Current News
Best of the Best for Stillinger and More
A Kind of Archeology: Collecting Folk Art in America, 1876-1976, by Elizabeth Stillinger, was chosen as “The Best of the Best from University Presses: Books You Should Know About.” This program highlights titles reviewed in “University Press Books Selected for Public and Secondary School Libraries, 22ndEdition,” from the American Library Association.
Daniel Kerr’s Derelict Paradise: Homelessness and Urban Development in Cleveland, OH received a compelling review by Roldo Bartimole.
Bridget R. Cooks shared some of the goals embodied in Exhibiting Blackness with Anuja Seith in an interview for Her Circle magazine.
Chris Daly appeared on BookTV to discuss Covering America.
Douglas Light, winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction for Girls in Trouble, conversed with Roy Kesey for The Nervous Breakdown.
You can view Michael Hoberman discussing New Israel / New England at the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Nothing Boring about Daly's History of Journalism Book
Christopher Daly’s Covering America is receiving excellent reviews. Publishers Weekly describes it as "a surprisingly spirited and detailed account of American journalism and the many ways in which the press has impacted the trajectory of American history, and vice versa. . . . In addition to the interesting stories, Daly makes many cogent arguments about what the press has meant to the country's shared history and identity.” Bookviews calls it “a splendid book that will please its readers on many levels. . . . Daly provides a lively, interesting review of journalism’s many personalities, events and trends. It is an excellent work of history concerning the profession and business of journalism, filled with anecdotes and intriguing facts. It surely belongs on the shelves everywhere journalism is celebrated.” You can find a list of Daly’s forthcoming events and speaking engagements here.
Announcing the Winners of the 2012 Juniper Prizes
The University of Massachusetts Press is pleased to announce that Brandon Dean Lamson has won the 2012 Juniper Prize for Poetry for his collection Starship Tahiti. The runner-up is Siobhán Scarry.
Steve Yates has won the 2012 Juniper Prize for Fiction with his collection Some Kinds of Love.
We want to express our gratitude to all of the writers who participated in this year's fiction and poetry competitions. For more information on this year's winners, please see our press release.
Honors for University of Massachusetts Authors
Laura Kasischke, Juniper Award winner for Dance and Disappear (UMass Press, 2002), won the National Book Critics Circle poetry prize for her collection Space, in Chains (Copper Canyon Press).
Christine Sneed, author of Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry (UMass Press, 2010), has a forthcoming novel from Bloomsbury Press called Little Known Facts.
UMass Press books now available in digital form through University Press Content Consortium (UPCC)
In January 2012, Project MUSE launched new e-book collections for libraries from the University Press Content Consortium (UPCC), with 17,000 titles from 66 university presses, including the University of Massachusetts Press. Scholars and students are now able to discover and search these books in an integrated environment with journal content currently on Project MUSE. Libraries purchasing these e-book collections will have perpetual access rights, with unlimited simultaneous usage, downloading, and printing of chapter-level PDFs.
Individuals can purchase more than 850 UMass Press titles as e-books through the Google eBooks program. These books are priced at least 20% lower than the lowest price of the printed edition (paperback or hardcover). The e-books can be purchased either through the Google e-bookstore or through the IndieBound website of independent booksellers.
For a brief overview of the Google eBooks program, see this video.
Christine Sneed wins another award
Christine Sneed's Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry has won the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award. It was presented to her at a ceremony on January 17, 2012. Previously the book was awarded the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, was selected by Time Out Chicago as one of the best books of the year, was named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, and received the John C. Zacharis First Book Award, instituted in 1991 to honor the best first book of poetry of fiction by a writer who has published in Ploughshares.
Praise for "A Kind of Archeology"
Elizabeth Stillinger’s A Kind of Archeology has generated a great deal of interest in the arts media, including a notice in the “Antiques” column of the New York Times and a front-page review by Laura Beach in Antiques and the Arts Weekly. The latter wrote, “Heavily illustrated and just shy of 450 pages, the book is a sweeping, De Mille-style epic populated by dozens of dealers, collectors, curators and museum directors, many of them remembered for their strident disdain for convention. In her always lucid prose, Stillinger identifies the players and their key contributions to the field’s evolution. . . . It is hard to conceive of a more thoughtful or thorough guide.”
"The Law of Miracles" named a finalist for Minnesota Book Award
Gregory Blake Smith’s The Law of Miracles and Other Stories has been named one of five finalists for the 2012 Minnesota Book Award in the category of “Novel or Short Stories.” The winner will be announced at a Book Awards Gala in St. Paul on April 14, 2012.
Ray Bradley's "Global Warming and Political Intimidation" receives national press coverage
Raymond S. Bradley’s Global Warming and Political Intimidation has generated a lot of media attention. Bradley was interviewed in Global Change, Inside Higher Ed, the Boston Globe, and the Daily Hampshire Gazette. He was featured on several public radio stations, including WFCR and WAMC, and in the “Political Bookworm” blog of the Washington Post. He also published an op-ed piece in the Guardian on global warming as a litmus test for Republican candidates, and another piece in Nature.
Allen Guttmann featured in "New Books in Sports" podcast
A lengthy interview with Allen Guttmann, author of Sports and American Art from Benjamin West to Andy Warhol, was posted at New Books in Sports, a podcast that bills itself as “the place for sports talk,” featuring conversations with authors of the latest biographies, histories, and studies of sports, money, media and society. The interviewer is Bruce Berglund.
