What is something at your press that you are most looking forward to? What one thing do you want to hold up and celebrate with your colleagues in the Association and more widely?
We in the AUPresses Central Office asked member press directors these questions a few months ago as some stared down the dog days of summer and others endured long winter nights. And now we’re pleased to share these 13 tidbits—heralding new books and journals, advances in technology, anniversaries, other joyful occurrences—with our wider community. Read UP and enjoy! (Responses have been edited for length and clarity.)
Publishing dissertations forms a large part of the mission and purpose of a university press. I am delighted to announce that in October we will publish the dissertation of Robert F. Prevost, now better known as Pope Leo XIV.—Trevor Lipscombe, Catholic University of America Press
Very early next year we will publish, in our food history series, The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese: From Ancient Rome to Modern America, by Karima Moyer-Nocchi. Start salivating!—Jennifer Crewe, Columbia University Press
At Georgetown we have a couple of exciting things cooking:
- A Taste for Change: The Ecological Transition as a Way to Happiness launches at the Terra Madre Americas Slow Food festival in Sacramento in September. There’s a foreword by the late Pope Francis and an endorsement from Alice Waters.
- The first books in our new Amazigh Studies series arrive later this fall/winter.
- Keep Your Ear to the Ground: A History of Punk Zines in Washington DC arrives October 1 and has a long list of events already lined up.
—Hope LeGro, Georgetown University Press
A recent book in our Empire State Editions imprint, Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car, was a co-winner of the Gotham Book Prize, which comes with a $50,000 prize split between the authors.—Fred Nachbaur, Fordham University Press
We’re ordering a reprint before the official pub date (August 4) of our English translation of Pelle Dragsted’s Nordic Socialism. The author—the leader of the Enhedslisten party in Denmark and a representative in the Folketing—and two members of his staff recently completed an 8-city, 16-day, coast-to-coast tour of the US, with events in D.C. Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Madison, St. Paul, Seattle, and Culver City/Los Angeles. Some highlights included standing room only at Politics & Prose, 100+ attendees at Scandinavia House (YouTube recording), standing room at Madison institution A Room of One’s Own, and attendance of 200+ at the National Nordic Museum.—Dennis Lloyd, University of Wisconsin Press
Eisenbrauns, our imprint specializing in ancient Near East studies, biblical studies, archaeology, linguistics, and related fields, is turning 50 this year. Established in 1975 by Jim and Merna Eisenbraun primarily as a means for students to purchase affordable books in ancient Near Eastern studies, Eisenbrauns grew to include a publishing program, a prepress house, and a book distribution and sales service; it became an imprint of Penn State University Press in 2017. In addition, the press is excited to announce the publication of a new journal, American Gothic Studies, the official journal of the Society for the Study of the American Gothic; this startup journal serves a general interest audience and is the first scholarly journal dedicated to the American Gothic.—David Aycock, Penn State University Press
This November, we’re thrilled to publish Prieta Is Dreaming: A Cuentos-novela, a much-anticipated posthumous collection of stories by legendary Chicana feminist Gloria E. Anzaldúa. Having previously published This Bridge Called My Back, coedited by Anzaldúa and our bestselling book of all time, wecouldn’t be more excited to share the joy. We’re also gearing up for our 60th anniversary in 2026 and have a full slate of celebrations taking shape. A centerpiece of the year will be a late-spring open house at our amazing historic building, featuring an author panel. We’re also working on a short video of memories and testimonials, a summer reading book club with several of our trade authors, and book displays across SUNY libraries.—Marlene McHugh Pratt, SUNY Press
We are having a good year following our 2024 National Book Award in Poetry for Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s Something about Living. In 2025 we published two works of regional history that have done very well: Native Americans of the Cuyahoga Valley, which examines the complex history of Indigenous peoples in Northeastern Ohio. This is a book which we expect to sell well for many years. We also published Akron at 200: A Bicentennial History. Akron has had a summer of bicentennial celebrations, and our book, an anthology of 27 articles by 26 local authors, has been a win for the city, the university, and the press.—Jon Miller, University of Akron Press
Middle Grades Collaborative (MGC), a collaboration of colleges and universities specializing in professional development for aspiring and practicing middle school educators, is our newest journals publishing partner. We’ve migrated MGC’s diamond open access journal, Middle Grades Review, to our Janeway platform and will be publishing new content on a rolling basis, in both HTML and PDF formats, improving speed and accessibility. The Journal of Black Military Studies, the diamond open access journal of the Society for Black Military Studies, will officially launch its website and open to submissions at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Annual Conference in September. These two publications join the Journal of Ecological Engineering Design, the diamond open access journal of the American Ecological Engineering Society, our first journals publishing partner.—Aimee Diehl, University of Vermont Press
We published Ambigrammia this week [July 25]. I’m normally averse to including unfamiliar or made-up words in titles but this works on so many levels; if you’re interested in language, cognition, design, or word puzzles, this is a book for you. I’ve also had the extreme good fortune of having barely taken a metaphorical seat at Yale University Press before a bestseller fell into my lap: at this writing, James West Davidson’s A Little History of the United States has spent two weeks on the NY Times bestseller list.—Niko Pfund, Yale University Press
The University of Virginia’s Center for Digital Editing (CDE) and UVA Press’ digital publishing imprint, Rotunda Digital, were granted a unique sole source award from the National Endowment for the Humanities to promote and preserve their affiliated documentary editing projects. The award will support 5 core documentary editing projects (Papers of George Washington, James Madison, Gouverneur Morris, and William Short, and the Naval Documents of the American Revolution) for the next 5 years. In return for this support, the papers projects and Rotunda Digital through its founding era collection will contribute relevant documents to a series of public access sites containing themed essays and exhibits (to be created by the CDE), tied to the upcoming 250th celebration of the Declaration of Independence. Rotunda Digital will also contribute a stand-alone site in late 2026 that maps networks of communication between 1771 and 1783 from the sender/recipient/date metadata from our current collection. The goal is to show the continued relevance of these primary sources and highlight the topics and discussions that framed the founding of the government.—Eric Brandt, University of Virginia Press
We are excited to be publishing a 20th anniversary edition of On Bullshit. The anniversary edition is inspiring a lot of collective brainstorming “on bullshit.”—Christie Henry, Princeton University Press
After 133 years, we’re starting a journals program. We plan to collaborate with the Simon Fraser-based Public Knowledge Project to publish platinum open access journals through a subscribe-to-open model (S2O) and with Knowledge Unlatched and their parent organization, Annual Reviews for sales representation to libraries, starting in the spring 2026. The first four journals to be published under our imprint are Reviews of Economic Literature, Biogeography. Population Biology Modeling & Theory, and Journal of Mass Spectrometry and Advances in the Clinical Lab.—Alan Harvey, Stanford University Press