Current News
Publishers Weekly Speaks to Editor Brian Halley
Brian Halley, our acquisitions editor based at UMass Boston, spoke to Publishers Weekly (June 17, 2013) about LGBT studies and university presses. He said: "Those of us at presses in which history is a strong area have continued to seek out those books that tell hidden or potentially forgotten stories which hold crossover appeal." Particularly he noted UMass Press books: Lies About my Family, by Amy Hoffman, and 1960s Gay Pulp Fiction, edited by Drewey Wayne Gunn and Jaime Harker (December).
Pawley Receives 2013 Eliza Atkins Gleason Book Award
Christine Pawley, author of Reading Places: Literacy, Democracy, and the Public Library in Cold War America, has won the Eliza Atkins Gleason Book Award from the American Library Association.
Presented every third year, the award recognizes the best book written in English in the field of library history.
Of Pawley's book, the committee said: " A particular strength of Reading Places was the relationship of the events to wider historical, social, political, and cutural trends. The light shed on American thinking during the Cold War, and on attitudes that later played into the “culture wars” makes this a work that has something important to say to a much wider audience than one would expect, and in reference to far more issues in American history. Reading Places exemplifies the potential value of library history as a means of investigating significant broader themes and trends. We congratulate Dr. Pawley for her important contribution to the professional scholarship."
Coughlin Discusses Finding Mehetabel
Michelle Marchetti Coughlin, author of One Colonial Woman's World: The Life and Writings of Mehetabel Chandler Coit discusses her discovery of this earliest of Colonial women's diaries and the subsequent search for the original document on Common-place: www.common-place.org.
2013 Juniper Prizes Announced
Dana Roeser has won the 2013 Juniper Prize for Poetry for her collection The Theme of Tonight's Party Has Been Changed.
Rod Val Moore has won the 2013 Juniper Prize for Fiction for his novel A History of Hands.
Thank you to all of the writers who participated in this year's Juniper Prize competition. Guidelines for next year's Juniper Prize for Poetry and Juniper Prize for Fiction can be found at our website: www.umass.edu/umpress. Submissions will be accepted between August 1 and September 30, 2013.
Many UMass Press Books Available in Multiple Electronic Formats
Many of our books are now available in Kindle, Kobo, Nook, Sony, and SOON iBook editions, and more are on the way. Take a look at which books are ready now on our Facebook page. And like us while you are there. Thank you.
UMass Press Public History Wins Accolades from National Council on Public History
Denise Meringolo’s Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History won the National Council on Public History’s 2013 Book Award. Meringolo’s book is part of the series Public History in Historical Perspective, edited by Marla Miller.
University of Massachusetts professor and UMass Press author Miller, The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution, won recognition from the NCPH for Excellence in Consulting. Cathy Stanton, The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City, also was honored with this recognition.
Michael Scott Van Wagenen also won praise with Honorable Mention for the NCPH Book Award. His book is Remembering the Forgotten War: The Enduring Legacies of the U.S.–Mexican War.
Luey on the Radio about Reading
Beth Luey , author of Expanding the American Mind , talks about why we read, what motivates our inquiry through books, on a radio show called “Library Café”: http://artlibrary.vassar.edu/wvkr/audio/Luey.mp3
Williams in New York Times
Susan Williams’s Alice Morse Earle and the Domestic History of Early Americawas featured by Eve Kahn in the New York Times Antiques ColumnFeb. 14.
Daly Scoops Media & Cultural Studies Award
Chris Daly’s Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism won the Association of American Publishers 2012 PROSE award for Media & Cultural Studies.
Edwin Martini Discusses the Politics of Uncertainty
In Agent Orange: History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty, Edwin A. Martini offers a probing reassment of a controversial legacy of the Vietnam War. In many ways, the use of Agent Orange despite uncertainty about its effects boils down to politics says Prof. Martini in an interview with WMUK, NPR in Kalamazoo, MI.
