News from the Membership
The member publishers of AAUP and the work they do are a major force in our intellectual and cultural life, and in the heart of their communities and fields. Here you'll find word of major achievements and milestones, including award-winning publications, press anniversaries and recognitions, and personnel announcements. AAUP also maintains directories of major digital publishing projects and collaborative initiatives. Keep up with even more news by following Books for Understanding.
Latest News
May 2013: The University of South Carolina Press has named bestselling author Pat Conroy editor-at-large of Story River Books, their new South Carolina-based original fiction series.
April 2013: The University of South Carolina Press has launched a new children's and young adult publishing imprint, Young Palmetto Books, in collaboration with the S.C. Center for Children’s Books and Literacy.
The Johns Hopkins University Press has reached an agreement with Stanford University's HighWire Press to transition to the HighWire Open Platform as the new digital hosting and delivery platform for Project MUSE.
March 2013: University Press of Florida has acquired Florida-based Seaside Publishing, a regional publisher of postcards, cookbooks, art, and photography, to produce gift-book titles under the Seaside imprint. Twenty-five of Seaside's existing titles have been transferred to the press.
Potomac Books has been acquired by the University of Nebraska Press, effective March 31. Potomac Books will continue to conduct business as usual under publisher Sam Dorrance. *This notice has been corrected.
December 2012: Indiana University Press has joined a small but growing group of university presses that are now launching their own digital shorts imprint. "INshort" will feature original, short e-content on contemporary and historical issues from award-winning authors, and will also showcase carefully selected excerpts from previously published IU Press books and journals.
November 2012: The Johns Hopkins University Press Journals Marketing Department has won five honors in the 2012 MarCom Awards presented by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals for outstanding creative achievement.
Latest Prizes
2013 Grawemeyer Award for Education
The purpose of the Grawemeyer Award for Education, awarded by the University of Louisville, is "to stimulate ideas that have the potential to bring about significant improvement in educational practice and attainment." Pasi Sahlberg has been honored for Finnish Lessons (Teachers College), which explores the surprising success of Finland's school system, in which elementary-level students have a four-hour day, do little homework, rarely take tests and wait to start school until age seven. The Finnish system also works to ensure the same opportunities for all students and to show a high regard for the teaching profession.
2013 Grawemeyer Award for Religion
Leila Ahmed's award-winning book, A Quiet Revolution, explains why a growing number of Muslim women in the United States are wearing veils. Ahmed interviewed young Muslim feminists, Arab nationalists, pious Islamic daughters, American Muslim immigrants and Islamic activists, discovering that in the context of contemporary American Islam, wearing a veil can represent a call for equality. The Grawemeyer Award in Religion honors and publicizes insights into the relationship between human beings and the divine and the ways this relationship may empower human beings to attain wholeness, integrity or meaning.
2013 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order
Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan's Columbia-published title has received this year's Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, awarded by the University of Louisville. The award is intended to stimulate the recognition, dissemination and critical analysis of outstanding proposals for improving world order. Why Civil Resistance Works explains that non-violent resistance brings about political change much more effectively than the use of violence. Chenoweth and Stephan collected and analyzed data on all known uprisings between 1900 and 2006, learning that the non-violent campaigns succeeded twice as often as the violent ones—even in the face of brutal repression.
2012 National Book Award, Poetry
Once again, the National Book Award in Poetry has gone to a university press-published work. Poet David Ferry has been honored with the 2012 award for his new volume Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, published this year by University of Chicago Press. The award notes that "In poem after poem, his diction modulates beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half century."
2012 Nobel Prize in Literature
Chinese novelist and story writer Mo Yan has been honored with this year's Nobel Prize in Literature: "Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition." Yan's work has been published by AAUP members Chinese University Press and in translation by University of Oklahoma Press, and three of his titles are distributed through Columbia University Press and University of Chicago Press.
2012 Edgar Award
For the second year running, a university press title has been awarded an Edgar Award for mystery writing. Princeton University Press's On Conan Doyle, by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Dirda, was honored with the Critical/Biographical prize (after a 2011 Edgar went to Nebraska's Scoreboard, Baby). Combining memoir and appreciation, On Conan Doyle is an engaging personal introduction to Holmes's creator, as well as a rare insider's account of the curiously delightful activities and playful scholarship of The Baker Street Irregulars.
