Paper Sparrow is a historical novel inspired by real-life events, Australia 1943 to 1955. PEGGY is born to circumstances that deny her opportunities afforded to others. Before her thirteenth birthday, she has no choice but to work as a Nursing Aide in a home for the elderly. Aged fourteen, Peggy is drugged and raped. She travels from Sydney to Melbourne to see out her pregnancy without family or financial support. Her dark journey reveals a massive baby farming industry, untold sufferings, and life-long consequences to thousands of post-WWII victims-single women. Their babies are officially recognised today as The Stolen White Generation. Peggy's core conflict comes from her necessary involvement with a network of welfare officers and medical teams, all fuelled by monetary greed. Torment, near-slavery, and degradation are encouraged through social bigotry. Peggy meets PETER, a man of the cloth, BINEHAM, a master of Chinese psychology and LILY, a welfare officer fighting for social justice. They foster her potential and lighten her journey. Peggy's baby is kidnapped from the birthing table and sold to a couple who have a ruthless plan to forbid Peggy to approach her child legally. This action leads Peggy to incite reform through civil society to end social prejudice against single mothers and their children. Fortune brings work in the fashion industry, and Peggy wins a scholarship which will lead to a career in live theatre. Peggy has a heart-rending meeting with her child aged one year, but the cherished experience loses its worth when he spits at her feet under instruction from his adoptive parents. This action and a sordid society party meant to launch Peggy in the Miss Australia quest destroy her will to live. Yet, she miraculously survives a deep-sea baptism and finds the strength and means to promote benevolence, communication, and beauty.

Blue Sparrow was born on Twitter. It's a compilation of my daily ramblings as a first time novelist encouraging myself and other writers to bite the bullet and do it despite the fear of blank paper, the insecurities, the angst every writer faces when left alone with the story and trying to bleed it out. My Twitter followers asked me to make it. They said they want to carry it around in their pockets and take it out each time they felt stuck, scared, or simply need to smile. Because people tell me my tweets are funny. You be the judge.

'Reckless Paper Birds' blends raw emotion, acute social observation and sharp wit to capture the gay male experience. The author of the critically acclaimed collections The Frost Fairs and Spacecraft, Brighton-based John McCullough pulls no punches in this latest - and his most powerful - collection. These are poems of skill, joy and quiet musicality that reflect the conflict and complexity of being.

Presents one bible story for every Sunday of the year, which is paired with an activity suitable for small children which reinforces the moral or lesson appearing in each story.

“Let our scars fall in love,” Galway Kinnell said. In this compelling book, Desmond Francis Xavier Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé moves his love language over old wounds, deep cuts now seemingly inappreciable. Scarred over and smoothed out—by grace. Yet, how reasoned and magnificent the rising for air, the lyric ascent that wraps a heady mix of theological imagination and handsome aesthetics, without pause or apology. This is a hearty nod to Hans Urs von Balthasar’s three transcendentals of Being—beauty, goodness, truth. In these poems, one experiences the full-bodied witness of Catholic piety, one that remains brave, vulnerable, curious, devoted, and above all, reverent. The lines traverse a broad, lustrous terrain, from Mount Olivet to Macau, Malacca to Montreal. From Caravaggio’s Deposition of Christ to Salvador Dalí’s Ascension of Christ. From the Church of Agios Lazaros to the Church of the Sepulchre of Saint Mary. One walks through Ordinary Time to Advent, and looks on the year Ash Wednesday fell on Saint Valentine’s Day. Without reservation, there remains an adoring love for the Holy Eucharist. And veneration for what is an impressive host of saints—from Saint Monica to Saint Rose of Lima, Saint John of the Cross to Saint Josemaría Escrivá. How do our conversations with God inhabit their own speech acts, then settle comfortably into the contemplative, the deep quiet of silence? How does the language of the confessional translate itself into confessional poetry, the expressed lyric turning itself over and over again, how iterative, how manifold the unfolding and infolding? A language always stationed in a state of contingency, open in its gentle evolutions—by turns; yet, all at once. The fragile transformations as delicate and faint, as they remain illumined, uplit. Always looking heavenward, toward the light, toward transcendence.

Revitalizing Classrooms brings together six diverse essays with the central purpose of providing a venue for scholar teachers from a number of disciplines to convey their individual journeys in pedagogical innovation. These classroom narratives involve a paradigm shift away from traditional lecture modes to vital, active, engaged teaching and learning. From high school classrooms to undergraduate and graduate classes, these models provide adaptable ways to reinvigorate and energize classroom spaces that center student driven learning.

Born of a Nez Perce mother and a white father in the second half of the twentieth century, Phoenix Stargazer has always struggled to find his place in two worlds. Called a half-breed by many, Phoenix is struggling to find his place in humankind when he falls in love with a white woman who sees past his mixed heritage and his anger to offer him her love and her God. Aerielle Buchanan, having delved past the wall Phoenix has built, has fallen in love. Yet without warning, Phoenix is torn from her life, and the two are left to live their own lives apart from each other. What will happen in 14 years when God reunites them? Bound by love and faith, but torn apart by time and circumstance, will their reunion be enough to bring them back together? Are they truly destined for each other, or was what they had only an illusion from their youth?

Wishing for something beyond her adventureless life, 16-year-old Ash is counting down the days until she and her mother move away from their prairie hometown of Treade. It's Ash's summer of goodbyes until she finds a way into the mysterious, condemned building on the outskirts of town that has haunted her childhood with secrets and questions. What she finds inside is an untouched library inhabited by an enchanting mute named Li. Brightened by Li's charm and his indulgence in her imagination, Ash becomes locked in a world of dusty books and dying memories, with Li becoming the attachment to Treade she never wanted. As the summer vanishes underneath her, Ash must choose between the road ahead or the dream she's living before what she wants most consumes her.