University of Nebraska Press Newsletter
in the autumn 2011 issue:
Dear Friends,
unp and partner presses garner Mellon Foundation award 2 Behind the Book: Sleep in Me by Jon Pineda 3 Understanding the world of E books
5
Celebrating 50 years of Bison Books
6
In memoriam: William Kloefkorn
9
Select awards and honors 10 In the news
14
Thanks to our supporters 16
unp Series listing
18
Press personnel
19
Friends of the Press membership form
20
Et cetera
21
Welcome to our first email newsletter for friends and supporters of the Press. We’re pleased to be able to communicate with you about all the exciting and transformative activities we are experiencing. I write this shortly after returning from the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses in Baltimore. This year’s theme was “Toward a Culture of Collaboration.” In the challenging environment that surrounds book publishing, this was a timely and important subject. Here at the University of Nebraska Press we have made collaboration—on many levels—a key strategy for the future. There is, of course, collaboration with other university presses. While we always want to maintain our own identity, there are certain functions that lend themselves to combined efforts. In receiving the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant for Recovering Languages and Literacies in the Americas (see p. 2), the University of Nebraska Press, along with the University of Oklahoma Press and the University of Texas Press, is taking some important experimental steps in collaboration and cooperation. Most noteworthy in the grant is our collaboration in two areas: using the same vendors in order to negotiate better prices and faster turnaround times and jointly marketing the books related to this initiative. Together, we three presses will be able to attend more academic conferences to solicit manuscripts from up-and-coming scholars and to promote books in this area—including foreign conferences that are normally too expensive for most university presses to attend. We also have a shared website (http://recoveringlanguages.unl.edu/ index.html) about the initiative for stream-
lining manuscript submission and promoting the initiative. Another way we are actively involved in collaborating with other university presses is through the new University Press Content Consortium (upcc) (see p. 5). This consortium, which represents more than sixty-five university presses, is being administered through Project muse, the very successful electronic journals distributor that is a part of the Johns Hopkins University Press. upcc will sell collections of e-books to libraries and, because we have partnered with muse, we will be able to offer users the ability to search books from all of the initiative’s member presses as well as muse’s hundreds of journals. There is truly strength in numbers—and the fifteen thousand university press e-books offered by the upcc should be well received by libraries, particularly academic libraries, that hunger for the peer-reviewed, quality content produced by university presses. unp was fortunate to be one of the five presses involved in the original startup of this venture, and we’re excited about its future potential for sales in the digital market. One of the crucial next steps with the burgeoning demand for e-books is to get our backlist digitized, either in pdf format for the libraries or in ePub format for the various e-readers that abound. In recent months we have seen sales of our books in electronic form skyrocket, and we need to be prepared by having more and more of our classic best sellers and other backlist books available in digital form. That takes resources that the Press doesn’t have—so we are actively seeking development funds for digitizing our books. continued on page 2
If you would like to view this newsletter as a pdf, please click here.
Director’s Letter, continued from page 1
Collaboration extends to areas beyond working with other presses. First and foremost, we have made collaborating on our own campus to be a high priority for the Press. We are pleased to be working with the Sheldon Museum of Art on several of its publications, both for exhibitions as well as for its permanent collection, and with the International Center for Quilt Studies, the Center for Great Plains Studies, and many academic departments on campus. Just as the Press’s excellent reputation extends far beyond the state of Nebraska, the same can be said of these institutions—and we’re proud to be able to work with them on their publication needs. (As
an aside, we were excited and delighted to learn that our joint unp/Sheldon publication, The Fabulous Harlequin: ORLAN and the Patchwork Self, received first prize in the books category in the 2011 American Association of Museums Publications Design Competition.) Collaboration involves active communication as well. On that note, I am always eager to hear from our Friends. I’m delighted that the Friends of the Press has begun underwriting the publication of a book each year—and I thank you for your continued support of the Press’s publication program. Drop me a note or email me with your thoughts and ideas! With best regards, Donna A. Shear Director
Press Shares in Mellon Foundation Award for Language Recovery Monographs We are pleased to report that the University of Nebraska Press, along with two other presses—the University of Oklahoma Press and the University of Texas Press— has been awarded a three-year $781,900 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This is the first Mellon Foundation grant that unp has received. The grant will aid in the publication of twenty-seven books—nine from each press—in an initiative titled Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas. The initiative will provide scholars who study endangered languages of North America, South America, and Central America an opportunity to publish indigenous language grammars and dictionaries, literacy studies, ethnographies, and other linguistic monographs through the three participating presses. “Linguistic research is valuable both to scholars in the fields of linguistics, Indigenous studies, and social sciences, and to Indigenous communities who wish to preserve their languages and the components of their cultures inextricably linked to language,” said Donna Shear, director of unp. “We are honored and excited to be a part of such an important project.” While the University of Nebraska Press primarily focuses its language and literacy publishing program
