Books: Fall 2025

Bimbola Akinbola ’11. Transatlantic Disbelonging: Unruliness, Pleasure, and Play in Nigerian Diasporic Women’s Art (Duke University Press, 2025)

Drawing on the work of contemporary visual and performance artists, experimental filmmakers, and writers, Akinbola redirects the focus in diaspora studies from questions of loss and longing to acts of unapologetic self-definition. Throughout the book, Akinbola examines how Nigerian diasporic women use contemporary performance, visual art, video art, and literature to contest and redefine their familial, cultural, and national belonging in Nigeria and its elsewheres.

“In this project, although I am theorizing about ways of seeing and being seen, intimacy, and community, I am also very much writing about seemingly insurmountable loneliness and alienation and what it means to sit with it, work with it, and attempt to transform it,” Akinbola says.

Marty Leistikow ’67. Touching History: One Family’s Twentieth Century (Leistikow, 2025)

Using firsthand accounts, Leistikow connects her family with important trends and events, with one chapter for each decade of the twentieth century. Macalester features heavily, with the alum unraveling tales about her experience on and off campus in the ’60s, including humorous anecdotes about her debate partner, an inspiring lecture from Professor Yahya Armajani, and a sobering study away experience in Europe where she visited London and East Berlin. In later decades, Leistikow describes raising a herd of highland cattle, Mac’s new mascot.

Miriam Moore-Keish ’19. This Is My Wonderful Face (Capstone Young Readers, 2025)

Every face tells a story, and our facial expressions are the words. In this picture book, young readers can explore all the different variations in facial features and learn to celebrate the diversity of beauty in every face. “In the end, I wanted to paint a picture of all the ways we can look, feel, sense, and connect,” Moore-Keish says. “And I wanted readers to feel it all in their own unique ways.”

Carlynn Trout ’82 and Cora Trout ’16. Jens Jensen: Brushstrokes of a Landscape Architect (The Clearing Folk School, 2025)

A mother-daughter project, “the book is meant to raise awareness about Jensen, an important landscape architect, environmentalist, and philosopher who in 1888 launched a new and sustainable direction for landscape architecture that was founded upon using mostly native plants rather than exotic imports.” – Carlynn Trout ’82

Jennifer Veilleux ’99. Open to Emotion: How Acknowledging, Understanding, and Regulating Your Feelings Can Improve Your Mental Health (American Psychological Association, 2025)

Dr. Veilleux’s new book serves as a practical, engaging resource that offers a clearer understanding of the science of emotion and a helpful path forward in regulating emotions. 

A dramatic arts major at Mac, Veilleux is now a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Arkansas. “I learned to lean into the discomfort of emotions via theater,” Veilleux says. “One of the things I’ve always loved about theater is that it can bring forth uncomfortable emotions, and people are willing to feel them because the feelings are about someone else. In therapy, we guide people to feel those feelings for themselves.”