Soak up the sun with a good book

The Marketing of Debt: How They Get You
BY JOHN DINSMORE (’94)
Emerald Publishing Limited

Why do people struggle so much with debt? The truth is, we are psychologically pre-disposed to misunderstanding it. We underestimate the cost of debt and overestimate our ability to pay. Not only do marketers of credit cards and loans know this, but they also exploit these psychological blind spots to get us deeper in hock.

The Marketing of Debt by John Dinsmore, a Bachelor of Arts in History and Political Science, is an irreverent look at the financial services industry and the psychological research on decision-making related to debt. Topics include resisting temptation and refocusing on long-term goals, how money lenders hide pricing, partitioned pricing, drip pricing, the issue with status-branded credit cards, and taking scientifically proven steps for making better financial decisions.

Featuring a foreword from CEO Jason Harris (’93) of the advertising firm Mekanism, this book is for anyone who wants to understand common tactics that marketers of debt use to get people into deeper debt and how to avoid the traps laid by lenders. For students, this will be an appealing point-of-entry to behavioral research on financial decision-making. This could also be required reading for a consumer-behavior or consumer-finance course.

Oh Oblivion
BY ROBERT KRUT (’95)
Codhill/SUNY Press

An increasingly untethered world gives way to the limbo between lives and raises a glass to the ones beyond in this fifth collection from the award-winning poet. In Oh Oblivion, Robert Krut presents poems written from the island between lives. They look out on a world disappearing, filled with the surreality of a city where a cardboard box containing a human heart awaits discovery (“Nocturnal Cartography”) to a country where gasping birds cough up coins in a now-drained lake (“The Loons”). While current life is keenly observed, the poems turn to what lies ahead, investigating the narratives that are yet to take place, where simple earnest gestures linger (“An Offering Is Infinite”) and “the ghosts of the future” turn to the comfort of a resetting solar system (“Oh Amnesia”). Standing in the space between worlds, the poems take a hard-earned stock of where we are but make a toast as we step forward on uncertain and unseen ground.

A graduate in English and Education, Krut is also the author of Watch Me Trick Ghosts, The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All on Fire, This Is the Ocean and The Spider Sermons. He teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Writing Program and College of Creative Studies.

Grandmother’s Animal Tails
EDITED BY BETSY (KURTH) QUINN (’86)
Willow Glen Publications

Sarah Elizabeth “Sadie” Taylor shares more than 30 short stories drawn from the lives of her pets and other animal friends with her grandchildren. Whether it be her dog, Nip, solving mysteries, her daughter’s cat, Peter, dressing up as a clown for a class pet show or a wild porcupine joining the family on a boat ride, Taylor always had a tale to tell. And believe it or not, they’re all true! These animal stories tell of adventure, tragedy and kindness. Taylor offers grandmotherly wisdom and witty commentary on her animal “tails” to all her young readers.

English major and editor Betsy (Kurth) Quinn, Taylor’s great-granddaughter, has worked as a correspondent for Prison Fellowship Ministries and served as chair of the Board for Oakseed Ministries International. She lives in Oak Hill, Virginia, with her husband, Michael Quinn, and has three sons.

The Elk of Amor
BY BETSY (KURTH) QUINN (’86)
Willow Glen Publications

A young girl playing in the park comes across a beautiful, bronze statue of an elk. Little did she know, this elk would take her on the adventure of a lifetime. Soaring through the air, sleeping in a quiet forest, bursting through the gates of a fortress and plunging into the depths of the sea, the Elk of Amor teaches the young girl valuable lessons while combatting the wicked tyrant Oinkler!

Betsy (Kurth) Quinn, who majored in English, is a talented writer and thorough researcher with a deep love of literature and history. She has edited and published Gold Rush Girl: Pioneer Life in the Black Hills, a memoir first written by her great-grandmother in the 1920s that chronicles the struggles and adventures of growing up in Lead, South Dakota, during the turn of the 19th century. More recently, she has published a compilation of short animal stories also written by her great-grandmother.

Start With a Vegetable: More Than 100 Easy, Tasty, Plant-Forward Recipes for Everyone
BY JESSICA SMITH (’03)
Countryman Press

With original recipes and photographs, Start With a Vegetable is a bright, colorful, fun, love letter to everyday vegetables. It offers simple dinner recipes that make use of the broccoli, baby spinach, bell pepper and carrots we all grab on the way through the grocery store without a real plan for how to use them.

Author Jessica Smith turned her English major into a successful food blog, inquiringchef.com, that received more than five million visits in 2024, an Instagram page (@inquiringchef) that has grown to 60,000 followers and a cookbook deal. Last year, she also opened a cooking school for kids in Kansas City, Missouri, called Inquiring Chef Academy.

Crazy by Conscious
BY CHRIS COOPER (’10)
Outcast Press LLC

Crazy by Conscious follows Dennis Clauden, a neurotic high school teacher torn between the life he has and the one he lost. Struggling with addiction and haunted by unhealed trauma, he finds his life spiraling as he navigates waves of existential angst and strives to live in the now. This dark, satirical novel dives into the chaos of the modern psyche, revealing the tension between madness and the pursuit of meaning. A provocative read, it offers a fearless journey into our most unsettling truths, exposing the raw edges of the human experience and the darkness we’re afraid to confront.

With a Bachelor of Arts in English and a minor in Psychology, Chris Cooper says his literature studies at JMU gave him the foundation to become a published fiction author who is nominated for the Pushcart Prize award in literary fiction. Over the years, he’s won a few literary accolades alongside public appearances. T-shirt sales that accompanied his 2022 short story raised more than $2,000 for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Reunited: A Novel
BY MARCUS O’MALLEY (’04)
Emerald Publishing Limited

Nick’s life was shattered. How would he ever recover from this? How could he ever look Jason’s family in the eye again? The accident had cost him everything. He had to keep going, Pablo and Connor needed him. Then Nick, looking through Jason’s laptop, discovered a vision for South Africa that would change the friends’ lives forever. Walk with four friends’ unique journeys of faith as each Christian and non-Christian puts their beliefs to the ultimate test.

Reunited is a fictional story inspired by true events when Marcus O’Malley, a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, sold his Harrisonburg-based business and everything else he owned, and moved to Cape Town, South Africa. The trip was inspired by the Rev. Desmond Tutu’s speech to “be the change” when he received the Mahatma Gandhi Global Nonviolence Award at JMU in 2007.

The Quiet Unraveling of Eve Ellaway
BY MELANIE SWIFTNEY (’97)
Left-Handed Mitten Publications

All Eve Ellaway wants is to escape to college, start a life of her own and finally sever the connection to her twin sister, Gen, who disappeared when they were babies. Because while the rest of the world moved on from the kidnapping, Gen’s still very much alive at home.

Most families would grieve their missing child. Some families might create a shrine for their lost daughter. But the Ellaways are not most families.

Every night, Eve pretends to be Gen to protect her mother’s delicate grasp on reality — dividing her life, her stories and her dreams so there’s enough for two sisters. Eve’s forced to maintain her father’s lie to ease his guilt over Gen’s disappearance, but is she sacrificing the last threads of her identity and any hope for a normal future?

As the lies propping up Eve’s life start to crumble, she no longer knows what she wants. But Gen does, and she’s ready to take it.