A stunning tour de force, Tracy Daugherty’s fourth novel explores the volatility of race, class, and economics as they affect three generations of a Houston, Texas, family, and traces the rise and decline of an inner city neighborhood from the point of view of a prodigal daughter. Twenty-something Telisha Washington returns after many years to the decaying Houston neighborhood where she was born, to renew old ties and come to terms with her family’s enigmatic heritage. The product of a racially mixed union, she has spent her life straddling received definitions of race, class, gender, and culture. Her personal odyssey is centered inside a black neighborhood’s convulsions, where violence, poverty, and the politics of gentrification take their toll. An unflinching meditation on family, race, sex, and love, as well as a dissection of public and private identity, Axeman’s Jazz is a stark, but loving, portrait of contemporary urban America.

Midland, Texas, native TRACY DAUGHERTY studied with Donald Barthelme at the University of Houston. He is the author of three previous novels: Desire Provoked, What Falls Away, and The Boy Orator (SMU, 1999). He has also published two story collections, The Woman in the Oil Field (SMU, 1996) and It Takes a Worried Man (SMU, 2002), as well as a volume of personal essays, Five Shades of Shadow. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Chelsea, The Gettysburg Review, The Ontario Review, The Southwest Review, and in many other literary venues. His short fiction has been honored with the Texas Institute of Letters Brazos Bookstore Award for Best Short Story and with the A.B. Guthrie Jr. Award. In 1998 he received a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He directs the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at Oregon State University and is a member of the M.F.A. faculty at Warren Wilson College.

“Ambitious, complicated and complex, and profound, Axeman’s Jazz is an identity novel, and a quest novel, but it’s also about race in America, and race in history. This is a novel that makes the reader ‘see.’” --Gordon Weaver, author, The Way We Know in Dreams

“Compelling, thought provoking, intense. I congratulate the author on the richness of this work.” --Carol Lee Lorenzo, author, Nervous Dance