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Five Questions with Ross A. Slotten, MD, author of “Plague Years”

June 15, 2021
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June 2021 marks a grimly significant anniversary: forty years ago this month, the CDC reported the first US cases of the disease that would come to be known as AIDS. Ross A. Slotten, MD—a Chicago-based family practitioner—has been deeply involved with the fight against HIV/AIDS since the beginning of his medical career in the 1980s. In Plague Years: A Doctor’s Journey through the AIDS Crisis—praised by Nature as a “powerful, humane, and stylish memoir”—Slotten provides an intimate yet comprehensive view of the disease’s spread alongside heartfelt portraits of his patients and his own conflicted feelings as a medical professional, drawn from more than thirty years of personal notebooks. We asked Ross a few questions about the book. The acknowledgments page for Plague Years points out that this book emerged from a memoir writing course at StoryStudio Chicago. How is the finished book different from your initial vision for it, and is there anything from earlier drafts that you were sad to have to cut from the final version? Initially, I intended to write something more academic. When I showed an early version of the book to an editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, she thought that a . . .

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Announcing the Recipients of the 2021-2022 Mellon University Press Diversity Fellowships

June 9, 2021
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The University of Chicago Press along with the University of Washington Press, the MIT Press, Cornell University Press, the Ohio State University Press, Northwestern University Press, and the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) are excited to announce the recipients of the 2021-2022 Mellon University Press Diversity Fellowships. These fellowships are generously funded by a four-year, $1,205,000 grant awarded to the University of Washington Press from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the continued development and expansion of the pipeline program designed to diversify academic publishing by offering apprenticeships in acquisitions departments. This second grant builds on the success of the initial 2016 grant from the Mellon Foundation, which funded the first cross-press initiative of its kind in the United States to address the marked lack of diversity in the academic publishing industry. Please join us in welcoming the 2021-2022 Mellon University Press Diversity Fellows: Chad M. Attenborough joins the University of Washington Press from Vanderbilt University, where he is a PhD candidate studying black responses to the British abolition of the slave trade in the Caribbean. While completing his research, Chad worked for Vanderbilt University Press as a graduate assistant where his passion for publishing developed in earnest and . . .

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Six Questions with Sujit Sivasundaram, author of “Waves Across the South”

May 27, 2021
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This is a story of tides and coastlines, winds and waves, islands and beaches. In Waves Across the South, Sujit Sivasundaram offers a fresh history of revolution and empire which centers on island nations and ocean-facing communities, turning the familiar narrative of the Age of Revolutions and the origins of the British Empire on its head. Waves Across the South has been praised for the awe-inspiring depth of its research, as well as its captivating storytelling. We asked Sujit Sivasundaram a few questions about his work. To start us off, what is the Age of Revolutions? How does Waves Across the South reconceptualize it? Usually, the Age of Revolutions is an Atlantic story, encompassing for instance the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and other uprisings in the Caribbean and Latin America. These events are taken as a pivotal origin point for our modern condition: for ideas of rights and belonging, a system of nation states as well as the application of reason and reform, for instance with respect to labor or governance. Waves Across the South moves this story to the Indian and Pacific oceans. In this vast oceanic zone, there was a pattern of indigenous creativity, unrest, revolt, and association; this was a first wave. There was then a response . . .

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The University of Chicago Press Welcomes the American Library Association as a New Distribution Client

May 12, 2021
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The University of Chicago Press and the Chicago Distribution Center are excited to announce a new distribution partnership with the American Library Association (ALA) throughout North America starting July 1, 2021. This includes books published by ALA Editions/ALA Neal-Schuman, ACRL Publications, and other ALA units; posters, bookmarks, READ-branded and other items that promote literacy and libraries, published by ALA Graphics; and ALA’s physical award seals such as the Newbery, Caldecott, Printz, and Carnegie Medals seals. The ALA is the foremost national organization providing resources to inspire library and information professionals to transform their communities through essential programs and services. For more than 140 years, the ALA has been the trusted voice for academic, public, school, government, and special libraries, advocating for the profession and the library’s role in enhancing learning and ensuring access to information for all. For more information, visit ala.org. “The opportunity to partner with a company whose values so closely align with where ALA is right now and where ALA is headed in the next few years is exciting,” said Mary Mackay, ALA Associate Director of Publishing. “We have been delighted by CDC’s responsiveness, their willingness to learn about our business, and their commitment to pivoting with . . .

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5 Questions with Michelle Oyakawa, Coauthor of “Prisms of the People”

May 6, 2021
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Grassroots organizing and collective action have always been fundamental to American democracy but have been burgeoning since the 2016 election, as people struggle to make their voices heard in this moment of societal upheaval. In Prisms of the People, Hahrie Han, Elizabeth McKenna, and Michelle Oyakawa show how the power of successful movements most often is rooted in their ability to act as  “prisms of the people,” turning participation into political power just as prisms transform white light into rainbows. Understanding the organizational design choices that shape the people, their leaders, and their strategies can help us understand how grassroots groups achieve their goals. We asked Michelle Oyakawa a few questions about the book. How did you become interested in grassroots organizing and collective action? What led you to write about it? Each of us came to this work by engaging directly with organizations that engage people in public life and agitate for change. Participating in organizing and witnessing the promise it holds for both personal and political transformation inspired us to further investigate and understand how people can come together to build power for themselves and their communities. We are motivated by hope and resistance against cynicism and despair. . . .

