Goodreads Giveaway x 3

We're giving away three different titles on Goodreads. Enter now to win an advance reader's copy of PENN CENTER, TYRANNICIDE, or ZERO TO THREE. Links to enter are below.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Penn Center

by Orville Vernon Burton

Giveaway ends October 21, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

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Win one of two ARCs!

“This is an extraordinary book. It is the most complete history of Penn Center that has ever been written. Many stories and famous academic accounts have been concerned indirectly with Penn Center over its 150-year history, but this book goes straight to the heart.”—from the foreword by Emory S. Campbell, former director of Penn Center

Recounting the past 150 years of the Penn Center, Orville Vernon Burton and Wilbur Cross’s PENN CENTER is the first comprehensive study of the Penn School which was established on St. Helena Island, South Carolina in 1862 to provide a formal education for formal slaves. In later years, the school expanded to become Penn Normal, Agricultural and Industrial School and later a safe meeting place for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as well as the Peace Corps. Today, Penn Center serves as a social services hub and museum.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Tyrannicide

by Emily Blanck

Giveaway ends October 31, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Win an ARC!

Uncovering the all-but-forgotten legal battle over escaped slaves who were transported from South Carolina to Massachusetts on a British ship during the American Revolution, TYRANNICIDE examines how African Americans sought freedom and how white Americans in South Carolina and Massachusetts responded to this quest for freedom by writing diverging slave law between 1765 and 1789. The law they wrote began to solidify the division of America between free and slave states and would later be etched into the Constitution.

While many books discuss slavery in the Constitution and during the American Revolution, no other book highlights the story of the Tyrannicide affair, brings out the dynamic between national and local politics in developing a state’s law on slavery, or ties the specific contexts of slavery during the Revolutionary War to the writing of the slavery provisions of the Constitution.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Zero to Three

by F. Douglas Brown

Giveaway ends October 22, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Win one of two ARCs!

Tracy K. Smith, author of Life on Mars and winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, selected F. Douglas Brown's ZERO TO THREE as the winner of the 2013 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

The poems in ZERO TO THREE focus on parenting and, more specifically, fatherhood in the midst of difficult situations and current events, such as Travyon Martin, Hurricane Katrina, and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. ZERO TO THREE refers to the developmental period (conception to toddler age) that many clinicians and pediatricians believe is the most fundamental period for children whose delicate brains are undergoing drastic and formative change. Research also shows that parents, too, undergo formative change during this period alongside their children. ZERO TO THREE celebrates pop culture and family and laments the anguish and frustration of a parent losing a parent or a parent losing their temper, all while rejoicing in the fact that parenting is a wonderful mystery to witness.

Mark Your Calendar: Decatur Book Festival 2014

Be sure to mark your calendars for this year's Decatur Book Festival! The festival will be held August 29-31 in Decatur, GA. At the UGA Press booth (#501, 503, 505), we will have a couple of signings and giveaway opportunities. We also have several authors who will be speaking at the festival. We hope to see you there!

Festival Author Events (UGA Press authors)
August 30 | 10:00am
Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, BREAKING GROUND 
First Baptist Decatur Sanctuary Stage

August 30 | 11:15am
Glenn T. Eskew, JOHNNY MERCER
Marriott Conference Center Ballroom C

August 31 | 5:00pm
Kate Sweeney, AMERICAN AFTERLIFE
Old Courthouse Stage

UGA Press In-Booth Signings
August 30 | 11:00am
Quentin Falk, TRAVELS IN GREENELAND

August 30 | 2:00pm
Kate Sweeney, AMERICAN AFTERLIFE


Get a FREE UGA Press book* (one of four choices) when you spend $25!
(The four available titles are below.)
Spend $50 or more and get a FREE UGA Press tote bag*, too!
*while supplies last

The four titles that will be available:

HEY, BUG DOCTOR!
CRAIG CLAIBORNE'S SOUTHERN COOKING
WORDS & MUSIC
HELL'S BROKE LOOSE IN GEORGIA

Goodreads Book Giveaway #4

With the Kentucky Derby happening in early May, we're giving away 5 finished copies of OLD LOUISVILLE! Ready to get in the Derby spirit now? Put on a big hat and sip a mint julep while reading this beautiful book full of photos of Louisville. To enter, click on the "Enter to win" button below or look under the giveaways section on Goodreads. Winners will be selected in late April.

