News

On this #GiveBIG Day, thanks for giving big today and every day! This year your support helped us publish some of the region’s most talented nonfiction writers, offer fellowships in scholarly publishing, and ensure a future for smart, accessible books. Thank you for being part of the University of Washington Press community!

We are also thrilled to announce that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the University of British Columbia a three-year $509,000 grant to support a new collaborative digital publishing platform for multimedia books in Indigenous studies between UBC Press and the University of Washington Press. Read more at Library Journal‘s InfoDocket and the full announcement on our blog, or contact Beth Fuget at bfuget [at] uw.edu.

Congratulations to senior designer Tom Eykemans, winner of the 2016 Standing Ovation Award from UW’s Professional Staff Organization. Winners and nominees will be celebrated on Wednesday, May 4, from noon till 1:30 p.m. in the Lake Washington Room of the UW Club.

Congratulations to UW forest ecologist and The Olympic Rain Forest co-author Jerry Franklin, who was recently awarded the Pinchot Medallion by the Pinchot Institute for Conservation (via UW Today).

Last, our Fall 2016 catalog is hot off the presses—we hope you’ll be as excited about what we’re publishing over the next months as we are!

Reviews and Interviews

The Utne Reader publishes an excerpt from Ana Maria Spagna‘s Reclaimers.

The University of Iowa’s Iowa Now interviews Deborah E. Whaley about Black Women in Sequence.

The IBEW Media Center (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) features an article about Building the Golden Gate Bridge by Harvey Schwartz. Cross-posted at ISHN (Industrial Safety & Hygiene News).

Carl Kilcourse reviews The World of a Tiny Insect by Zhang Daye and translated by Xiaofei Tian in the January-March issue of the Journal of the American Oriental Society: “[A] unique and extremely valuable source for understanding rebellion and its impact in nineteenth-century China. . . . [A]ccessible and highly engaging”

Carla Nappi of New Books Network interviews Beverly Bossler, editor of Gender and Chinese History.

The West Seattle Herald features Judy Bentley and Walking Washington’s History ahead of the Southwest Seattle Historical Society’s “Words, Writers & West Seattle” First Friday book talk on May 6th. Dean Kahn of the Bellingham Herald also features the book: “Bentley endeavors to make her book as useful as possible while toting it along on a history-minded walk.”

Melissa De Witte of the University of California Santa Cruz Newscenter interviews Power Interrupted author Sylvanna M. Falcón.

Andrew B. Kipnis reviews Educating the Chinese Individual by Mette Halskov Hansen in the January 2016 issue of The China Journal: “[E]xcellent. . . . [T]his ethnography is a fine depiction of a slice of life in China today.”

Nina Ayoub includes Karline McLain‘s The Afterlife of Sai Baba in her April 8 Book List at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Mark Walmsley reviews Emilie Raymond‘s Stars for Freedom in the April 2016 H-1960s: “[A] welcome addition to growing literature that stresses the heterogeneity of civil rights protest in the postwar era. . . . [H]ighly entertaining and readable.”

Miles A. Powell reviews Whales and Nations by Kurkpatrick Dorsey in the May 2016 issue of Environment and History: “Whales and Nations is a dazzling accomplishment.”

New Books

Once and Future River: Reclaiming the Duwamish
Photographs by Tom Reese
Essay by Eric Wagner

Launch event at Town Hall
Tuesday, May 3 at 7:30 p.m.
Doors open: 6:30 p.m.

BUY TICKETS / $5

Great Hall
1119 Eighth Avenue (enter on Eighth Avenue)
Seattle, WA 98103

Declared a Superfund site in 2001, the Duwamish river has faced a battered history; it’s been straightened, dumped into by over 40 companies, and neglected to the degree that the river now has 5% of its original natural habitat. Now, as Seattle joins several other cities in a lawsuit against Monsanto to help pay for cleanup and Boeing invests millions into restoration, the hope for rejuvenation seems positive. According to Pulitzer Prizewinning photographer Tom Reese and science writer Eric Wagner, reclamation of the Duwamish is nothing new. In a presentation rich with photos from their new book, they’ll discuss local efforts to reclaim the river, what its future might look like, and how life can thrive even in the murky waters of this iconic river. Panelists include James Rasmussen, Duwamish Tribal member and director of the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition, and moderator Lynda Mapes, Seattle Times environmental reporter.

