News
Our job posting for the 2017-2018 Mellon Diversity Fellow is now live and we are accepting applications through March 15. If you know of excellent candidates, please send them our way!
Reviews and Interviews
The New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog features No-No Boy by John Okada: “Reading No-No Boy, this week, it no longer seemed bound to its past; it felt like a prophecy, a cosmic tragedy, a message in a bottle that arrives a half century later.”—Hua Hsu
A collaborative piece with PRI’s Global Nation Education and Densho mentions Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660 in an article about activists working to keep the story of Executive Order 9066 alive today. Bustle also features the book in a round-up of “10 Graphic Novels Written by Activists That You Need to Read Now More Than Ever”: “Heartbreaking, candid. . . . Okubo recounts her experience with poignancy and a surprising amount of humor.”—Charlotte Ahlin
Award-winning novelist Kate Hamer mentions Anybody Can Do Anything and The Plague and I by Betty MacDonald in a Q&A in the Irish Times: “I love all [Betty MacDonald] books inordinately, they are comfort reading which in no way demeans their literary merit.”
Salon features an opinion piece on lessons for today from the Redwoods Wars protests by Defending Giants author Darren F. Speece. Aspen 82’s “The Lift” interviews the author in a recent segment.
New Books in Southeast Asian Studies interviews Jayde Lin Roberts about Mapping Chinese Rangoon.
High Country News reviews Forest Under Story edited by Nathaniel Brodie, Charles Goodrich, and Frederick J. Swanson: “In the Andrews Experimental Forest, ‘experimental’ is the domain of the scientist and writer alike. It is also the domain of the forest itself. . . . Forest Under Story seems keenly aware that the most important feature of language involves listening. When writers listen to the forest, the forest always speaks, however softly.”—Lawrence Lenhart
The New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog interviews Judy Yung and mentions Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940.
Seattle Times features Seattle Walks by David B. Williams in the Lit Life column. (Too High and Too Steep also gets a mention.): “I could go on and on—every stop in the book seems to have an embedded mystery. . . . Chances are good that your neighborhood is in this book. Find and explore your own.”—Mary Ann Gwinn
Seattle Times reviews “Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection,” now on view at the Seattle Art Museum. We published the exhibition catalogue with Portland Art Museum.
New Books
Seattle Walks: Discovering History and Nature in the City
By David B. Williams
David B. Williams weaves together the history, natural history, and architecture of Seattle to paint a complex, nuanced, and fascinating story. He shows us Seattle in a new light and gives us an appreciation of how the city has changed over time, how the past has influenced the present, and how nature is all around us–even in our urban landscape. With Williams as your knowledgeable and entertaining guide, encounter a new way to experience Seattle.
Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture
Edited by Leigh Raiford and Heike Raphael-Hernandez
How is the travel of black bodies reflected in reciprocal black images? How is blackness forged and remade through diasporic visual encounters and reimagined through revisitations with the past? And how do visual technologies structure the way we see African subjects and subjectivity? This wide-ranging volume brings together an international group of scholars and artists who explore these questions in visual culture for the historical and contemporary African diaspora.
Reporting for China: How Chinese Correspondents Work with the World
By Pál Nyíri
While Western media are shrinking their foreign correspondent networks, Chinese media, for the first time in history, are rapidly expanding worldwide. Based on interviews and informal conversations with over seventy current and former correspondents, Reporting for China documents a diverse group of professionals who hold political views from nationalist to liberal, but are constrained in their ability to report on the world by China’s media control, audience tastes, and the declining market for traditional media.
Rural China on the Eve of Revolution: Sichuan Fieldnotes, 1949-1950
Edited by Stevan Harrell and William Lavely
A key portion of G. William Skinner’s legacy as “the world’s most influential anthropologist of China” arose from his Sichuan fieldwork, contained in his classic monograph Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China. Although the People’s Liberation Army confiscated Skinner’s research materials, some had been sent out in advance and were discovered among the files donated to the University of Washington Libraries after his death. Skinner’s notes and photos bring to life this rare glimpse of rural China on the brink of momentous change.
Two Centuries of Manchu Women Poets: An Anthology
Translated by Wilt L. Idema
This anthology presents substantial selections from the work of twenty Manchu women poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The poems, inspired by their daily life and reflections, provide fascinating insights into the experiences and emotions of these women, most of whom belonged to the elite families of Manchu society. Each selection is accompanied by biographical material that illuminates the life stories of the poets.
Book of the Month Giveaways
Enter to win one of this month’s picks! (Open to US residents only.)
- Seattle Walks: Discovering History and Nature in the City by David B. Williams (Entry form)
- The Adventurous Traveler’s Guide to Health by Christopher Allen Sanford, M.D. (Entry form)
The giveaways will close on on Friday, March 10, 2017 at 1:00 p.m. PT. The giveaway winners will be notified by Monday, March 13, 2017.
Distributed for Lost Horse Press
Decanting: Selected and New Poems, 1967-2017
By Stuart Friebert
A poetic biography of arachnids, boats, cemeteries, damfoolskis, eggs, funerals, grandparents, hairy woodpeckers, innocent gazing, jabalinas, Kornjuden, lilies, marbles, Nazis, oysters, proximodistal, questions, rocking chairs, submarines, telephonographs, understanding poetry, Virginia Woolf’s diaries, wigs, X-rays, Yad Vashem, Zurich, and the poet himself!