on Native groups in North America, the University of Texas Press specializes in studies of Mexico and South America and Central America. The University of Oklahoma Press publishes books on the native languages of the Americas. The three university presses involved in the Recovering Languages and Literacies in the Americas Initiative hope the project will also accomplish the following: 1. Attract junior scholars to the fields of linguistics and indigenous studies; 2. Develop more efficient ways of producing traditionally expensive linguistic monographs; and 3. Reach a wider audience with the books published as part of the initiative, creating an increased demand for linguistic monographs that continues even after the grant support ends. Linguistic monographs are expensive to produce and during a time when colleges and universities have limited resources, without the aid of the Mellon grant such projects might otherwise go unpublished. The first books published through the initiative are slated for release this fall. Specific project titles and publication dates will be announced in the future. The project continued on page 8
2
behind the book
Writing an American Life Kristen Elias Rowley “Before my sister Rica’s accident, I thought I might stay a boy forever,” Jon Pineda writes of his carefree adolescent days, in the opening pages of his memoir, Sleep in Me. Within the ensuing chapters readers quickly encounter the tragedy that will change the course of this boy’s journey to adulthood. Sleep in Me is Pineda’s poignant and lyrical memoir about not just the tragedy of his sister’s car accident but growing up in the shadow of the tragic event. A Filipino American boy on the cusp of manhood, Pineda’s life drastically changes at age eleven, when a dump truck filled with sand crushes the small Datsun carrying his sixteen-year-old sister, Rica, leaving her permanently disabled. Rica’s condition and struggle to survive after the accident took a toll on the family. “My family had long romanticized my sister’s memory,” Pineda relates about sitting down to write his sister’s story, “but because she had lived nearly five years after the accident, I felt it was important to relay her survival.” Rather than glamorize this, Pineda looks very honestly at the way his family dealt with the challenges they faced in the wake of the accident: “When I told my family I was working on this book about Rica, some were apprehensive. I asked them if they’d write down a few things, what they remembered most about her, and it was my sister Tinah who didn’t even blink. She wrote ten handwritten pages. She said she’d done so in one sitting. It began a dialogue between us. I realized if I was going to honor Rica and my family’s collective story, I would have to be willing to open up. I had to show the negative aspects, involving myself especially, alongside the positive ones.” Sleep in Me succeeds in this honesty. The Pinedas are a three-dimensional, unsentimentalized family dealing with pain, and hurt, and guilt: If Rica was especially quiet, I would ask, What’s wrong? And when she wouldn’t answer, I would know the answer. We all knew, in some ways, the same answer. Her face would take on the soft expression of someone resigned to a task. I had seen our mother bear this same expression. It involved looking at the present tense as something of a burden itself, an obstacle. So long as the present tense continued on page 4 existed, their dreams remained unfulfilled.
3
A Writing Life, continued from page 3
“Pineda lays bare his struggles with family duty and identity in this literary standout.” —Julie Kane, Library Journal “[Pineda’s] muted, lyrical messages, to be savored at length, remind us of the value of listening deeply, to ourselves and others.” —Gina Webb, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Sleep in Me is memoir at its best: explorative, honest, and centered not just on a singular incident but on the larger implications of the individual moments that comprise our lives; not just on a tragedy but on how we survive after tragedy. “As I wrote more things that I remembered during that time, returning to what I felt were emotionally challenging moments, I realized I wasn’t just writing her story. I was writing mine alongside hers,” Pineda says. Because Sleep in Me isn’t as much about Rica and the accident as it is about young Pineda growing up in the aftermath and making sense of the normal ups and downs of his teen years—struggles in athletics, strained friendships, divorce—while caring for the irreparably damaged older sister he had long idolized. Pineda candidly reflects in moments of frustration and exhaustion at being a caregiver to his sister, carrying her broken body because she no longer can: I open the car door and immediately smell the sharp, bitter stench to which I am already growing accustomed. I lift my sister’s feet off the floorboard and position them just so. Her calves are moist to the touch. This makes my stomach turn. I want to gag, but I know if I do, I will offend her . . . . Stand her up, our mother says. I try. I step in and shift my hips. Now that I’m on the wrestling team, I think about the hip toss, any other move for gaining leverage on your opponent. But I’m also barely eighty pounds. I don’t know if I can move her without my mother helping me some. She outweighs me by at least sixty pounds, if not more. I don’t know if I have what it takes to hold onto her. These are moments of pain, but also tenderness. “I’m most proud of the fact that, even now, the book continues to break my heart. But in a good way. A way that makes me glad I wrote it. I didn’t hold back in the retelling of these moments,” Pineda explains. Sleep in Me is the twenty-seventh book in unp’s nationally recognized American Lives series, which is 4