Presented by Town Hall and University Book Store, as part of the Science series and Town Green. / Town Hall members get 10% off books purchased at the event and priority seating.

The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl
By Sarah D. Wald

Join us at the book release celebration at Bark in Portland
Sunday, May 15 from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Bark
351 NE 18th Ave.
Portland, OR 97232

Sarah Wald is an assistant professor of Environmental Studies and English at University of Oregon, a longtime Bark volunteer, and current Bark board member. The event will include a reading from her book addressing the ways the environmental movement can benefit from increased engagement with social justice, followed by a book signing.

Analyzing fiction, nonfiction, news coverage, activist literature, memoirs, and more, Wald gives us a new way of thinking through questions of national belonging by probing the relationships among race, labor, and landownership. Bringing together ecocriticism and critical race theory, she pays special attention to marginalized groups, examining how Japanese American journalists, Filipino workers, United Farm Workers members, and contemporary immigrants-rights activists, among others, pushed back against the standard narratives of land-ownership and citizenship.

We are offering a 30% discount for books purchased for this event. Books must be purchased online ahead of time using code WSH2275.

READ AN EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK

Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco’s Two-Spirit Community
By Andrew J. Jolivette

The first book to examine the correlation between mixed-race identity and HIV/AIDS among Native American gay men and transgendered people, Indian Blood provides an analysis of the emerging and often contested LGBTQ “two-spirit” identification as it relates to public health and mixed-race identity.

Using surveys, focus groups, and community discussions to examine the experiences of HIV-positive members of San Francisco’s two-spirit community, Indian Blood provides an innovative approach to understanding how colonization continues to affect American Indian communities and opens a series of crucial dialogues in the fields of Native American studies, public health, queer studies, and critical mixed-race studies.

California through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History
By William J. Bauer, Jr.

Most California histories begin with the arrival of the Spanish missionaries in the late eighteenth century and conveniently skip to the Gold Rush of 1849. Noticeably absent from these stories are the perspectives and experiences of the people who lived on the land long before European settlers arrived. Historian William Bauer seeks to correct that oversight through an innovative approach that tells California history strictly through Native perspectives. Using oral histories of Concow, Pomo, and Paiute workers, taken as part of a New Deal federal works project, Bauer reveals how Native peoples have experienced and interpreted the history of the land we now call California. The result both challenges the “California story” and enriches it with new voices and important points of view, serving as a model for understanding Native historical perspectives in other regions.

Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State
By Justin M. Jacobs

Historian Justin Jacobs views modern Chinese political history from the perspective of Han officials who were tasked with governing Xinjiang. This region, inhabited by Uighurs, Kazaks, Hui, Mongols, Kirgiz, and Tajiks, is also the last significant “colony” of the former Qing empire to remain under continuous Chinese rule throughout the twentieth century. By foregrounding the responses of Chinese and other imperial elites to the growing threat of national determination across Eurasia, Jacobs argues for a reconceptualization of the modern Chinese state as a “national empire.” He shows how strategies for administering this region in the late Qing, Republican, and Communist eras were molded by, and shaped in response to, the rival platforms of ethnic difference characterized by Soviet and other geopolitical competitors across Inner and East Asia.

DISTRIBUTED FOR FOWLER MUSEUM AT UCLA

World Share: Installations by Pascale Marthine Tayou
By Gemma Rodrigues and Leora Maltz-Leca

This exhibition catalogue gives us a large-scale immersive environment that combines the artist’s sculpture, drawings, and poetry with Fowler artworks.

