Entries - Time Period: Modern Era (2023 - the Present)

Arkansas Special Agents is a three-book series written by Maggie Wells (pen name for Margaret Ethridge) and published by Harlequin in May–July 2023 under the Harlequin Intrigue imprint, which offers a fusion of the thriller and traditional romance genres. The books feature the Arkansas State Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and take place in northwestern Arkansas, highlighting the growing divide between rich and poor and the corruption bred by a tremendous influx of wealth into the region. The first book in the series, Ozarks Missing Person, opens with Mallory Murray riding in a speedboat on Table Rock Lake with Tyrone (Trey) Powers III and his friends. Trey is an Ivy League–educated lawyer at the firm of Powers, …

The Barber of Little Rock is a 2023 short documentary film that follows barber Arlo Washington, who founded a community development financial institution (CDFI) called People Trust with the goal of improving the financial health of his predominately African American Little Rock (Pulaski County) neighborhood. The film, directed by John Hoffman and Christine Turner and distributed by the New Yorker media company, was nominated for a 2024 Academy Award for best documentary short but lost to The Last Repair Shop. Washington founded Washington Barber College in 2008, having worked as a barber since the death of his mother when he was seventeen years old as a way of supporting his two younger sisters. A longtime customer requested a small loan …

Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear is a 2023 memoir by Jinger Duggar Vuolo, one of the stars of 19 Kids and Counting and Counting On, reality television shows focused upon the daily lives of the Duggar family. She was assisted in writing by Corey Williams. Published by W Publishing Group, an imprint of Christian publishing company Thomas Nelson, the book constituted the first memoir by a Duggar family member following brother Josh Duggar’s arrest on charges of possessing child pornography, but it deals with this scandal only in passing. The book was followed in 2023 by the release of the Amazon Studios documentary series Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets and the publication of Counting …

The C. D. Wright Women Writers Conference was established in 2017 to focus on women writers, with a special emphasis on written work that has been inspired by or written in the South. The conference is usually held for two days each fall on the campus of the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) in Conway (Faulkner County). It is named in honor of the late Arkansas poet C. D. Wright (1949–2016), who was born in Mountain Home (Baxter County) and published more than a dozen books in her lifetime. Naming the conference for her was endorsed by Wright’s husband, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Forrest Gander. The conference recognizes women writers at all experience levels and from all genres, not only …

Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves is a modern southern gothic novel with a heavy dose of magical realism. This debut novel published in 2023 was cowritten by Alexandra Cronin and Robyn Barrow under the pen name Quinn Connor. The story was inspired by Barrow’s childhood weekends spent on Lake Ouachita in Arkansas and Cronin’s family time spent on Cedar Creek Lake in Texas. As stated in the novel’s author’s note, “The town of Prosper was inspired by Buckville, Arkansas, which was flooded in the 1950s by the Blakely Mountain Dam and is now beneath Lake Ouachita. The upper Ouachita valley is a part of the homelands of the Indigenous Caddo Nation, which has been systematically displaced by settlers for hundreds …

Come and Get It, Kiley Reid’s second novel, delivers a penetrating study of American young adulthood. Reid was born in Los Angeles, California, and raised in Arizona, and she studied fiction writing at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Reid wrote Come and Get It while her partner was working at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County), and most of the novel’s action follows undergraduates and a visiting professor as their fates collide on the Fayetteville campus. Published in 2024 by Putnam on the heels of a heralded debut novel, Such a Fun Age, Reid’s sophomore novel develops a coming-of-age story, featuring plenty of comic moments despite concluding in the aftermath of a traumatic incident. The novel earned …

Counting the Cost is a 2023 memoir written by Jill Duggar, with her husband, Derick Dillard, and Craig Borlase, a bestselling writer who specializes in assisting with the composition of memoirs. The book was published by Gallery Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, and was the third major critique of the Duggar family released in 2023, preceded by sister Jinger Duggar Vuolo’s own memoir Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear and the four-part documentary series Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets, in which Jill Duggar had a major role. As Jill writes in the prologue to her book, “One thing about growing up in the Duggar family, I saw a lot of bewilderment in a …

The Delta Civil Rights Legacy Trail is a website-centered project that shines a spotlight on the important role that Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) played in the civil rights movement in Arkansas. With most of the commonly remembered history centered in Little Rock (Pulaski County), especially the desegregation of Central High School in 1957, other important efforts have sometimes been overshadowed. The Delta Legacy Trail is an effort to address that oversight. The Delta Civil Rights Legacy Trail is prominently featured by Pine Bluff in civic and tourist materials, and it has received favorable coverage in some travel-focused media (although the headline in one complimentary article touted “Pine Bluff, Arizona”). The website asserts that, in its fight for equal rights for …