directed by series editor Tobias Wolff (director of the creative writing program at Stanford University and author of several acclaimed books, including the memoir This Boy’s Life and Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories). Called “splendid” by Newsweek, the American Lives series recognizes that the singular American life is a source of endless diversity and the methods of telling the life are as important as the details themselves. In this, Pineda’s memoir adds to the already wide range of books in the series; whether evoking moments of death or disease, in family or marriage, history, politics, religion, or culture, they come together in a richly textured, colorful patchwork quilt of American life. unp’s reputation for fine books and the growing reputation of the American Lives series were factors in Pineda’s decision to publish with unp: “The University of Nebraska Press has always published compelling work and beautiful books, and I truly couldn’t think of a better home for Sleep in Me. I remember the moment I picked up Peggy Shumaker’s memoir, Just Breathe Normally; I knew I was going to send my manuscript to the American Lives series.” Chosen as a Barnes & Noble 2010 Discover Great New Writers selection and by Library Journal as one of the Best Memoirs of 2010, Sleep in Me was also a finalist for the Foreword 2010 book of the year in the Autobiography/Memoir category. Pineda appreciates the success of the book and is glad to have Sleep in Me counted among the many American Lives books that have been honored and recognized for awards over the past decade. “Books published by unp have enriched my life. By fostering the vital connection between authors and readers, unp’s American Lives series honors the legacy of our humanity, and I’m so grateful to be a part of it,” Pineda says. Sleep in Me is followed in the American Lives series by Tracy Seeley’s My Ruby Slippers: The Road Back to Kansas. Forthcoming this fall in the series are Mary Clearman Blew’s This Is Not the Ivy League: A Memoir, and Bison Books editions of two earlier American Lives volumes, Gabrielle Burton’s Searching for Tamsen Donner and Dinah Lenney’s Bigger than Life: A Murder, A Memoir. Harrison Candelaria Fletcher’s Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life will be available in March 2012. Jon Pineda is the author of Birthmark (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), winner of the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry open competition. His second collection, The Translator’s Diary (New Issues, 2008), won the 2007 Green Rose Prize. He teaches in the lowresidency mfa program in Creative Writing at Queens University of Charlotte. π Kristen Elias Rowley is unp’s humanities editor.
The electronic publishing landscape has changed dramatically, even in just the past year. On the direct- to-consumer side, e-books are a force to be reckoned with— Amazon announced that it now sells more e-books than print books, hard cover and paperback combined. Certainly, print books are not dead. After all, Amazon is an internet company, and one would expect that their customers would welcome the instantaneous gratification of having a book delivered electronically, especially since its Kindle—like other hand-held e-readers—is convenient and affordable. Here at unp, many of our books, particularly our newer ones, are available for e-readers such as the Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s nook, the Sony e-reader, and other devices. We are striving to make our backlist available in electronic form, too, although this requires an enormous investment in converting them to digital format. There is no doubt that electronic books are here to stay and that people of all ages enjoy reading on their electronic devices.
Understanding the World of Electronic Books E-books to consumers are only one aspect of the electronic book revolution. The other is on the scholarly side, where researchers, scholars, and students expect to access books in electronic form via their university library—and to be able to search across subject areas and find relevant information in numerous books and journals. The University of Nebraska Press has been involved with other scholarly publishers in searching for bold new models to deal with the changing scholarly book environment. Director Donna Shear, serves on the executive committee of a group of university presses that, with an initial grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, studied, developed, and is now in the process of implementing an e-book university press consortium model for scholarly titles that academic libraries can purchase in collections, for use by the scholarly community. This consortium will deliver significant revenue to member presses when it launches in 2012. After evaluating potential technologies and marketing partners for the consortium, the group concluded that joining forces with Project muse—a significant partner to university presses in the journals world—was the best way to take this idea to market. In March 2011 the University Press Content Consortium upcc, powered by Project muse (a division of the Johns Hopkins University Press), was officially launched and more than sixty scholarly publishers agreed to participate.
