By Laurie Hertzel

Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta is known for her disturbing visual and performance art, her strong feminist themes tinged with violence and her mysterious death. Now Olga Viso, director of the Walker Art Center, has gathered Mendieta's unpublished works into a big and impressive new book, "Unseen Mendieta" (Prestel, 304 pages, $75).

"The art she produced during a brief yet prolific career ... often defied easy classification," Veso writes. "Mendieta vehemently resisted being labeled Hispanic, Latin, or feminist, or described as solely a performer, sculptor, photographer or conceptual artist. She was an artist first and foremost ... who explored complex issues of human sexuality and identity."

Viso, an expert on Latin American contemporary art, organized a Mendieta exhibit, which opened at the Whitney in New York in 2004.

Also ...

• Poet Thomas R. Smith has a new chapbook of poetry, "Kinnickinnic," published by Parallel Press at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Smith's work has appeared in "Best American Poetry 1999," and has been featured on Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac" public radio program. He is the author of five previous volumes of poetry. He lives in River Falls, Wis.

• The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference of Middlebury College has teamed with Graywolf Press of St. Paul to publish the winners of the Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize. The prize, established in 1996, is awarded annually for fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction of first-time authors. This year's winners will be announced in May 2009, with publication of their work in 2010.

• A poetry reading will be part of this year's Seward Arts Festival. Phebe Hanson, Patricia Cumbie, Milissa Link, Merra Young and Patricia Rhoades will read at 2 p.m. Nov. 8 at the Vine Arts Center, 2637 27th Av. S., Minneapolis, Room 201.

• The third book in Marion Dane Bauer's ghost trilogy has been published by Random House. Bauer, of Eden Prairie, has written more than 60 children's books and is a Newbery Honor winner. "The Green Ghost" (96 pages, $11.99) follows "The Red Ghost" and "The Blue Ghost," both mysteries for ages 6-9.

• Steve Fainaru, the Washington Post reporter who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, has written "Big Boy Rules: America's Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq" (Da Capo Press, 288 pages, $26), to be published in November. One of the characters he follows is Paul Johnson-Reuben, the security contractor from Buffalo, Minn., who was kidnapped two years ago in Iraq. His body was found in late March.

laurie.hertzel@startribune.com