With health concerns keeping some from the annual meeting of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) this week in Texas, we’re extending our conference discount to the general public. Save 30% on new works of fiction and literary nonfiction using code WVUAWP at checkout on our site. Full list of discounted titles below.Read More »
Kevin Gannon’s Radical Hope, new in our series Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, is shipping now when ordered from our website. Here we share an excerpt from the book, which Gannon will launch officially at West Virginia University on April 1.
In August 2017, the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, saw a range of white supremacist, alt-right, and neo-Nazi groups converge on the town, ostensibly to protest the removal of Confederate monuments. The rally’s true purpose, however, was racist fear-mongering and violence. The night before the rally, a throng of white men carrying tiki torches and shouting such slogans as “Jews will not replace us” wound its way through the University of Virginia’s grounds. The rally itself was marked by dozens of attacks instigated by the alt-right and white nationalist groups, including the severe beating of an African American man in a nearby parking garage as well as the death of one counterprotester (and injury of several more) when a white supremacist sped his car through a crowd of antiracist demonstrators. One of the most emblematic images from this orgy of hate and violence was a close-up photograph of a rank of the tiki-torch marchers, in the center of which walked a young man wearing a polo shirt with the logo of the white nationalist group “Identity Europa,” face contorted in anger while screaming whatever slogan the marchers happened to be proclaiming at that moment. Social media users quickly identified him as a current student at the University of Nevada–Reno. Within days, other college students at the rally were identified on social media, including the president of Washington State University’s College Republicans. In the immediate aftermath of Charlottesville, these institutions struggled mightily with both the backlash against these students and fallout within their campus communities. Lost in the immediate hubbub over whether those students would be allowed to graduate or if they could even be safely enrolled in classes with students of color, however, was any reckoning with the fundamental question at issue here: are these the ends we seek in higher education? To put it bluntly, is it possible for a learner to both successfully move through the academic and intellectual spaces of a college or university and march in support of violent white nationalism?
And if it’s possible, should it be?Read More »
In WVU Press’s first appearance on a public radio program that airs nationally, Tom Hansell talks with PRI’s “Living on Earth” about his book After Coal and the broader movement for just energy transitions in Appalachia and Wales.
Publishers Weekly praises Wesley Browne’s “wry, thrilling” Hillbilly Hustle, saying it “will appeal to fans of Daniel Woodrell and Charles Portis.” Browne will read in Lexington, Knoxville, and other cities this winter and spring.
From the New Yorker to the Los Angeles Review of Books, our higher ed titles continue to attract attention:
Wesley Browne talks with Sarah Munroe, WVU Press’s marketing manager and acquisitions editor, about his new novel Hillbilly Hustle, now available on our site.
SM: By only reading a synopsis and your brief biography, it’s immediately clear that you are 1. very busy, and 2. at least in some ways “writing what you know.” How did you come to the idea of the novel (I assume you are not selling weed out of your pizza shop, but perhaps you’re a poker player?), and how did you translate aspects of your life, people, and places onto the page? (And if you are a poker player, what’s your tell?)
WB: My family co-owns Apollo Pizza in Richmond, Kentucky. Under previous ownership you could buy marijuana there. It was kind of an open secret in town. The local police told stories about it, but they never went out of their way to bust it. It struck me that as a novel premise there was a lot I could do with it. I took a novel class with Amy Greene at the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop and started developing the idea there. Nothing about the marijuana operation at the fictional Porthos Pizza in the novel is drawn from real life except the use of “spinach special” as code for a pot order, and the location of the shop, which is on South Second Street in Richmond, just like Apollo.Read More »
The holiday season brings two blurbs not for WVU Press books, but for the press itself. In the Journal for the Anthropology of North America, West Virginia is referred to as an “intellectually ambitious press that prides itself on placing regional issues in dialogue with global concerns.” And writing in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, West Virginia Poet Laureate Marc Harshman says the press “has in recent years put itself squarely on the map as one of the finest university publishers anywhere in America.” Thanks to all of our partners and friends for their support as we wrap up a big year and look ahead to another!
The publication of three new titles in our series Teaching and Learning in Higher Education means a new wave of attention. John Warner’s gift guide for educators in Inside Higher Ed starts by recommending “All of the West Virginia University Press Teaching and Learning Series Books,” saying “the series, overseen by James Lang . . . is (as the kids used to say, but probably don’t anymore) killing it.” In other series news:Read More »
Sarah Munroe will join West Virginia University Press as marketing manager and acquisitions editor at the start of the new year, overseeing marketing and sales operations and acquiring a mix of literary and social justice titles. Sarah is currently at Temple University Press, and she has worked previously at the Pew Charitable Trusts and at WVU Press, where she was a graduate assistant while earning her master of fine arts degree. She received the Russ MacDonald Creative Writing Award from WVU’s Department of English. While at Temple, she has worked in literary studies, disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, and other fields.
We hope you’ll join us in welcoming Sarah back to Morgantown, and we invite you to get to know her in this blog post from the spring, in which she talks with Kat Saunders, another WVU Press alum, about graduate work at West Virginia University as preparation for a career in publishing.
We kicked off this blog two years ago with a roundup of the year’s highlights and—73 posts and 17,000 views later—we’re excited to once again provide a celebratory recap of a successful year. Our year-in-sixty-seconds feature makes room for all of 2019’s books, but necessarily leaves out a lot (including television appearances, bookstore sightings, and newspaper takeovers). Still, we hope this highlight reel captures some of the year’s energy, and provides a glimpse of the communities that have come together around our books. We’re grateful to them—to you—and we wish you all the best this holiday season.
As a treat this holiday week, we convinced WVU Press’s art director to dip into his discard pile and share rejected covers for some of our recent titles. Did we get any of these wrong?
See the winner here.Read More »
At West Virginia University Press we publish books in our areas of specialization by authors around the world, including WVU faculty like Rosemary Hathaway and Travis Stimeling, both of whom have written for our blog. Other members of the WVU community, of course, work with different publishers. In this post we continue to feature authors at the university who publish with other houses—part of our effort to serve as a forum for all things book- and publishing-related at West Virginia University.
Last year I was proud to publish my book Life without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay through the University of California Press. The finished product readers view or hold is of course only a façade veiling a complex internal scaffolding of effort, time, and multistep stages involved in bringing a book to fruition. Here I outline the combination of perseverance and fortune that resulted in my book being accepted for publication, in addition to the steps, at once monumental and mundane, that got it into print.Read More »
Sadie Hoagland’s American Grief in Four Stages lands alongside books by Jia Tolentino, Jaquira Diaz, Sarah Elaine Smith, and others on the Electric Lit roundup of the best debuts of the second half of 2019. This fall Hoagland will read in Davis, Salt Lake City, and Lafayette, LA. Learn more at her website.
A Blue Ridge Public Radio piece about the Appalachian studies community and its reactions to Hillbilly Elegy draws on Appalachian Reckoning, quoting coeditor Meredith McCarroll and contributor Ivy Brashear. The book is also profiled in the Charleston Gazette Mail, and reviewed on the US Intellectual History blog, which praises it for “[uplifting] historically marginalized voices, such as LGBTQIA+ Appalachians and Affrilachians.”
The Gazette Mail also interviews author and series editor Travis Stimeling about his book Songwriting in Contemporary West Virginia.
Titles in our higher education series continue to attract attention. Joshua Eyler talks with Inside Higher Ed about How Humans Learn, his “incredibly well-received new book,” which also appears on the list of the 66 best education books of all time from Book Authority.Read More »