continued on page 8
5
1981
1971
1961
Celebrating Fifty Years 2011
marks the 50th anniversary of Bison Books, the University of Nebraska Press’s groundbreaking line of popular paperbacks. Bison Books, which first published in 1961, were at the time aimed to make classic literature more accessible and affordable and made the University of Nebraska Press one of the first scholarly presses to release quality literature in paperback format. The first season’s eight releases were priced between $1.00 and $1.50, and included history, poetry, and literary criticism reprints as well as Old Jules, a biography by Mari Sandoz originally published in 1935. Birthday Bash
The Press kicked off its year-long celebration with a birthday bash on February 24 in the midst of a major snowstorm. Even with the horrific weather, forty-five hearty souls gathered to watch an net-produced interview with Mari Sandoz, filmed in 1961, in which she talked about her love of books and the process of writing.
6
Twelve Months of Bison Books
In addition to the birthday bash, the Press printed and distributed a “Twelve Months of Bison Books” calendar to members of the university community and other Press partners and supporters. Publishers Weekly, the premier book publishing industry magazine, did a story on the 50th anniversary, as did several other publications both locally and nationally. Articles or editorials ran in the Lincoln Journal-Star and the Omaha World-Herald and the university featured it on unl Today and in the Research Department’s annual report. A special logo and pin were designed for the occasion, too. At the publishing industry’s biggest trade show of the year, known as BookExpo America, Bison Books was a featured part of the University of Nebraska Press’s exhibit. Classic Bisons
Perhaps most important, the Press took the opportunity to reissue a line of “classic” Bisons and to publish two readers, one featuring selections from the most iconic Bisons,
2011
1991
of Bison Books Electronic Bisons
entitled The Golden West: 50 Years of Bison Books, and the other a selection of the writings of Wright Morris. One of these classic Bison titles, Lord Grizzly by Frederick Manfred, is an epic western novel that follows a mountain man throughout his journey of survival after being mauled by a grizzly bear. The Golden West reader includes selections from Willa Cather, Luther Standing Bear, Ralph Moody, Jack Schaefer, David Lavender, John Neihardt, Mari Sandoz, Louise Pound, and others. To encourage audience interaction, the press is sponsoring Twelve Months of Bison Books on its website. Visitors can check out the month’s specials and contests for Bison Books prizes. “It’s an opportunity to look back at all of the contributions to affordable literature that Bison Books has made over the past fifty years,” said Cara Pesek, unp’s publicity manager.
The anniversary also occasioned a new Bison strategy, according to Donna Shear, director of the Press. With the popularity of handheld reading devices on the rise, Bison Books is ready to stay true to its founding purpose while embracing twenty-first-century technology. This year the Press is digitizing a collection of its classic Bisons and making them available on e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s nook, and the Sony e-reader. Bison Books will still be available as affordable paperbacks, but progressively more of them will be digitized for sale as electronic books. “Keeping in mind that these are historic times in book publishing, the challenge will be to continue the mission of Bison Books—to bring classic and western literature to the American public inexpensively—by making our books technologically accessible, whatever form that technology takes,” Shear said. “A good, classic book is a book that should still be read three generations from now, and we want to make sure Bisons are in the hands of our audience in whatever form they choose.” π 7
Mellon grant, continued from page 2
will also be promoted via a website (http://recoveringlanguages.unl.edu/index.html), catalogs, and other materials. “This grant is significant for the Press for a number of reasons,” Shear said. “First, it will allow us to continue to publish in an area for which we are known throughout the academic community. Second, it is an exciting opportunity to see how we can collaborate with other university presses as we examine ways to be more efficient in this challenging economy. And third, it opens up a new area of funding for the Press—a major private foundation.” π
Electronic books, continued from page 5
The partnership allows e-books from these university presses and nonprofit scholarly presses—representing as many as thirty thousand titles—to be discovered and searched in an integrated environment with content from nearly five hundred journals currently available through Project muse. “Our user community will benefit greatly from the integrated research opportunities presented by putting university press book content alongside journal collections,” said Dean Smith, director of Project muse. “Publishers and authors will see their books exposed to muse’s installed base of several million scholars, researchers, and students across the globe.” “The University Press Content Consortium will be the online destination for peer-reviewed university press scholarship,” said Steve Maikowski, New York University Press director and one of the leaders spearheading the consortium. “The efficiencies and cost savings resulting from this collaboration will bring far more revenue to participating presses than current third-party models.” “There are several key components to the upcc initiative,” said unp director Shear. “First, because so many university presses are involved, we’ll be able to offer libraries a very dynamic and robust collection of scholarly books. Second, because we are grouping them as both comprehensive collections and subject collections, we’ll be able to offer them at competitive prices that will make the collections very attractive in these days of tight library budgets. Finally, we are offering these collections with as few digital restrictions as possible. In other words, libraries won’t be constrained by the number of their users who want to access a book at the same time, or by the number of uses a book gets—as some models to libraries currently operate.”