OLD LOUISVILLE is written by Louisville-based author, David Dominé, and is illustrated with beautiful photographs by the photographer/stylist/writer team duo, Franklin and Esther Schmidt. OLD LOUISVILLE is a lavishly illustrated history and guide to a famous Louisville, Kentucky neighborhood.

An intimate tour of one of the largest and most significant historic preservation districts in America, OLD LOUISVILLE features fifty residential designs, from grand mansions to cozy cottages, from familiar house museums and boutique hotel adaptations to private homes of charm and sophistication. Located just south of Louisville’s business district, Old Louisville arose from the expansive grounds where the great Southern Exposition amazed and inspired visitors from 1883 to 1887. Many of these residences have never been open to the public.

In 2013, Louisville, Kentucky topped Lonely Planet’s Top 10 U.S. Destinations. “Louisville may just be the new Portland, Oregon,” according to Lonely Planet’s U.S. travel editor, Robert Reid.

David Dominé is also the author of GHOSTS OF OLD LOUISVILLE (McClanahan Publishing House, Inc.). He writes travel pieces and food reviews for various local and national publications. Franklin and Esther Schmidt specialize in interior, landscape, and exterior photography. They shoot for art, decorating, historic, and travel magazines. This is their fifth heavily illustrated, large-format book. The book is published by Golden Coast Publishing Company and distributed by the University of Georgia Press.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Old Louisville

by David Domine

Giveaway ends April 22, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Goodreads Book Giveaway #3

We're giving away advance reader copies of VISIBLE MAN: THE LIFE OF HENRY DUMAS! To enter, click on the "Enter to win" button below or look under the giveaways section on Goodreads. Winners will be selected in late March. Good luck!

The long-awaited biography of an unsung literary legend...

Henry Dumas (1934–1968) was a writer who did not live to see most of his fiction and poetry in print. A son of Sweet Home, Arkansas, and Harlem, he devoted himself to the creation of a black literary cosmos, one in which black literature and culture were windows into the human condition. While he certainly should be understood in the context of the cultural and political movements of the 1960s—Black Arts, Black Power, and Civil Rights—his writing, and ultimately his life, were filled with ambiguities and contradictions.

Dumas was shot and killed in 1968 in Harlem months before his thirty-fourth birthday by a white transit policeman under circumstances never fully explained. After his death he became a kind of literary legend, but one whose full story was unknown. A devoted cadre of friends and later admirers from the 1970s to the present pushed for the publication of his work. Toni Morrison championed him as “an absolute genius.” Amiri Baraka, a writer not quick to praise others, claimed that Dumas produced “actual art, real, man, and stunning.” Eugene Redmond and Quincy Troupe heralded Dumas’s poetry, short stories, and work as an editor of “little” magazines.

With VISIBLE MAN, Jeffrey B. Leak offers a full examination of both Dumas’s life and his creative development. Given unprecedented access to the Dumas archival materials and numerous interviews with family, friends, and writers who knew him in various contexts, Leak opens the door to Dumas’s rich and at times frustrating life, giving us a layered portrait of an African American writer and his coming of age during one of the most volatile and transformative decades in American history.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Visible Man

by Jeffrey B Leak

Giveaway ends March 25, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

AMERICAN AFTERLIFE book club giveaway!

Kate Sweeney, author of AMERICAN AFTERLIFE, is offering free signed copies of her forthcoming book!

