a friend questioned the treatment of African Americans in the military in a 1944 pamphlet titled "Waste of Manpower." Branton was investigated but was honorably discharged in 1946.

Returning to civilian life, Branton was determined to ensure African Americans' access to first-class citizenship. In the late 1940s he was a member of the Arkansas NAACP State Conference Board, and he participated in voting drives and developed workshops that helped African Americans learn how to vote. Also during this time he and a friend attempted to enroll at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville after reading about other African Americans who had successfully desegregated institutions of higher learning. Branton's friend was admitted, with restrictions, to the university's law school in 1948; after finishing undergraduate credits in Pine Bluff, Branton entered the law school in 1950.

Branton's attacks on racial injustice continued into the 1950s and beyond. After establishing a law practice in Pine Bluff, he joined Thurgood Marshall as counsel for the Little Rock Nine. In the 1960s Branton, as the executive director of the Voter Education Project, was once again instrumental in registering black voters, and he was the executive secretary of Lyndon B. Johnson's President's Council on Equal Opportunity. In the late 1960s Branton turned his attention to the nation's pervasive poverty and became the executive director of the United Planning Organization. As the federal government increasingly cut funding to poverty programs, Branton was attracted by the platform of the Alliance for Labor Action (ALA) and its dedication to unionizing workers, particularly those in the South. In 1969 Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers and a supporter of civil rights for African Americans and working people, recruited Branton to become the director of social action for the ALA. In the 1970s Branton returned to private law practice, but his civil rights activism did not wane. He worked with the Voter Registration Fund and a host of organizations, including the NAACP and the National Bar Association, until his death in 1988.

Kilpatrick's exploration of the life of this "civil rights warrior" is an important contribution to the growing scholarship on African Americans and civil rights activism in Arkansas.

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Publishers Weekly Starred Review

Author, award-winning poet and professional artists' model Rooney (Reading with Oprah, Something Really Wonderful) uses everything from Roland Barthes quotations to sitcom episode synopses off the internet (specifically, fortunecity.com on Growing Pains) to explore the myths and realities of nude modeling. Despite the fact that it largely consists of sitting still for hours on end, Rooney keeps work stories compelling: "with the sculptors continually approaching... to rotate you slightly... [it's] like you're on the world's slowest and most boring Teacup Ride." Posing for an advanced sculpting class working on life-sized renderings, Rooney merges her experience with a look at China's ancient Terra Cotta Army; elsewhere she tackles semantics, quoting art historian Kenneth Clark on the difference between "naked" and "nude." Happily, Rooney is perfectly willing to satisfy readers' curiosity upfront in order to move in more philosophical directions, going from awkward first impressions ("the first thing they ask is, 'Like, naked?'") to questions of safety and empowerment ("I feel safer from sexual predation [naked] in the art studio than I do... [clothed on] the street"). This esoteric, organic meditation on life as an art object is itself a model of personal writing, perfect for those on either side of the easel. (Feb.)

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Los Angeles Times Review of Live Nude Girl

"a compelling memoir that blends observation, personal revelation and scholarly inquiry"... read the review

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"poignant... recommended"

Military History of the West recently reviewed Confederate Guerilla: The Civil War Memoir of Joseph M. Bailey, edited by T. Lindsay Baker, and had this to say.

"This memoir provides a poignant portrayal of guerrilla warfare and its effect on society... Bailey's memoirs offer insight into the relationship of guerilla warfare with military, gender, and social history... this memoir, with its references to both the battlefield and the home front, is recommended for those interested in the social and military history of the Civil War."

Military History of the West

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Live Nude Girl in the Devil's Territory

Check out Kathleen Rooney's (Live Nude Girl) very funny blog about the tour she's on with fellow writer Kyle Minor, author of the short story collection In the Devil's Territory, published by Dzanc.

They're in Minnesota today, I think, but it's hard to keep up.

Here's some recent press:

The Oregonian

Time Out Chicago

Working Our Way through the Ice

Fayetteville was caught up in the ice storm that affected so much of the South last week and kept most of the city out of power for days. Our McIlroy office is still without power, but our warehouse was up and running as of yesterday. Please excuse any delays with communication and we're hopeful that things will be back to normal within a couple of days.

For more information on how the University is handling cleanup after the storm