Professor & Author
Discovering the Peoples of Michigan: Ukrainians in Michigan
by Paul M. Hedeen and Maryna Hedeen, 2023
This history of Ukrainian immigrants in Michigan and their American descendants examines both the choices people made and the social forces that impelled their decisions to migrate and to make new homes in the state. Michigan’s Ukrainians came in four waves, each unique in time and character, beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing in the twenty-first. Detroit attracted many of them with the opportunities it offered in its booming automobile industry. Yet others put down roots in cities and towns across the state. Wherever they settled, they established churches and community centers and continued to practice the customs of their homeland. Many Ukrainian Americans have made significant contributions to Michigan and the United States, including those who are showcased in this book. This comprehensive text also highlights cultural practices and traditional foods cherished by community members.
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The Butterfly
by Paul M. Hedeen, 2019
After the fall of 1963 and a few weeks before President Kennedy’s assassination, an obscure émigré Russian professor dies of a stroke—or so it is believed. The professor’s eccentricities and complicity create both mystery and jeopardy as his documents lead his student backward into a century of famine, political terror, and war and forward into a bewildering underworld of malevolent opportunists, unstable identities, and improvised histories. When the student falls in with the troubled daughter of the Nazi elite, she becomes his lover, guide, and tormentor as both are irresistibly drawn into the dark aftermath of World War II. Memoirs, fairy tales, fiction, and scenarios interweave and reveal the postwar fate of Eva Braun and secrets concerning the famous Holocaust photo, “The Last Jew in Vinnitsa.”
Under a Night Sky
by Paul M. Hedeen, 2016
While we typically may associate the dark of night with loneliness or isolation, what if it is in fact our daylight lives that isolate us? What if night, rather than day, is the time when we are exposed to the history of the whole of Creation, in the words of Richard Grossinger? These are the kind of questions that animate Under a Night Sky, a book-length collection of poetry from Paul M. Hedeen. In a collection of thirty-five poems that confront loss and find healing, Hedeen offers an intimate account of paths to knowledge and the possibility of happiness.
The Knowledge Tree
by Paul M. Hedeen, 2013
Set in contemporary Berlin, The Knowledge Tree is a thriller that evokes the rich backgrounds of Graham Greene and the sharp insights of Günter Grass. Hedeen chronicles Dr. Friedrich Kaspar's loves, temptations, and fall as he is drawn into forests of wealth and power. There Kaspar naively believes that if you find the tree of knowledge you can climb it. Climb it and you can taste its fruit. It is this very human error made in the midwinter twilight of Europe's most troubled city that brings terror into Kaspar's safe life.
--Gary Eller, author of Thin Ice and Other Risks
When I Think About Rain
by Paul M. Hedeen, 2009
In the four sections of When I Think About Rain, poems vary in settings from central Ukraine to the Cedar Valley. Drawing on religious, philosophical, and personal insights, the emotional territory Hedeen covers includes the quiet dignities of love and the raucous indignities of its loss and lack. The volume ends by affirming that only love provides an escape from "this sudden room, / this life."
Unrelenting Readers: The New Poet-Critics
by Paul M. Hedeen (Editor), D. G. Myers (Editor), 2003
As creative writing programs, beginning in the '70s, multiplied, poetry criticism became increasingly chummy, little more than a promotional sideshow. Still, some poets (and the best critics of poetry have always been poets) have always written, against the popular tide, independent, honest, and challenging essays and reviews. Here are fifteen essays by the leading poet-critics of our time, including Rita Dove, Robert Haas, Robert Pinsky, Louise Gluck, Mary Kinzie, Mark Jarman, and others. These unflinching voices make sense at last of our Poetry Wars.