Read more about the exhibition

José Montoya’s Abundant Harvest: Works on Paper/Works on Life
Edited by Richard Montoya and Selene Preciado

Chicano activist, poet, artist, intellectual, professor, and musician, José Montoya (1932-2013) was a veritable Renaissance man. This exhibition catalogue honors the artist’s prolific work as well as his subject matter in this energetic survey that includes eighty-one of his drawings.

 Exhibition on view through July 17, 2016

DISTRIBUTED FOR LOST HORSE PRESS

Chinook & Chanterelle
By Robert Michael Pyle

Robert Michael Pyle’s second full-length book of poetry. Rich in natural images, stories, and indelible episodes from the whole world around us, Pyle’s poems exalt the ordinary even as they find the extraordinary in physical details that we too often look right through.

Fugitives
By Danielle Pieratti

These poems are punctuated by avoidance, disguise, and sheltering of all kinds–escapes both from and to. They combine the magical and the mundane, shifting between dreams and the domestic, while exploring the nebulous confines of marriage, motherhood, and girlhood.

East & West
By Piotr Florczyk

Whether questioning the afterlife of the Berlin Wall or taking a fresh look at kitchenware, these poems investigate themes of identity, politics, and memory while wrestling with what it is that makes us human.

Triage
By Renee Rossi

Renee Rossi’s first full-length collection weaves poems about seeking license to heal others, Detroit’s dog days, dreams’ brushstrokes, and how we become closer while drifting apart.

Wonderland
By Samuel Ligon
Illustrated by Stephen Knezovich

These twelve short-short stories, illustrated by collage artist Stephen Knezovich, are as dark and absurd as they are poignant, playful, and true, examining men and women, love and loss, donkeys and goats, and murder, carnivals, and whiskey bosoms.

Events

MAY

Tom Reese, Eric Wagner, and James Rasmussen, moderated by Lynda Mapes, Once and Future River, Town Hall Seattle with University Book Store, May 3, 7:30 p.m.

Judy Bentley, Walking Washington’s History, Words, Writers, and West Seattle, Westwood Village Barnes and Noble, May 6, 5 p.m.

David B. Williams, Too High and Too Steep, Eastlake Community Council, TOPS-Seward School, May 10, 7 p.m.

Tom Vick, Time and Place Are Nonsense (dist. Freer | Sackler), Introduction to screening of Seijun Suzuki’s “Kanto Wanderer” (1963) and book signing, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), May 11, 7 p.m.

Melinda Bargreen (Classical Seattle), Ana Maria Spagna (Reclaimers), and David B. Williams (Too High and Too Steep), Literary Voices, University of Washington Libraries, May 14, 6-9:30 p.m. ($150 per person or $1,500 per table)

Sarah D. Wald, The Nature of California, Bark, Portland, OR, May 15, 5-9 p.m.

James Longhurst, Bike Battles, Midwest Active Transportation Conference with UW-La Crosse Continuing Education (Full-conference agenda), La Crosse, WI, May 20, 8:30 a.m. – 5 p.m.

James Longhurst, Bike Battles, Wisconsin Bike Federation, Wisconsin Bike Summit (keynote), La Crosse, WI, May 21, 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.

David B. Williams, Too High and Too Steep, University of Washington Faculty Auxiliary Club, May 25, 9:30 a.m.

JUNE

Sarah D. Wald, The Nature of California, Literati Bookstore, Ann Arbor, MI, June 3, 4 p.m.

Jean Morgan Meaux, In Pursuit of Alaska, Alaskan Prospectors Society, Anchorage, AK, June 7, 8 p.m.

David B. Williams, Too High and Too Steep, Renton History Museum, Renton, WA, June 14, 7 p.m.

Margaret Willson, Seawomen of Iceland, Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, June 16, 7 p.m.

James Longhurst, Bike Battles, Hennepin History Museum, Minneapolis, MN, June 23 at 6:30 p.m.

Margaret Willson, Seawomen of Iceland, Nordic Heritage Museum, June 30, 7 p.m.