A Filament Burns in Blue Degrees: Poems
By Kendra Tanacea
This collection explores life’s strains and joys and the human compulsion to create something lasting despite certain entropy. Teardowns, remodels, sex, longing, joy; sometimes tender, sometimes humorous, these poems explore interpersonal relationships of all kinds and embrace the competing impulses of working hard at changing life’s course and fatalistic acceptance.
Events
MARCH
March 2 at 4 p.m., Migrating the Black Body, edited by Leigh Raiford & Heike Raphael-Hernandez, University of California, Berkeley, Center for Race and Gender, Berkeley, CA
March 3 at 5 p.m., Lorraine K. Bannai, Enduring Conviction, Words, Writers, and West Seattle, Westwood Village Barnes & Noble, Seattle, WA
March 3 at 7 p.m., Paula Becker, Looking for Betty MacDonald, Humanities Washington and the Jefferson County Museum of Art, Port Townsend Historic City Council Chambers, 540 Water Street, Port Townsend, WA
March 6 at 4 p.m., Darren Speece, Defending Giants, University of Maryland Department of History, Miller Center, College Park, MD
March 7 at 6 p.m., Noriko Kawamura, Emperor Hirohito and the Pacific War, Pritzker Military Museum & Library lecture and livestream (Turbulence in the Pacific: Japanese-U.S. Relations During World War I), Chicago, IL ($10; Free for members)
March 8 at 7 p.m., Coll Thrush, Native Seattle, Second Edition, Folio with Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA ($10 at the door; $5 for Folio Members)
March 10 at 8 p.m., Kevin Craft, Vagrants and Accidentals, Open Books, Seattle, WA
March 11 at 12:30 p.m., Kathleen Alcalá, The Deepest Roots, Tucson Festival of Books, Tucson, AZ
March 11 at 1:00 p.m., Paula Becker, Looking for Betty MacDonald, Kitsap Regional Library, Port Orchard, WA
March 15 at 5:30 p.m., Paula Becker, Looking for Betty MacDonald, Kitsap Regional Library, Downtown Bremerton, WA
March 15 at 7 p.m., David B. Williams, Seattle Walks, University Book Store, Seattle, WA
March 15 at 7 p.m., Linda Tamura, Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence, with Sydney Blaine, Jack Sheppard, Joan & Dorothy Laurance, Sense of Place lecture series, Columbia Center for the Arts, Hood River, OR
March 18 at 1 p.m., Paula Becker, Looking for Betty MacDonald, Kitsap Regional Library, Poulsbo, WA
March 20 at 2 p.m., Judy Bentley, Walking Washington’s History, NEST (North East Seattle Together), NESTCafé, Magnuson Park Brig, Rm 406 (6344 NE 74th St, Seattle, WA 98115)
March 20 at 7 p.m., Paula Becker, Looking for Betty MacDonald, King County Library System, Newport Way (Humanities Washington)
March 21 at 6 p.m., Paula Becker, Looking for Betty MacDonald, Vashon Heritage Association, Betty MacDonald 110th birthday week celebration and screening of the Betty MacDonald Day video, Vashon Theatre “GreenTech” night screening, Vashon Island, WA
March 21 at 7 p.m., Frederick L. Brown, The City Is More Than Human, Denny Lecture, MOHAI, Seattle, WA ($10 MOHAI members; $15 general public)
March 21 at 7:30 p.m., Kevin Craft, Vagrants and Accidentals, Phinney Books, Seattle, WA
March 26 at 5:30 p.m., Paula Becker, Looking for Betty MacDonald, Vashon Heritage Association, Betty MacDonald 110th birthday week celebration events, Vashon High School Theater, Vashon Island, WA
March 25 from 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Kathleen Alcalá, The Deepest Roots, Writers’ Workshoppe, Point of View: The Clueless Narrator workshop, Port Townsend, WA (RSVP, $75, max: 12 participants)
March 27 at 7 p.m., Linda Tamura, Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence, McMenamins History, Oregon Historical Society, and Holy Names Heritage Center, History Pub, Kennedy School, Portland, OR
March 29 at 11:30 a.m., Judy Bentley, Walking Washington’s History, University of Washington Faculty Auxiliary, Seattle, WA (RSVP required)
March 29 at 6:00 p.m., Paula Becker, Looking for Betty MacDonald, Kitsap Regional Library, Manchester, WA
March 30 at 7 p.m., Jess Thomson, A Year Right Here, University Book Store, Seattle, WA
APRIL
April 5 at 6:30 p.m., Jess Thomson, A Year Right Here, Omnivore Books, San Francisco, CA
April 5 at 7 p.m., David B. Williams, Seattle Walks, Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, WA
April 6 at 6 p.m., Lorraine McConaghy and Judy Bentley, Free Boy, Performance of Free Boy, the musical, MOHAI Free First Thursday, Free performance of Free Boy, the musical, by 5th Avenue Theatre’s Adventure Musical Theater Touring Company, Seattle, WA
April 7 at 5 p.m., Judy Bentley, Hiking Washington’s History, Words, Writers, and West Seattle, Westwood Village Barnes & Noble, Seattle, WA
April 8 at 11 a.m., Jess Thomson, A Year Right Here, Book Passage, Corte Madera, CA
April 17 at 7 p.m., Jess Thomson, A Year Right Here, Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, WA
University of Washington Press Blog 