Post-holiday report: President's late mother a published author; poet heads to Afghanistan

The world returned from Thanksgiving to learn of these literary milestones:

Duke University Press is releasing "Surviving Against The Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia" Thursday with some hoopla at the American Anthropological Association's  conference in Philadelphia. Why?
The author is the late S. Ann Dunham, mother of President Obama, who died 15 years ago. It's her doctoral dissertation about a blacksmithing village in Java. It earned her a Ph.D in anthropology from the University of Hawaii.

Suzanne Steele of the Victoria, British Columbia, area, is Canada's first official War Poet, planning to join Canadian forces in Afghanistan early next year. She'll be part of something called the Canadian Forces Artists Program which send artists into the field to portray the life of soldiers. (Holy crap, that's amazing!)
The position of war artist is unpaid, the military providing access to bases and transportation to Afghanistan, plus food, lodging and protection when she's there, but exerting no control over what she writes. "I have to be careful not to drink the Kool-Aid," she says. "I'm not a propagandist. They're not choosing a safe artist," she told The Tyee, a B.C.-based cultural Web site.
She'll be blogging from Afghanistan later next year.