Spirituality has consistently been present in the political and cultural counternarratives of Chicanx literature. Calling the Soul Back focuses on the embodied aspects of a spirituality integrating body, mind, and soul. Centering the relationship between embodiment and literary narrative, Christina Garcia Lopez shows narrative as healing work through which writers and readers ritually call back the soul—one’s unique immaterial essence—into union with the body, counteracting the wounding fragmentation that emerged out of colonization and imperialism. These readings feature both underanalyzed and more popular works by pivotal writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, and Rudolfo Anaya, in addition to works by less commonly acknowledged authors. Calling the Soul Back explores the spiritual and ancestral knowledge offered in narratives of bodies in trauma, bodies engaged in ritual, grieving bodies, bodies immersed in and becoming part of nature, and dreaming bodies. Reading across narrative nonfiction, performative monologue, short fiction, fables, illustrated children’s books, and a novel, Garcia Lopez asks how these narratives draw on the embodied intersections of ways of knowing and being to shift readers’ consciousness regarding relationships to space, time, and natural environments. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Calling the Soul Back draws on literary and Chicanx studies scholars as well as those in religious studies, feminist studies, sociology, environmental studies, philosophy, and Indigenous studies, to reveal narrative’s healing potential to bring the soul into balance with the body and mind.

After their amazing first competition, 12-year-old Harper is loving life in her new group, the DanceStarz. But now, Harper has landed a part in her school musical - and not everyone is as thrilled about it as she is. The DanceStarz are worried Harper will be distracted so close to their next event. The girls have to win - especially as they're facing their arch-rivals, the Belles. Can Harper figure out how to find her balance and shine before she loses it all? The Callback, written in collaboration with Jula DeVillers, is the glittering sequel to dancer and international superstar Maddie Ziegler's debut novel, The Audition.

Shares the author's story of his brushes with the law and addictions to heroin and alcohol, tracing his complicated journey toward a recovery marked by a run for political office and his rise to an internationally respected gang interventionist.

'Funny, heart-warming and just properly brilliant.' Maximum Pop ‘Glows with warmth and wit’ Jenny McLachlan ‘A witty, feel-good romp of a book. Waiting For Callback is my new favourite teen read!’ Emma Carroll When Elektra is discovered by an acting agent, she imagines Oscar glory can't be far away, but instead lurches from one cringe-worthy moment to the next! Just how many times can you be rejected for the part of 'Dead Girl Number Three' without losing hope? And who knew that actors were actually supposed to be multi-lingual, play seven instruments and be trained in a variety of circus skills? Off-stage things aren't going well either - she's fallen out with her best friend, remains firmly in the friend-zone with her crush and her parents are driving her crazy. One way or another, Elektra's life is now spent waiting for the phone to ring - waiting for callback. Can an average girl-next-door like Elektra really make it in the world of luvvies and starlets? Geek Girl meets Fame meets New Girl in this brilliantly funny new series!

Actors are always waiting for the callback. Leona Shay isn’t looking for love. Having just gone through a divorce from her high school sweetheart, her world is in upheaval. And things are about to get even crazier after selling the movie rights to her series. Rising movie star, Luke Chance, could have anyone he wants, but he wants an author who may not be ready for him or anything that comes with being with him. Luke wants a role in the movie. Leona can’t see him as the lead, not that she has a say in the cast. Their first encounter may be rocky, but he’s not going to let her slip away. Trust doesn’t come easy for Leona. Tabloids and distance may send her running. How far is Luke willing to chase?

Foreword Book of the Year Award Independent Publishers Award (IPPY) Lambda Literary Award Finalist Publishing Triangle Award Finalist GAMMA Award, Best Feature from The Magazine Association of the Southwest for “Getting the News,” The Georgia Review, Summer 2009 Notable Essay of the Year Citation in Best American Essays 2010 for “Getting the News” Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Guerilla Girls On Tour and by WILLA: Women in Literary Arts and Letters An extended meditation on the nature of love and the nature of time inside illness, Called Back is both a narrative and non-narrative experiment in prose. The book moves through the standard breast cancer treatment trajectory (diagnosis, surgery, chemotherapy, radiation), with the aim of discovering unexpected vectors of observation, meaning and desire inside each phase of the typically mandated four-part ritual. A lyrical feminist critique of living with cancer at the turn of the twenty-first century in the United States, the book looks through the lens of cancer to discover new truths about intimacy and essential solitude, eroticism, the fact of the body, and the impossibility of turning away. Offering original exegeses of the work of Marsden Hartley, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Marcel Proust, Called Back relies on these artists’ queer aesthetics to tease the author back to life. What might a person tutored as a reader of signs “see” inside breast cancer’s paces, protocols, and regimes? What does the experience occlude, and what can we afford to liberate? The first chapter paves the way for the book’s central emphases: a meditation on the nature of “news” and the new, on noticing, on messages—including those that the body itself relies upon in the assumption of disease—and the interpretive methods we bring to them in medical crisis. Language is paramount for how we understand and act on the disease, how we imagine it, how we experience it, and how we treat it, Cappello argues. Working at the borders of memoir, literary nonfiction, and cultural analysis, Called Back aims to displace tonal and affective norms— infantilizing or moralizing, redemptive, sentimental or cute—with reverie, rage, passionate intensity, intelligence, and humor.