8
Fast Facts: Digital Publishing in the University Press Community
From “Digital Book Publishing in the aaup Community,” the Association of American University Presses’ survey of scholarly presses in April 2011: 97 percent of university presses currently use digital printing technologies—what consumers know as “print on demand”—for physical printing of backlist (older) titles; 76 percent use it for frontlist (new) titles. 86 percent currently make their books available electronically through companies that aggregate books from many publishers and sell primarily to libraries. 85 percent are involved in some sort of e-book to consumer sales (Kindle, nook, etc.). Most report sales of e-books of all types to be less than 7 percent of total book sale revenue, with most in the 1 to 3 percent range (University of Nebraska Press is in this range). Only 8 percent said they had digitized their entire backlist; 39 percent had digitized at least half their backlist. Most cite “lack of staff time” or “financial resources” as the reasons that more books haven’t been digitized. The Cost to Digitize a Book
It is expensive to turn a print copy of a book into an electronic version. For a straight text book, costs range from $.50 to $1.50 per page. For a 300-page book, that means $450.00! Multiply that by the hundreds—or even thousands—of books that a university press needs to convert, and you can see that it’s a sizable investment. Here at unp we estimate that we have nearly one thousand books still to be digitized. If we estimate the average cost to be $1.00/page, and the average book is 250 pages long, that comes to a whopping $250,000! Additionally, our other books that currently exist as pdfs need to be converted to e-Pub—the format needed for most current e-readers—so we are looking at an investment of $400,000 to $500,000 to make all of our print books e-book ready. π
william kloefkorn 1933 –20 11 unp lost a cherished friend and longtime author on May 19, 2011, when Nebraska State Poet William Kloefkorn died in Lincoln, Nebraska, at the age of seventy-eight. We will miss Bill dearly.
9
select awards and honors during White Mother to a Dark Race by Margaret D. Jacobs won the 2010 Bancroft Prize, awarded each year by the trustees of Columbia University for books about diplomacy or the history of the Americas. The prize is widely considered to be among the most prestigious in the field of American history writing. Jacobs is a professor of history and the director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of Nebraska– Lincoln, a member of the unp Faculty Editorial Board, and editor of two of unp’s series, Race and Ethnicity in the American West and Women in the West. White Mother to a Dark Race also won the 2010 Athearn Western History Association Prize and the 2010 Armitage-Jameson Prize sponsored by the Coalition for Western Women’s History. Congratulations, Margaret!
“This book deserves wide readership in U.S. western history, women’s history, Indian history, and comparative ethnic studies.”—Peggy Pascoe, Montana, the Magazine of Western History
10
unp Senior Designer Andrea Shahan’s work on Fabulous Harlequin: ORLAN and the Patchwork Self, edited by Jorge Daniel Veneciano and Rhonda K. Garelick (both of unl), won first prize in the 2011 American Association of Museums Publications Design competition.
the past year Quotidiana by Patrick Madden, hailed as “charming and liberating” by Robert Birnbaum in the Morning News, captured the 2011 Independent Publisher Book Gold Award in the Essay/Creative Nonfiction category and the 2011 Association for Mormon Letters Award in the Personal Essay category.
In Native studies, The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the Frontiers of Iroquoia, 1667–1783 by David L. Preston garnered the 2010 Albert B. Corey Prize, awarded jointly by the American Historical Association and Canadian Historical Association.
In the science arena, Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft by Jay Gallentine won the 2009 Emme Award for Astronautical Literature, sponsored by the American Astronautical Society.
From our sports list, Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity by Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry took home the 2011 Edgar Award in the Best Crime Fact category, and 1921: The Yankees, the Giants, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York by Lyle Spatz and Steve Steinberg with a foreword by Charles C. Alexander, scored the 2011 Seymour Medal, sponsored by the Society for American Baseball Research.
