Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we celebrate our 200^th episode of Inside the Blanket Fort! The show first aired on July 9^th, 2020.

Hosted by SIU Press Director Amy Etcheson and Professor Pinckney Benedict, it began with a focus on delving inside our Blanket Fort Radio Theater Productions—audio adaptations of the Press’s books, helmed by SIU students in Creative Writing.

The first season adapted A Knight of Another Sort: Prohibition Days and Charlie Birger, by Gary DeNeal. Birger has gone down in southern Illinois history as a bootlegger, enemy of the Ku Klux Klan, and even as the reigning "kingpin of the Saline County underworld" during the Prohibition Era. Drawing from the colorful cast of the living, the dead, and the soon-to-be-dead—a state shared by many associated with Birger and his enemies, the Shelton gang—DeNeal re-creates Prohibition-era southern Illinois. I had the privilege of serving as a producer on this first season of Blanket Fort Radio Theater and providing voices for a few of the characters while working on my MFA, and I’ve recently celebrated two and a half years of working for SIU Press.

The show’s second season adapted Survived by One: The Life and Mind of a Family Mass Murderer by Robert E. Hanlon and Thomas V. Odle. As our nation attempts to understand the continual mass murders occurring in the U.S., Survived by One sheds some light on the psychological aspects of why and how such acts of extreme carnage may occur. However, Survived by One offers a never-been-told perspective from the mass murderer himself, as he searches for the answers concurrently being asked by the nation and the world.

The third season of Blanket Fort Radio Theater adapted two related SIU Press titles: American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking: The Courage of Minnie Vautrin, by Hua-ling Hu, and The Undaunted Women of Nanking: The Wartime Diaries of Minnie Vautrin and Tsen Shui-fang, by Hua-ling Hu and Zhang Lian-hong. These two intertwining narratives tell the stories of female missionary in a time of terror and the only known daily account by a Chinese national written during the crisis and not retrospectively—a woman grappling with feelings of anger, sorrow, and compassion as she witnesses the atrocities being committed in her war-torn country.

Since the airing of these three seasons, Inside the Blanket Fort has shined a spotlight on a number of other SIU Press titles, focusing on brand-new releases and themes across our catalog, from Black History Month and Women’s History Month to Pride Month to Spooky Season, and recently, we’ve delved into an incredible new roster of books published in 2024. Over this episode and the next one, we’ll be recapping all the amazing books that have been released by the Press this year.

Celebrating the First Fifty Years of Southern Illinois University School of Law, by Frank G. Houdek, is a photographic commemoration of SIU Law’s milestones. The Southern Illinois University School of Law held its first class on September 4, 1973, in a temporary building on the outskirts of campus. 2023 marks fifty years since that humble beginning, and over the course of those years, the School of Law has expanded to offer eight joint-degree programs, four in-house clinics, and more than twenty student organizations. Featuring more than one hundred photographs, complete indexed lists of full-time faculty members and deans, and identification of numerous “firsts” in the law school’s history, this detailed commemoration is a testament to the faculty, staff, students, and alumni who have paved the way for future generations.

First published in 1987 and revised in 1997 and 2007, Stage Rigging Handbook remains the only book in any language that covers the design, operation, and maintenance of stage rigging equipment. The reorganized and greatly expanded fourth edition of Jay O. Glerum’s industry standard text updates much of the information in the previous editions with the addition of chapters on truss, motorized chain hoists, hardware, and job safety, including fall protection systems. Award-winning production manager Shane Kelly preserves Glerum’s voice while bringing fresh information to a new generation of riggers.

The scene of myriad grisly deaths, late nineteenth-century St. Louis was a hotbed for homicide, suicide, alcoholism, abortion, and workplace accidents. The role of the city’s Gilded Age coroners has not been fully examined, contextualized, or interrogated until now. In Sudden Deaths in St. Louis: Coroner Bias in the Gilded Age, Sarah E. Lirley investigates the process in which these outcomes were determined, finding coroners’ rulings were not uniform, but rather varied by who was conducting the inquest. These fascinating case studies explore the lives of the deceased, as well as their families, communities, press coverage of the events, and the coroners themselves.

Sara Henning’s new poetry collection Burn draws readers deep into the moments that make us, focusing on instances of crisis and renewal to explore our relation to time and lived experience. In these poems, we follow a speaker as she works through the loss of young love, the death of her parents, marriage’s hardness and beauty, sexual assault, and the devastation of a pandemic—evolutions of trauma that fracture time and alter perception. Twinned with these extremes are shimmering manifestations of joy only an imperfect world can make possible.

Pulling off the Sheets: The Second Ku Klux Klan in Deep Southern Illinois tells the previously obscured history of the Second Klan which formed in the area in the early 1920s. Through meticulous research into both public and private records, Darrel Dexter and John A. Beadles recount the Klan’s mythical origins, reemergence, and swift disappearance. This disturbing historical account challenges readers to “pull back the sheet” and confront the darkest corners of their past. Dexter and Beadles emphasize the importance of acknowledging the damage that white supremacy and racism cause and how we can move toward healing.