AMERICAN AFTERLIFE is not a grief handbook, comprehensive history, or survey of all death practices in America today. Instead, it is a collection of narratives that speak to one another—and it appeals to anyone curious about how Americans “do” death, whether they have navigated this nation’s changing choices in memorialization or not.

Discuss AMERICAN AFTERLIFE in your book club and win a free signed copy. Sweeney is available for Skype book club visits. To schedule, email samantha@jkscommunications.com. Bonus: The first five book clubs to contact Samantha with the subject line "American Afterlife Book Club Giveaway" will receive a free signed copy.

More information about the book, upcoming events, and "Dismal Trade Interviews" is available here: http://www.americanafterlifebook.com/.

Kate Sweeney is a reporter and producer at NPR affiliate WABE in Atlanta, Georgia. She has won two Edward R. Morrow awards (2004 and 2011) and two Associated Press awards (2005 and 2010) for her reporting. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Sweeney’s public radio experience has trained her to write about complex subjects in a voice that is straightforward, intelligent, and conversational. AMERICAN AFTERLIFE reflects that. Her book is also written from the viewpoint of someone who has not yet experienced a terrible death. The driving force behind this book is her curiosity about mortality and what death means when it happens, rather than a penchant for the morbid.

Goodreads Book Giveaway #2

We're giving away advance reader copies of PIRATES YOU DON'T KNOW, AND OTHER ADVENTURES IN THE EXAMINED LIFE! To enter, click on the "Enter to win" button below or look under the giveaways section on Goodreads. Winners will be selected in mid-February. Good luck!

A gorgeous and profound look at life, death, transience, toil, class, and family.

For nearly ten years, John Griswold has been publishing his essays in Inside Higher Ed, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Brevity, Ninth Letter, and Adjunct Advocate, many under the pen name Oronte Churm. His new book, PIRATES YOU DON’T KNOW AND OTHER ADVENTURES IN THE EXAMINED LIFE is a funny, poignant, bittersweet, and sometimes snarky account of everything ranging from creative writing to babies, and from race issues in a university town to crocodiles.

Griswold’s tongue-in-cheek tone allows him to discuss this breadth of subject matter in an inviting and entertaining way while still addressing prevalent and important issues. With humor, pathos, and poignancy, he touches on his upbringing in a coal town in southern Illinois, how class in America affected four generations of his family, his experience as an army deep-sea diver and frogman, the joys and challenges of fatherhood, and what it means to be literate and open to the world. 

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Pirates You Don't Know, and Other Adventures in the Examined Life

by John Griswold

Giveaway ends February 10, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Goodreads Book Giveaway

We're giving away advance reader copies of BREAKING GROUND! To enter, click on the "Enter to win" button below or look under the giveaways section on Goodreads. Winners will be selected at the end of January. Good luck!

The compelling life's story of a towering champion of higher education, medicine, and accessible health care for all.

"I don't think I really appreciated the man Louis Sullivan is until I read BREAKING GROUND. He is a true American hero, and Barbara and I are proud we have played a small part in his life's journey."--President George H.W. Bush

BREAKING GROUND is not just an autobiography of Dr. Louis W. Sullivan. It is also a history of how the south has changed, as well as an inspirational story for future generations of all backgrounds. Sullivan began his path to becoming the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary as a young boy growing up in Jim Crow south Georgia. He was HHS secretary during the George H. W. Bush administration, and, during that time, he made efforts to push through comprehensive health care reform decades before the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Sullivan’s life—from Morehouse to the White House and his ongoing work with medical students in South Africa—is the embodiment of the hopes and progress that the civil rights movement fought to achieve.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Breaking Ground

by Louis W. Sullivan

Giveaway ends January 31, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Short Takes

Over on today's Wall Street Journal Japan blog, Japan Real Time, poet Cynthia Lowen talks about her new book, THE CLOUD THAT CONTAINED THE LIGHTNING.

