One Man's Music: The Life and Times of Texas Songwriter Vince Bell, by Vince Bell Texas singer/songwriter Vince Bell’s story begins in the 1970s, when he and his contemporaries Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith, and Lucinda Williams were on the rise. In 1982, while returning from the studio (where he and Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eric Johnson had just recorded three of Bell’s songs), a drunk driver broadsided Bell at 65 mph. He was thrown from his car and suffered injuries to his liver, ribs, forearm, and head—a severe traumatic brain injury. Not only was his debut album waylaid for a dozen years, life as he’d known it would never be the same. In detailing his recovery from the accident and his roundabout climb back onstage, Bell shines a light in those dark corners of the music business that, for the lone musician whose success is measured not by the Top 40 but by nightly victories, usually fall outside of the spotlight. More details on One Man's Music: The Life and Times of Texas Songwriter Vince Bell

Ohio Violence, by Alison Stine Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 2008 Ohio Violence starts with scandal: the narrator leads the high school football coach into the cornfields, but as she promises, “nothing happened.” In the fields, in the woods, in the dark water of Ohio, something is happening. Girls disappear, turn on each other. Men watch from the rearview as the narrator hedges, changes her mind, then shows all in this break-out collection of bittersweet and cataclysmic lyrics. More details on Ohio Violence