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“The Porch” Playlist

April 23, 2021
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To help us tune into the atmosphere of his book, Charlie Hailey made a playlist that will musically transport you to his porch on Florida's Homosassa River on a hazy, lazy summer's day. Click through to listen. . . .

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An Earth Day Reading List

April 22, 2021
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An Earth Day Reading List

First observed in 1970, Earth Day has grown into an annual, April 22 celebration of the natural world—and the importance of humanity’s role in protecting it. As we mark Earth Day 2021, read on for ten recommended books that are sure to inspire thought, awe, and action. Barbara J. King’s Animals’ Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity and in the Wild “King’s Animals’ Best Friends is the most comprehensive exploration I’ve read of the complex relationship between the human and nonhuman, full of great insights and practical information.”—Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times Book Review, “By the Book” Charley Hailey’s The Porch: Meditations on the Edge of Nature “Hailey bears daily witness to the subtle vibrations of the natural world that well up from below, drift down from above, or move across his screened porch in the form of air, sound, light, weather, or wing beats. With this book, he fulfills a fundamental requirement of morality—paying attention.”—Robert Pogue Harrison, author of Juvenescence Sandra Knapp’s Extraordinary Orchids “In this captivating overview, Knapp covers the biology of both terrestrial and epiphytic (tree-dwelling) orchids and explains how epiphytes are adapted to living in trees, even using a special form of . . .

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Remembering Marshall Sahlins (1930-2021)

April 9, 2021
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Remembering Marshall Sahlins (1930-2021)

Marshall Sahlins, a giant in the field of anthropology and a celebrated Press author, died earlier this week at his home in Hyde Park. Best known for his ethnographic work in the Pacific and for his contributions to anthropological theory, he was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and the author of many books. Retired anthropology editor T. David Brent had the honor of working closely with Sahlins throughout his career, and he offered these words of remembrance for a significant author and friend. Marshall Sahlins was a distinguished scholar, a great anthropologist, a treasured author of the University of Chicago Press, and my dear friend. I had the privilege of being the editor for several of his books including Islands of History (1985), Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii volumes 1 & 2, co-authored with Patrick V. Kirch (1992), How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, For Example (1995), Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice-Versa (2004) and What Kinship Is . . . And Is Not (2013). I also helped shepherd his Culture and Practical Reason (1976) into publication just after I joined the Press . . .

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Read an Excerpt from “Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront”

April 6, 2021
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Polymath artist David Wojnarowicz blazed a singular trail through the New York avant-garde from the 1970s until his untimely death in 1992. His incendiary and deeply personal work—often physically and spiritually rooted in the desolation of the Manhattan waterfront—roamed freely between painting, photography, film, and music to confront mainstream inaction on the AIDS epidemic. With the new documentary Wojnarowicz screening now in virtual cinemas, it’s the perfect time to revisit Fiona Anderson’s Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront, which Attitude Magazine called “a fascinating journey in cruising, sex, and the art scene of Manhattan’s dilapidated waterfront in the 1970s and 1980s.” Detailed descriptions of sex at the West Side piers appear in David Wojnarowicz’s personal journals from the summer of 1977. Walking “through Soho and over to Christopher Street” that September, he found himself in the dilapidated districts he had spent time in as a hustling teenager, by “the big pier past the old truck lines and the Silver Dollar Café/Restaurant.” There, he wrote, “away from the blatant exhibitionist energies of the NYC music scenes gay scenes,” he felt “uncontrollably sane.” In journal entries, poetry, memoir essays, photographs, short films, and drawings, he depicted the . . .

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Marvell Marvelled: Katie Kadue on Andrew Marvell’s 400th Birthday

March 31, 2021
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Marvell Marvelled: Katie Kadue on Andrew Marvell’s 400th Birthday

The poet Andrew Marvell was born on this day in 1621 near Hull, England. Marvell’s poetry has inspired readings by some of our finest literary critics, from T. S. Eliot and Cleanth Brooks to Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Christopher Ricks, and Leah S. Marcus. Indeed, it was 300 years ago today that Eliot published his now-classic essay “Andrew Marvell” in the Times Literary Supplement. For Marvell’s quadricentenary, we asked our author Katie Kadue for a brief essay on the poet, touching on the themes of her forthcoming Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton. Kadue illuminates what Marvell’s poetry still preserves for us, and the best literary criticism, too.  Andrew Marvell’s poetry is best known for images of time’s hurtling, inexorable movement toward a spectacular end: the winged chariot hurrying near, warning us of death’s encroachment, in “To His Coy Mistress,” or, less hurtlingly, the annihilation of all that’s made in “The Garden.” Marvell wrote his poems and was active in politics during the English Civil War and its aftermath, when the nation was captivated by providential time; his “Horatian Ode” to Oliver Cromwell is emphatic that the time to act is “now.” But Marvell also took his sweet time . . .

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