It’s Monday, December 29, 2025. I hope you’ve had a chance to enjoy this holiday season.
2025 has brought surprises—mostly good—and opportunities, which are welcome but sometimes bring their own array of bewitching challenges.
The arrival of WVU President Michael Benson in May signaled that the dust had largely settled on WVU’s 2022 academic transformation. The reset has given us space to refocus our list, rebuild our acquisitions process, and even reestablish our place in the university. This year demonstrated clearly that our future—as a publisher, a thought leader, and a curator of culture and ideas—lies in collaboration and community.
Upon the retirement of our good friend Melissa Latimer, Associate Provost for Faculty Development and Culture, the Press was invited to become a department of the WVU Libraries—an invitation we embraced in July and from which we’ve benefitted almost immediately. Expert financial tracking and guidance has been one plus; inclusion in a close-knit community that serves the entire university, much as the Press does, has been another. The Libraries possess a uniquely rich body of materials, an active development office, and a staff of eager, knowledgeable librarians. Together they create a combination that suggests a nearly infinite range of possible collaborations.
2025 has also been a year of reconnecting with old friends: Neema Avashia, whose engaging memoir Another Appalachia continues to resonate with so many readers; Marc Harshman, West Virginia poet laureate and author of 2025’s warmly received Dispatch from the Mountain State; and John Antonik, whose book Almost Heaven: How Bobby Bowden’s Ten Years at West Virginia University Helped Him Become One of the Winningest Coaches in College Football History offers a fascinating time capsule of a consequential moment in collegiate sports. Longtime Press collaborator Imre Szeman teamed up with Jennifer Wenzel to bring us Power Shift: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy. And in November, Davon Loeb, author of The In-Betweens, was a featured author in People magazine, which published an excerpt from Davon’s 2023 memoir. .
It’s also been a year of developing new talent and new relationships, thanks to the energetic acquisitions work of Editorial Director Marguerite Avery. Julija Šukys’s sobering Artifact: Notes from the Campus Shooting Archives launched to an engaged full house at Austin’s Alienated Majesty Books. Mo Daviau’s novel Epic and Lovely touched a nerve with reviewers from Kirkus Reviews, ABA IndieNext, LitHub, Library Journal, and Electric Lit, among others.
We saw gratifying recognition for Megan Howell (Softie), whom the National Book Foundation selected as one of five fiction writers under 35, whose debut work promises to leave a lasting impression on the literary landscape, and for This Book Is Free and Yours to Keep: Notes from the Appalachian Book Project, which received the Appalachian Studies Association’s prestigious Weatherford Award in late spring.
Rouzbeh Yassini and Stewart Schley’s The Accidental Network: How a Small Company Sparked a Global Broadband Transformation carried WVU Press into the realm of tech publishing. The author appeared on countless YouTube interviews and podcasts, as well as in Inc. magazine and the Los Angeles Times. September events supporting the book at WVU’s Business and Engineering Schools attracted a wide range of students, faculty, administrators, and tech entrepreneurs.
WVU’s Center for Resilient Communities brought us Weaving a Fabric of Unity: Conversations on Education and Development, the story of the pioneering enterprise that came to be identified as FUNDAEC (the Foundation for the Application and Teaching of Science). Haleh Arbab, Gustavo Correa, and Bradley Wilson highlight five decades of stories, learning, and insight. The book’s global scope challenged our international distribution systems, but it pushed us to reestablish pathways into markets in Europe, Africa, and beyond. WVU Press books are again easily available worldwide through Mare Nosrum Group.
We’ve also had the good fortune to shape editorial roles for WVU Press authors Catherine Venable Moore (editor of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead), Meredith McCarroll (co-editor with Anthony Harkins of Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy), and Renée Nicholson (author of Fierce and Delicate), whose Connective Tissue series is generating buzz ahead of the February release of Dizzy by Rachel Weaver. Creative voices like the energetic and engaging Chris Campanioni have extended the Press’s reputation for emotionally complex, unflinching cross-cultural explorations of identity. And we have work in development from Appalachian cult favorite Scott McClanahan and groundbreaking West Virginia filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon.
It’s been a year of making the best of difficult circumstances. In February, I suffered a cardiac arrest that required our tiny staff to fill my role at the most inconvenient time: the beginning of the trade show and conference season. Marguerite Avery, Natalie Homer, and Kristen Bettcher—our three full-time team members—rose admirably to the task and accomplished a mountain of work to make strong showings at AWP and ASA in the spring and ASLE in July. Every title in our list emerged on time and error-free thanks to Kristen’s efforts. Operations Manager Natalie Homer kept the bills paid, the lights on, and so much more. Our partners Justin Hargett and Haley Beardsley kept publicity and social media moving while the rest of the team handled everything else.
It has also been a year of connections built by simply showing up—at conferences, readings, book launches, the West Virginia State Fair, the Mountaineer Week Craft Show, and in WVU classrooms. Every time I speak with a group of students—a true pleasure and a welcome break from the daily grind—I receive two or three inquiries about internships. To meet this interest, we’ve partnered with the Professional Writing and Editing Program and the College of Creative Arts to redevelop a formal internship program. Our first team begins this spring.
And in late December, WVU Press began the process of absorbing WVU partner FiT Publishing, a respected publisher of work on physical activity, sport sciences, and sport management. WVU Press will carry FiT’s work forward and keep its existing list in print as a separate imprint of the Press.
All of this activity, all these relationships, and all these plans—with so much creative potential—feel like a return to what a university press’s mission should be. We’ve weathered many storms over the past few years, and it feels good to be upright and moving forward at a strong pace again. 2026 is going to be fun.