11
select awards and honors during The 2010 Nebraska Book Awards were good to unp. African Americans on the Great Plains: An Anthology edited and with an introduction by Bruce A. Glasrud and Charles A. Braithwaite won in the Anthology category, while Ladette Randolph’s A Sandhills Ballad, praised by the New York Times Book Review as “quietly moving,” took home the award in the Fiction category.
state writer laureates Peggy Shumaker, author of unp’s Just Breathe Normally, was named the Alaska State Writer Laureate 2010–2012 by the Alaska State Council on the Arts. As State Writer Laureate, Shumaker represents the council and the state in communities, conducting workshops and readings as well as connecting Alaskan writers with each other and with the outside world. She succeeds former Alaska Writer Laureate Nancy Lord, who is the author of Rock, Water, Wild (published by unp in 2009).
12
the past year nobel laureates Peruvian writer and unp contributor Mario Vargas Llosa won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. Vargas Llosa was the third consecutive Nobel Prize in Literature winner to publish with unp. He contributed an essay to The Global Game: Writers on Soccer, published in 2008. unp is also the publisher of Nadirs (Nebraska, 1999) by 2009 Nobel Laureate Herta Mueller, as well as Onitsha (Nebraska, 1997), The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts (Nebraska, 2002), and Mondo and Other Stories (Nebraska, 2011) by 2008 Literature Prize winner J. M. G. Le ClĂŠzio.
13
in the news: Things Seen by Annie Ernaux, translated by Jonathan Kaplansky, was lauded as “beautiful and powerful” by Alison McCulloch in the New York Times Book Review and praised by Susan Salter Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times: “Annie Ernaux was blogging about her daily life long before the blog was invented. If anyone can raise it to an art form, she can. . . . This is a beautiful translation.” Kevin O’Kelly, writing in the Boston Globe, called Bliss and Other Short Stories by Ted Gilley “a great collection by a gifted writer,” and Sue Russell of Library Journal heralded it as “a remarkable debut for all readers of fiction.” 14
Publishers Weekly declared The Sacred White Turkey by Frances Washburn “a lively, heartfelt novel,” while Heather Paulson in Booklist called it “captivating.” Searching for Tamsen Donner by Gabrielle Burton caught the attention of Maureen Corrigan, book critic for National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, who declared it “An extraordinary ‘must-read’ memoir. . . . An unforgettable feminist family-on-the-road saga the likes of which I’ve never read before.” Eric Asimov, writing in the New York Times, extolled the pleasures of Palmento: A Sicilian Wine Odyssey by Robert V. Camuto: “From the craggy vineyards of
Mount Etna to the tiny moscatoproducing island of Pantelleria, and from every angle of its wine hierarchy, Mr. Camuto extracts fascinating and illuminating details about Sicily, bringing to life the characters, conflicts, and family dynamics that define a culture and its wines. It’s a beautiful, enthralling work, eternally wistful and hopeful, much like Sicily itself.” “American Quilts in the Modern Age shines as an intelligent, informed, and elegantly produced presentation of quilts fashioned from the 1870s through the midtwentieth century,” wrote B. L. Herman in choice magazine.
This volume, from the International Quilt Study Center Collections at unl and edited by Marin F. Hanson and Patricia Cox Crews, also garnered notice in the quilting press. Quiltmaker wrote: “With more than 587 color photos, this far-reaching volume belongs in the hands of anyone who loves quilts and the stories connecting them to the modern world.” Michelle Mach of Piecework deemed it “A must-have for quilt researchers and historians.” Writing in the Seattle Times, Steve Weinberg called Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity by Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry “a remarkable book.” Libby Sand-
er, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, wrote that the book “should be required reading for anyone linked to university life.” One of our scholarly Native Studies books, Indian Slavery in Colonial America edited and with an introduction by Alan Gallay, garnered a rave review from choice magazine: “A splendid anthology, full of rigorously researched and strongly written essays that will rapidly become must reading for historians of early America.” The Wall Street Journal reviewed two new unp books in less than two weeks during July. Henry D. Fetter discussed David George Surdam’s book Wins, Losses, and Empty
Seats: How Baseball Outlasted the Great Depression in the July 9 edition, and Daniel Askt covered Judy Muller’s Emus Loose in Egnar: Big Stories from Small Towns on July 19. Earlier in the year wsj showcased Shelby’s Folly: Jack Dempsey, Doc Kearns, and the Shakedown of a Montana Boomtown by Jason Kelly. Writer Bill Kauffman deemed it “Enjoyable. . . . Mr. Kelly writes sympathetically, not mockingly, of Shelby, and he has a proper appreciation for the brazen roguery of Doc Kearns, whose greed and manipulativeness made the fight possible—and doomed Shelby’s self-promotional hopes.” 15