JRT: What prompted you to write poetry about the atomic bomb?
Lowen: Initially, I thought I would be writing about my own family history. I knew from a very young age that my grandfather was involved with the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb–he was a nuclear physicist on the Project in the earlier phases, and I remember feeling terrible that my own family was part of something so horrific. As I started to uncover my grandfather’s history, I was looking for ways to write about it, ways to find out about the bomb, and the human feelings attached that led to the creation of this book.
My family history is what led me to write the material, but J. Robert Oppenheimer was the figure that I wanted to be the central force because he’s so emblematic. He became a metaphor for something much larger than he was, and I thought it would be a good way to enter the material. From there, I did extensive research into his life, and I got into the psychology of the bomb, using the splitting in fission as a way to talk about our own departures from our conscience.

Kirkus Reviews describes THE SMALL HEART OF THINGS as a "sharply observed" and "deeply felt book."

KATHARINE AND R. J. REYNOLDS is both a "tour de force" and "top-notch study," according to the Journal of American History.

ISLAND TIME author Jingle Davis had a talk and book signing at Avid Bookshop in Athens, GA this past Saturday. Athens Patch recommended the event to its readers, saying "If you love St. Simon’s, the beach, or just good writing, be there." Thanks to everyone who came and to Avid for hosting it!

"[Novey's] modes vary from flashes of anecdote to surreal narrative, from prose to brief lyrics to long-lined poems. The effect is one of an extended reach toward concretions, routines and environments that won't yield to mere wishes to understand or change them. . . . In Exit, Civilian, the thing is the prison, intractably present—and freedom, more than simply a life outside a jail, comprises an infinite speculation on the meaning of itself. The tonal gives way to the atonal, the fuzzy."—Ron Slate's review of EXIT, CIVILIAN on his website, On the Seawall.

WFPL 89.3 talks with Frank X Walker about his new book, TURN ME LOOSE. Listen to the interview here:

Southern Spaces features an excerpt from Candace Waid's new book, THE SIGNIFYING EYE.

CHICKEN DREAMING CORN author Roy Hoffman has a piece in the New York Times in which he comments on the experiences from his youth. In particular, he reminisces on hitchhiking in the 1970s.

From left to right: Saisha Grayson, Judy Chicago, and Jane Gerhard

A few weeks ago, the Brooklyn Museum of Art hosted an event for author Jane Gerhard and artist Judy Chicago to promote the new book, THE DINNER PARTY. Below is a YouTube video from Judy Chicago that features audio of the conversation between Chicago and Gerhard, moderated by Saisha Grayson, Assistant Curator.

Don't forget about our Flannery O'Connor Award 30 Years | 30 Books Giveaway!

Sign up for our newsletter and qualify for our Flannery O’Connor Award 30 Years | 30 Books Giveaway! Stop by our booth at the Decatur Book Festival to enter in person or sign up online by noon EDT September 1st—winners will be announced later that day. You need not be present to win.

Prize includes:
• 30 titles from the acclaimed short fiction series
• Our great new UGA Press canvas tote

Winners will be announced at 2 pm and notified by telephone and email.

Want to win a free book? Take our new survey

Like to read? Want to win a free book?

Tell us all about your reading and book-buying preferences in our new survey and you could win one of our new Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction books before it hits shelves next month.

After you complete the survey, email us your response to question #10. You'll then be entered into a drawing to win an advance reader's copy of the forthcoming Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction winner, THE VIEWING ROOM, by Jacquelin Gorman.

Based on author Jacquelin Gorman's personal experience as a hospital chaplain and pastoral counselor, the stories in THE VIEWING ROOM share a unique view of people who are misunderstood and unseen. The book lays bare nine parallel worlds of suffering in stories of unflinching detail that follow two hospital chaplains who work to console survivors of patients in a large urban hospital in Los Angeles.

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world's leading questionnaire tool.

Giveaway Alert!

