Critiquing his own fathering practices, Dowdy’s essays move between simplicity—being present for his daughter—and complexity—considering the harrowing present of entrenched misogyny, school shootings, climate change, and other threats to childing and fathering with love, optimism, and joy.

In this tender collection of letters to his son, Tomás Q. Morín meditates on love, the body, and the future his son will have to face. He writes about the America his son will soon be born into, a country that will constantly question his place in it. An America that wields labels like Black, Brown, and white to make itself feel safe. An America in which Mexican American people continue to be seen as outsiders in their ancestral lands.

The Essential Book of Pickup Trucks is a memoir about the complex role pickups have played in Fred Haefele’s life and in American culture at large. Growing up near the GM truck plant in Flint, Michigan, young Haefele was delighted by these centaur-like vehicles. In his adult life as an arborist, teacher, and father, pickups bore him through hard times and disaster, high adventure, triumph, and love.

At the sound of the bell on the last day of kindergarten, B.J. Hollars and his six-year-old son, Henry, hop in the car to strike out on a 2,500-mile road trip retracing the Oregon Trail. Their mission: to rediscover America, and Americans, along the way.

Alternating between reimagined battle scenes and present-day travels, Thorness explores World War II and family history, the value and limits of memory, the attitudes of war, and our society’s inadequate understanding and support of combat veterans, who may return with physical and emotional scars that change them deeply.

Fugitive Son is not a love letter to Calderón’s father, whom he sees even after his death as an unethical, toxic, and incredibly complex man. Rather, Calderón’s memoir explores how his father’s undeniable love for his family despite drug addiction, lawlessness, and toxic masculinity informed Aramís’s rebellious decision to join the Marines, and how all this shaped his determination to become the father he wished his own had been.

Your Crib, My Qibla interrogates loss, the death of a child, and a father’s pursuit of language able to articulate grief. In these poems, the language of memory functions as a space of mourning, connecting the dead with the world of the living. 

With honesty and wit, Franklin explores what it takes to raise three boys, succeed in a relationship, and survive as a modern man. My Wife Wants You to Know I’m Happily Married is an uplifting rumination on learning from the past and living for the present, a hopeful take on being a man without being a menace to society.