unp Thanks the Following Generous Supporters Janne Lane June Perry Levine Frederick and Peggy Link Bill and Karen Lyons Martin and Ruth Massengale Hilary Masters Rowena McClinton Tom McGowan Greg Morris Gary E. Moulton Don and Andrea Nelson
Foundations and Organizations
Argentine Foreign Affairs and International Trade Ministry Atherton Family Foundation Charles Redd Center for Western Studies College Art Association Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Foundation for the Preservation of American Indian Arts & Culture French American Cultural Exchange (face), French Voices Program French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hemingway Grant Program Friends of the University of Nebraska Press Ike and Roz Friedman Family Foundation Institut Français H. Lee and Carol Gendler Charitable Fund
Individual Donors/Friends Members
16
Jonis Agee and Brent Spencer Gordon Bakken Susan Belasco and Linck Johnson Lora Black Roger and Sally Buchholz Tom Clemente Roger and Anne Cognard Beth Boosalis Davis David Dell Christopher S. DeRosa Jeffrey and Nina Di Leo Cinnamon Dokken Richard and Carolyn Pope Edwards Charles A. and Barb Francis Ricardo L. GarcĂa Carol Gendler Kandra Hahn Christine L. Hansen James W. and Marjorie Hewitt Melissa J. Homestead Margaret D. Jacobs and Tom Lynch Pamela Carter Joern Landon Jones Beverly Keever Ted Kooser and Kathleen Rutledge Margaret Kreuzberger
Jeri L. Nordbrock Paul A. Olson and Frances G. Reinehr Gregg Orr Zeese Papanikolas and Ruth Hedy Anne Fallenbaum Eric Papenfuse and Catherine Lawrence Harvey and Susan Perlman Susan Poser Ladette Randolph Hilda Raz and Dale Nordyke Jane Renner Hood Guy Reynolds Bruce and Sandra Rippeteau William F. Sater Donna Shear and Joe Weber Jeffrey H. Smith Drs. James and Connie Capers Thorson Virginia M. Tyler Pierre A. Walker Elizabeth and Craig Walls Jenni and Benjamin Welsch Tom and Karla Wendelin Mike and Amy Zeleny
Getty Foundation Florence Gould Foundation Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Minnesota Historical Society National Endowment for the Arts
National Historical Publication and Records Commission (nhprc) Program for Cultural Cooperation Between Spain’s Ministry of Culture & United States’ Universities Sheldon Museum of Art Swedish Arts Council Tides Foundation University of Nebraska Foundation University of Nebraska–Lincoln College of Architecture University of Nebraska–Lincoln Research Council, funded in part by the Charles J. Millard Trust Fund University of Nebraska–Lincoln in cooperation with the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation Virginia Faulkner Fund at the University of Nebraska Foundation William D. & Betty Ruth Hewit Fund at the University of Nebraska Foundation
Announcing the First Annual Friends-Sponsored Book
Beginning in 2011, the Friends of unp will directly underwrite publication costs of one book per year. This year, the Friends group is delighted to support Let’s Be Reasonable by Lincolnite and National Geographic contributing photographer Joel Sartore. All new and renewing Friends members in the next year will receive a copy of Let’s Be Reasonable as their thank-you gift for membership. Join today and support great reading from Nebraska!
We also extend our thanks to administrators at universities across the nation and around the world who provide support for the publication of their faculty members’ unp books. 17
University of Nebraska Press Series American Indian Lives American Lives At Table Beyond Armageddon Bison Frontiers of Imagination Borderlands and Transcultural Studies Cather Studies Class in America The Complete Letters of Henry James Comprehensive History of the Holocaust Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology Engendering Latin America European Women Writers Extraordinary World Flyover Fiction France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization French Modernist Library French Voices Frontiers of Narrative Great Campaigns of the Civil War Great Plains Photography Historical Archeology of the American West History of the American West Indians of the Southeast Indigenous Education Indigenous Films The Iroquoians and Their World Jerry Malloy Book Prize Jewish Writing in the Contemporary World Justice and Social Inquiry Latin American Women Writers Law in the American West Legacies of Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers Life in Performance
18
Memorable Teams in Baseball History The Mexican Experience Native Literatures of the Americas Native Storiers: A Series of American Narratives North American Indian Prose Award Our Sustainable Future Outdoor Lives Outward Odyssey: A People’s History of Spaceflight Politics and Governments of the American States Postwestern Horizons Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry Race and Ethnicity in the American West River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize Stages Studies in Antisemitism Studies in the Anthropology of North American Indians Studies in the Native Languages of the Americas Studies in War, Society, and the Military Texts and Contexts This Hallowed Ground: Guides to Civil War Battlefields Willa Cather Scholarly Edition Women in the West The Works of Robert E. Howard The preceding list includes series for which we are actively acquiring new books. For a complete list of unp series, please visit www.nebraskapress.unl.edu.
