Bonnie Friedman, associate professor of English, describes her book, Surrendering Oz (Etruscan Press) as "a memoir in essays about how I learned to think."

Friedman completed the project thanks to a fellowship from UNT's Institute for the Advancement of the Arts, which gives faculty members a semester off to work on creative projects full time.

"It charts the emotional awakening of a bookish Bronx girl -- a desire to understand the significance of my own life experiences and what they indicated about the nature of friendship, marriage, life and death, all the big subjects," she says. "An essay is a way to think and feel something through. It is the tool I use to grasp my own experiences."