Sign up for our newsletter and qualify for our Flannery O'Connor Award 30 Years | 30 Books Giveaway!

This year is the 30th anniversary of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. The University of Georgia Press publishes the winning collections each year. All of the collections are currently in print and most are available in either paperback or ebook editions.

The award was established to encourage gifted young writers by bringing their work to the attention of readers and reviewers.

Sign up for our newsletter by September 1st to enter the drawing.*
Sign up here.

Prize includes:
- 30 titles from the acclaimed short fiction series
- Our great new UGA Press canvas tote

*One entry per person, please. Deadline to enter is September 1, 2013 at 11:59pm EDT.

50th Anniversary of Medgar Evers' Assassination

Today is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Medgar Evers. Both Minrose Gwin, REMEMBERING MEDGAR EVERS, and Frank X Walker, TURN ME LOOSE, are in Jackson, MS, participating in several days' worth of events commemorating Medgar Evers. The Medgar & Myrlie Evers Institute is hosting most of these events. More information about the institute and order of events is here.

Gwin and Walker will also be doing a joint talk and signing at Square Books in Oxford, MS on Friday at 5:00pm.

Check out this ABC News story for more on Medgar Evers and his life in pictures.

On June 12, 1963, Evers was assassinated in the driveway of his Mississippi home by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith. The first NAACP field secretary for Mississippi, Evers's death was the first assassination of a high-ranking public figure in the civil rights movement.

REMEMBERING MEDGAR EVERS by Minrose Gwin.

In REMEMBERING MEDGAR EVERS, Gwin compiles together an impressive collection of fiction, poetry, memoir, drama, and songs that emerged in response to Evers's life and death. Gwin examines local news accounts about Evers, 1960s gospel and protest music as well as contemporary hip-hop, the haunting poems of Frank X Walker, and contemporary fiction such as The Help and Gwin’s own novel, The Queen of Palmyra. In this study, Evers springs to life as a leader of “plural singularity,” who modeled for southern African Americans a new form of cultural identity that both drew from the past and broke from it.

When speaking of REMEMBERING MEDGAR EVERS, Myrlie Evers-Williams said, "This is a book that should be widely read, shared with others, and placed in a spot of honor in every library. It tells important and all-too-often forgotten stories of the times with clarity and passion. It is a treasure."

TURN ME LOOSE by Frank X Walker

The poems in TURN ME LOOSE unleash the strong emotions both before and after the moment of assassination and take on the voices of Evers's widow, Myrlie; his brother, Charles; his assassin, Byron De La Beckwith; and each of De La Beckwith's two wives. Except for the book's title, "Turn me loose," which were his final words, Evers remains in this collection silent.

To recognize today's anniversary, the Press is giving away two advance reader copies of TURN ME LOOSE. To enter the drawing to win a copy of the book, email your  mailing address to press@ugapress.uga.edu. You have until 9:00am EDT tomorrow (June 13th) to enter.* The two winners will be notified via email.


*One entry per person please.

National Poetry Month Giveaway

To celebrate National Poetry Month, we are giving away two advance reader copies of Frank X Walker's new book, TURN ME LOOSE. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the death of the well-known civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, TURN ME LOOSE is a collection of poetry that speaks out on the life and loss of Medgar Evers.

To enter the drawing to win a copy of the book, email your answer to the trivia question, along with your mailing address, to press@ugapress.uga.edu. You have until 9:00am EDT tomorrow (April 5th) to send in your answer.*  All those who guess the correct answer will be entered in the drawing. The two winners will be notified via email.

Which of the following accurately describes Frank X Walker and/or TURN ME LOOSE?

A. Walker was recently named Kentucky's first African American poet laureate.
B. Walker coined the word Affrilachian, which relates to an African American who lives in Appalachia.
C. The book's title, TURN ME LOOSE, refers to Medgar Evers' final words.
D. All of the above.

*One entry per person, please.