Dear Friends:

I hope this message finds you well, and that the coming of spring and vaccines means we can all find reason to be hopeful about the future. I write with some exciting news about the Teaching and Learning in Higher Education series from West Virginia University Press.

For the past couple of years WVU Press director Derek Krissoff and I have been thinking about adding a coeditor to the series. With close to a dozen books published now, and approximately that many in the pipeline, the workload has really grown too much for me to handle on my own. More importantly, we wanted to expand the vision of the series by engaging a series coeditor who could balance out some of my experiences and interests, but who would still have the same passion for what I view as the primary strength of our series: excellent writing. When the manuscript for Michelle Miller’s new book came in a couple of months ago, and I sat down to read it, I was floored both by the elegance of the writing and by Michelle’s ability to digest complex areas of research into accessible recommendations for college faculty. I realized too that Michelle’s background in cognitive psychology, and her work with diverse student populations at Northern Arizona University, would provide some important balance to my own background teaching English at a liberal arts institution in New England. Derek and I agreed that she would be our ideal coeditor for the series, and she has happily accepted our invitation.

I invite you to join me in congratulating Michelle on becoming coeditor of the series. Performance of books in the series continues to be robust, and we hope that friends in our network are both keeping us in mind for future projects, and referring appropriate contacts to us. We are of course ever on the search for authors who will expand the diversity of our list in every way, and we especially welcome help in recruiting writers of color whose work we can publish and whose voices we can amplify. Send your favorite writers our way, whether they are new or established. Michelle and I will work together to make sure they receive the best editorial treatment an author could wish for.

We are aided in this work by a new series advisory board, to whom I am grateful:

Derek Bruff, Vanderbilt University
Sarah Rose Cavanagh, Assumption College
Jenae Cohn, Stanford University
Josh Eyler, University of Mississippi
Kevin Gannon, Grand View University
Mays Imad, Pima Community College
Cyndi Kernahan, University of Wisconsin, River Falls
Guadalupe Lozano, University of Arizona
Jessamyn Neuhaus, SUNY Plattsburgh
Viji Sathy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
John Staunton, Eastern Michigan University

My thanks to all of the readers and authors who have contributed to the success of the series, and my best wishes for your spring semester and beyond.

Jim Lang