Fall Through is a graphic novel by National Book Award–winning writer-artist Nate Powell, who grew up in North Little Rock (Pulaski County). The book was inspired by the central Arkansas underground music scene of the 1990s. Published on February 6, 2024, by Abrams ComicArts, the book tells the story of Diamond Mine, a scrappy punk rock quartet from the fictional town of Wormwood, Arkansas, whose members include singer Diana, guitarist Napoleon, bassist Jody, and drummer Steff. The first-person narrative, set in 1994, is told by the idealistic Jody. Rather than follow a simple story of friends in an underground band, Powell introduces themes of time travel, mental health, magical realism, and the supernatural, subjects he has written about in earlier …

The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America, written by Clinton (Van Buren County) native Monica Potts, was released on May 30, 2023, to critical acclaim. The memoir recounts Potts’s personal experience reconnecting with childhood friend Darci Brawner over a period of years after returning to her hometown of Clinton. Within its first week, it appeared on the New York Times bestsellers’ list. In the book, Potts connects moments of her life, Brawner’s life, and the lives of other members of their community with larger studies and data pertaining to the experience of living in rural America. Monica Potts was born and raised in Clinton. After graduating from high school, she attended Bryn Mawr College …

Joan of Arkansas is a 2023 work mixing poetry, drama, and prose written by Milo Wippermann (working under the name Emma Wippermann when the book was released) and published by Ugly Duckling Press of Brooklyn, New York. Wippermann’s website describes the work as “a queer drama about climate catastrophe, internet fame, and political divinity.” The work received the 2023 Whiting Award in Poetry and Drama and was a finalist for a 2024 Lambda Award in LGBTQ+ drama. The book opens with a poetic rendering of the legend of Petit Jean, one that notes how the feminine form of Jean in French is Jeanne, the name of Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc). Next comes the cast of characters, which includes the …

The LEARNS Act (Act 237 of 2023) was the signature piece of legislation promoted by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders during the 2023 session of the Arkansas General Assembly, her first session as governor of the state. After her election, Sanders indicated that her top priority would be a bill to change the public elementary and secondary education system in the state. On February 8, 2023, she held a press conference at the Arkansas State Capitol together with various Republican Party officials to announce some of the basics of her plan, which was still being drafted in secret. These included: a starting teacher pay set at $50,000, the creation of a voucher program (called “education freedom accounts”) that could be used …

The solar eclipse of 2024 was one of three eclipses for which Arkansas lay within the “path of totality,” or the path of the eclipse when total darkness would be experienced. The previous ones occurred in 1834 (when Arkansas was still a territory) and 1918. The most recent previous total solar eclipse to cross the United States, the eclipse of August 21, 2017, produced a path of totality that went from the Pacific Northwest in Oregon and proceeded southeast toward South Carolina. The first such American eclipse in the era of the smartphone and social media, the 2017 event was a major media spectacle, and areas within the path of totality experienced an enormous influx of visitors. Arkansas did not …

On March 31, 2023, a massive outbreak of tornadoes struck nine states across the country, from Arkansas and Iowa to as far east as Delaware. The storms killed more than thirty people across seven states—five in Arkansas. One tornado hit the Pulaski County cities of Little Rock, North Little Rock, Sherwood, and Jacksonville. Another hit the eastern Arkansas community of Wynne (Cross County). This outbreak came a week after a similar system killed twenty-one people in Mississippi and one in Alabama. In the days leading up to the outbreak, the National Weather Service had been warning about the potential for severe storms striking the state on Friday, March 31, 2023. By the afternoon, a supercell started showing signs of becoming …

The U.S. Marshals Service, the nation’s oldest law enforcement agency, was established in 1789 by President George Washington when he signed the Judiciary Act into law. A Smithsonian exhibit about the U.S. Marshals Service, “America’s Traveling Star,” was displayed at locations throughout the United States and then housed in Laramie, Wyoming, from 1991 until 2002. After the museum in Laramie closed, the Marshals Service began an active search for a new museum site. Several cities indicated interest in the new museum, including Fort Smith (Sebastian County). Community leaders in Fort Smith felt that the city was a logical choice for the museum because of Fort Smith’s western heritage, the presence of Judge Isaac Parker’s court, the work of early intrepid …