Andy Wilkinson

Trinity: Sol 3 is a fast-paced and intriguing thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat right up until the terrifying and chilling end.

Andy Wilkinson began writing poetry as a high-school sophomore. Over the 60 years since, his poems have been published in anthologies and magazines, featured in musical recordings and films, and along the way he's written a stage play and two books in poetry. Yet this is his first collection, 120 poems drawn from a much larger body of work. Given the six decades represented, they reflect a variety of form, subject, and length. But each and every poem is very much characteristic of his art and life.

Ever watched a war film made in the 1940’s or 50’s and asked, did this really happen or is it a fictional action story made to entertain? Every one of these classic British war films had a vital purpose in telling the narrative of the conflict; providing honesty, advice and consolation, these films helped a nation through the uncertain years before the outbreak of the war; supporting them in the darkest days of the blitz when invasion and defeat by Nazi Germany was a real possibility; celebrating their victories and consoling them through the trauma of surviving an unwanted war, leaving their once prosperous country bankrupt and in ruins. British war films are the unsung heroes of the world conflict. How many people know of the British Army Film and Photographic Unit? Who acknowledges the unit that captured live footage of the war for the world, with the highest casualty rates of any regiment at the time? Your Sunday afternoon war film has much more to it than you may have thought. Bovril & Sherry: The Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat of British War Films highlights the deep feelings and purpose held by the film makers who made them and the bold, insightful thinking of the Ministry of Information who green lit these productions.

If you are a fan of the silent film pioneers like Buster Keaton, you'll know that everything you saw on the screen in those films, actually happened.

Llanero: a boyhood on the 360-of-180 is a memoir of growing up atop the flattest mountain on Earth. The writer -- Andy Wilkinson -- a poet, songwriter and artist -- reflects on how the Llano Estacado shaped him as a person as it shaped his work. It also speaks to how place shapes us all. The artist -- Amanda Sneed -- who also grew up on the Llano Estacado -- reacted to the text with her multi-layered use of bold colors and brash forms to tell the story in a different way.

Take One, Action! takes you behind the scenes of swordplay in film - written by professional swordsman and film director Andy Wilkinson who has appeared in over seventy-three films, including many Hollywood blockbusters.

By emphasizing process over product, Mystery Mechanics approaches the creative process by recognizing that creativity is a gift possessed by all human beings and equally accessible to all, and that creativity is best defined as the way of doing something rather than the thing done. While expressing the mystery of creativity both poetically and philosophically, Mystery Mechanics is, nevertheless, grounded in a practical description of the mechanics of process.

An historical fiction, or a fictional history -- you decide which -- intended to be read aloud, this is a story about how we sometimes must become what we pretend to be. Set in the ephemeral village of Surprise in the hard-scrabble oil patch of Andrews County, Texas, Thom Ed Jones recounts the history of the place and its peoples, a tribe by choice living by design in obscurity, quartered in homes with wheels. Surprise, Texas is the sort of place you drive past as quickly as you can, though after reading Thom Ed's story you might want to lighten your load of possessions and throw in with all these Surprises.

An historical fiction, or a fictional history -- you decide which -- intended to be read aloud, this is a story about how we sometimes must become what we pretend to be. Set in the ephemeral village of Surprise in the hard-scrabble oil patch of Andrews County, Texas, Thom Ed Jones recounts the history of the place and its peoples, a tribe by choice living by design in obscurity, quartered in homes with wheels. Surprise, Texas is the sort of place you drive past as quickly as you can, though after reading Thom Ed's story you might want to lighten your load of possessions and throw in with all these Surprises.

Since he first dreamed of a career in photography, Guy Gillette has traveled regularly to his wife's family's ranch, located outside the small town of Crockett, Texas. When Gillette first came to the Porter Place, as the ranch has always been known, he began to photograph the Porter family and their land. Thanks to Gillette's sense of composition, these wonderful black-and-white photographs, dating from the 1940s, led to his career as a magazine photographer. Collected here for the first time, they document small-town life in East Texas, where Guy Gillette's sons, the musical duo the Gillette Brothers, still run cattle. A Family of the Land offers a portrait of a community over a half century during which remarkably little has changed.Midway between Dallas and Houston, the Porter Place is where the South meets the West. The pastures began as cotton fields carved out of piney woods, and the cowboys use southern curs to control the cattle. One of the photographs presented here, of a boy and his dog at the veterinarian's office, is said to have moved Museum of Modern Art curator Edward Steichen to tears. Gillette also captures cowboys at work and at play, branding and marketing their animals, enjoying a game of dominoes, driving trucks with ""2-50"" air conditioning - two windows down, fifty miles an hour.""Though photography is often called art,"" says Gillette, ""I have wanted to be artless: to be a documentarian, not an artist. . . . Telling a story was always the attraction of photography for me."" The story ends with the outdoor wedding of Guy Porter, one of the Gillette Brothers, at the Porter Place. Family, labor, and land remain, inseparable.

Before Big Love, before Eldorado, a groundbreaking memoir explored polygamy, not with outrage but with honesty and grace. In 1984, when polygamous groups knew little but the fear and pain of secrecy and hiding, Dorothy Allred Solomon, the twenty-eighth of forty-eight children, went public with her family's story. Descended from five generations of Mormon polygamy, Solomon evokes the fervor and dedication that bound the Allreds to living the Principle. She vividly renders the persecution and poverty she knew as a child, the joyous awe of a fathers too-rare presence, and an abiding hunger for autonomy. Confronting the paradox of a faith that seals loved ones as families for eternity but casts them as outlaws in the here and now, she traces the events that culminated in her father's 1977 assassination, a tragedy that rocked all Utah. Now, more than a quarter century later, Solomon revisits her story in a new preface and epilogue and in light of recent events that continue to rivet attention and spotlight our national struggle for understanding and fairness.

Texas shows its best moves in dance halls that dot its landscape. Wherever they've found fiddlers and dance floors, Texans have been tickled into motion. And for a century and a half, they've been kicking up dust in dance halls across the state. Writing about the eighteen she knows best, Gail Folkins celebrates how these halls still bring people together and foster joy. Folkins etches portraits of proprietors who give space for music and dancing, of musicians who furnish the soundtrack for dramas and comedies that play out across hardwood or concrete floors, and of people who come to dance, listen, or simply share the experience with friends and neighbors. Paired with Marcus Weekley's photographs, some whirling and some dreamy, they capture beat and motion, even the scent of sawdust on the floor. Drawn in, we witness daytime preparations for evenings to come, and the quiet that returns after the dancers go home and the musicians have packed up for the night. Moving from Twin Sisters near New Braunfels to legendary Luckenbach, we meet the third generation in a family of makers of music and keepers of dance halls. And then there are the descendants of Czech Catholic settlers coming to dance under the giant letters KJT (Katolika Jednota Texaska). At Coupland Dance Hall, we sense ghostly apparitions of pioneer women in long skirts. Very much in the twenty-first century, we share a dance floor with tourists and university types among the kitschy accoutrements at Austins Broken Spoke.