Current News
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.
Vallianatos's Collection "Sheds Light on Expectation and Disappointment"
Corinna Vallianatos's My Escapee , which won the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, was favorably reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. Reviewer Natalie Serber described it as a "taut, delicate collection" that is "full of swift insights about expectation and disappointment. . . . In the vivid lives of Vallianatos's characters, as in our own, hope and aim are often misaligned." The book was also selected the following week as a NYTBR Editors' Choice .
Trent Speaks of Perfectibility at Perkins School for the Blind
James Trent, author of The Manliest Man: Samuel G. Howe and the Contours of Nineteenth-Century American Reform, spoke recently at the Perkins School for the Blind, an institution Howe helped found. Trent described Howe's devotion to the idea that education is the means to improvement for all people no matter their place in society, a solidly liberal idea that helped define nineteenth-century American reform. Please view Trent's speech.
Celebrating William Apess, Pequot
2012 marks the twentieth anniversary of On Our Own Ground: The Collected Works of William Apess, a Pequot (UMass Press, 1992), edited by Amherst College professor Barry O'Connell. Since the publication, Apess has emerged as "an intellectual beacon" (Robert Warrior, The People and the Word) for the twenty-first century, an indigenous intellectual and political visionary who is even now enabling scholars, students, tribal leaders and activists to envision strategies for revitalization, resistance, and survival. Amherst College honored Apess with a day-long symposium December 6th at the crossroads between his birthplace of Colrain, Massachusetts and his home community of Mashantucket Pequot.
