Mid-spring roundup: Reviews, media attention, and author events

With universities pivoting quickly to online instruction in response to public health concerns, a number of authors from our series Teaching and Learning in Higher Education are in the news:

  • Joshua Eyler, author of How Humans Learn, is part of an Inside Higher Ed roundtable on “The Shift to Remote Learning,” and he appears on the podcast Tea for Teaching to talk about how universities might plan for the fall semester.
  • Also in Inside Higher Ed, Cathy Davidson’s essay on student assessment during the pandemic cites work on going gradeless by Susan D. Blum, editor of our forthcoming Ungrading (a volume to which Davidson contributes). Blum’s work on the shift from grades is discussed, as well, in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
  • Thomas Tobin, coauthor of Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone, appears in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, and talks with the Lecture Breakers podcast.
  • The EdSurge series “Sustaining Higher Education in the Coronavirus Epidemic” includes a writeup of Derek Bruff’s Intentional Tech.
  • In Public Books, Kevin Gannon, author of Radical Hope, talks with historian Kevin Kruse about the role of public engagement at less prominent universities that are sometimes overlooked by traditional media. Gannon is also interviewed for the Teaching in Higher Ed and Tea for Teaching podcasts.

Pittsburgh City Paper‘s guide to supporting independent bookstores during the pandemic recommends Deesha Philyaw’s forthcoming The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.

A list of 100 Days in Appalachia‘s “uplifting distractions” keyed to stay-at-home mandates in the region includes three WVU Press books: Appalachian Reckoning, LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia, and After Coal.

After Coal also appears—alongside our new study of the Elk River chemical spill, I’m Afraid of That Water—in a Charleston Gazette-Mail roundup of resources in Appalachian studies.

Wesley Browne’s “riveting” Hillbilly Hustle is reviewed by Chapter 16 from the Tennessee Humanities Council, and in Writer’s Bone. An excerpt appears in Appalachian Heritage.

Chapter 16 also reviews Valerie Nieman’s “chilling” To the Bones.

Nez, the Olfactory Magazine praises Mark Smith’s Smell and History as a “comprehensive and easy introduction” to the subject.

We’re pleased that two recent titles have received state-level recognition. Krista Eastman’s The Painted Forest is winner of the Norbert Blei/August Derleth Nonfiction Book Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers, and Joe Anderson’s Capitalist Pigs wins the State Historical Society of Iowa’s Research Award.

While most author events are understandably postponed, the Ohio County Public Library is taking its April 28 launch for Wheeling’s Polonia, by West Virginia University’s own Hal Gorby, online. And in other news from our home institution, don’t miss the announcement of our new series Borderless, edited by a team that includes WVU faculty members Maria del Guadalupe Davidson and Jonathan C. Hall.

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