Advisory Council
Ted Kooser, Honorary Chair Beth Boosalis Davis, Evanston il Carol Gendler, Omaha ne James Hewitt, Ex Officio, Lincoln ne Jane Renner Hood, Lincoln ne Hilda Raz, Placitas nm
Press Staff
Donna A. Shear, director acceler ated publishing & management (journals)
editor ial, design, and production
Manjit Kaur, manager Joyce Gettman Joel Puchalla Terence Smyre Shirley Thornton
Ann Baker, manager Terry Boldan Roger Buchholz Kim Essman Nathan Putens Bob Reitz Alison Rold Annie Shahan Sara Springsteen Sabrina Stellrecht Mikah Tacha Joeth Zucco
Faculty Editorial Advisory Board
acquisitions editor ial
Kenneth Price, chair University Professor and Hillegass Chair of 19th Century American Literature
Rob Taylor, interim editor in chief Bridget Barry Matt Bokovoy Elisabeth Chretien Alicia Christensen Leif Milliken Courtney Ochsner Wesley Piper Kristen Elias Rowley Sabrina Ehmke Sergeant Tom Swanson
Joy Castro Associate Professor, English Margaret Jacobs Professor of History and Director, Women’s and Gender Studies Jeanette Jones Associate Professor, History and Ethnic Studies Gregory G. Nosan Curator of Education and Publications, Sheldon Museum of Art Prem S. Paul Vice Chancellor for Research William J. Nunez Director of Institutional Research and Planning Joseph Starita Associate Professor in the College of Journalism and Mass Communications Jordan Stump Professor of French and Section Head, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
business
digital asset management and information technology
Jana Faust, manager Amy Lage marketing
Tera Beermann, assistant director for business Odessa Anderson Deborah Kohl Claire Schwinck Barbara Townsend
Rhonda Winchell, manager Rob Buchanan Erica Corwin Tish Fobben Acacia Gentrup Kim Mahrt Cara Pesek
development
student interns
Erika Kuebler Rippeteau
Jeff Alessandrelli Hannah Baker Megan Bauerle Lindsay Mayo Fincher Caitlin Marmie Libby Mason Kyle Simonsen Heather Stauffer Kristen Tobias Rosemary Vestal
19
Yes!
Members receive the benefits listed under the selected level plus those of all previous levels.
I want to join the Friends of the University of Nebraska Press Friends of the Press Mission: To promote and support the University of Nebraska Press through the development of financial resources and to heighten awareness of the role the Press plays in the dissemination of scholarly research and literature. Suggested giving levels: $50
$500
$2,500
$10,000
$250
$1,000
$5,000
other_____
Sponsor ($250) Ω Ted Kooser special hardcover edition, Lights on a Ground of Darkness Patron ($500) Ω 30% discount on all purchases Director's Circle ($1,000) Ω Director’s Circle annual presentation volume
Enclosed is my check for $ (Make payable to Friends of the University of Nebraska Press) Opportunities exist to sponsor or endow individual books or series at the $5,000, $10,000, and greater levels.
Chairman's Circle ($2,500) Ω Recognition in annual Chairman's Circle book Ω 40% discount on all purchases
I am interested in sponsoring or endowing a book or series. Please have the Director contact me.
Literati Circle ($5,000) Ω Individual recognition in a book selected in accordance with your area of interest
name street city
Friend ($50) Ω Friends annual presentation volume Ω 20% discount on all purchases Ω Invitations to special events Ω Seasonal catalogs
state zip
Benefactor ($10,000) Ω A home library containing a set of books from the unp series of your choice, i.e., Flyover Fiction, The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, At Table, etc.
Please mail your contribution to: Friends of the University of Nebraska Press, Box 1, Lincoln, Nebraska, 01-1.
friends presentation volume All new and renewing Friends members at the $50 or above level are entitled to receive a copy of the Friends presentation volume as a benefit of their membership. The current volume is Let’s Be Reasonable by Joel Sartore. For book details click here.
Publication supported by Friends of UNP
Matching Gifts Increase your benefits by participating in your company's matching gift program! Just pick up the necessary form in your human resources office and include it with your gift. We are pleased to recognize you for the total amount of your and your company's generosity. All memberships are renewable annually, and are tax-deductible to the extent provided by law.
Click here for a printable form
et cetera:
Author Karol Nielsen in unp’s booth at Book Expo America, New York, 2011.