Closed for the Holidays!

Our offices will be closed December 22, 2012 - January 1, 2013. We'll be back at work Wednesday, January 2, 2013. Happy Holidays!

Spring 2013 titles announced

The Spring 2013 seasonal catalog is now available on our website featuring titles that will be published from March through August 2013. We have an exciting range of new books in the categories of history, geography, international relations, literary & cultural studies, environmental studies, and creative writing, as well as plenty regional interest titles.

Highlights include:

THE DINNER PARTY follows the path of Judy Chicago's iconic piece of American Art—The Dinner Party—as it traveled from inception (1973) to completion (1979) to tour (1979-1989) to the permanent collection of the Brookly Museum (2007), and it sheds light on the history of American feminism since 1970.

In OLD LOUISVILLE, author David Dominé and photographers Franklin and Esther Schmidt take the reader on an intimate tour of one of the largest and most significant historic preservation districts in America.

Robinson Forest in eastern Kentucky is one of our most important natural landscapes—and one of the most threatened. THE EMBATTLED WILDERNESS chronicles the cultural and natural history of the forest and makes the case for saving it.

Get out and explore northwest Georgia's biologically diverse and beautiful Etowah River with the waterproof guidebook, ETOWAH RIVER USER'S GUIDE.

The beautifully illustrated ISLAND TIME by retired Atlanta Journal-Constitution journalist, Jingle Davis, captures the history and beauty of the Georgia seaside destination, St. Simons Island.

NORTH CAROLINA'S AMAZING COAST, modeled after the successful GEORGIA'S AMAZING COAST, contains 100 short, self-contained features about the flora, fauna, and natural history of North Carolina's coast. It makes an excellent educational tool and inspiring gift.

Now back in print and available in paperback for the first time is James Beard Award Winner NATHALIE DUPREE'S COMFORTABLE ENTERTAINING.

2013 Georgia Writers Hall of Fame Inductees Announced

Press release from UGA Today

2013 Georgia Writers Hall of Fame inductees announced by UGA Libraries

Tuesday,December 18, 2012

Writer: Jean Cleveland

Contact: Toby Graham

Athens, Ga. – Judson Mitcham, Georgia’s poet laureate, and the late author Toni Cade Bambara, who compiled one of the first anthologies of African-American women’s writing, will be honored as the newest inductees of the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame at its 2013 ceremony.

A poet and novelist, Mitcham—the only two-time winner of the Townsend Prize for Fiction—was not formally trained as a writer. He earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in psychology from the University of Georgia and spent his career as a psychology professor at Fort Valley State University where he taught for 30 years. His debut novel, The Sweet Everlasting (1996), and his second, Sabbath Creek  (2004), were both published by the UGA Press. He also twice has been given the Georgia Author of the Year Award, for his first novel and his book of poems Somewhere in Ecclesiastes (1991).

“In his novels and his poetry, Mitcham’s elegiac voice looks backward with fondness and discernment on a personal and regional past slipping rapidly beyond reach,” said Hugh Ruppersburg, senior associate dean of the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

A resident of Macon, Mitcham began teaching writing workshops at Mercer University in 2002. He also has served as adjunct professor of creative writing at UGA and Emory University, where he has directed the Summer Writers’ Institute.

Bambara is well known for her teaching and community service, in addition to her award-winning writing, which focused on African-American culture. Her first novel, The Salt Eaters, won the 1981 American Book Award and the Langston Hughes Society Award.

Born in New York City, Bambara lived in Atlanta several times during her career, including being writer in residence at Spelman College (1978-79), visiting professor in Afro-American studies at Emory University (1975) and instructor at Atlanta University (1979). She died in 1995.

Bambara did not separate civil rights from the fight for women’s equality. In 1970, she published The Black Woman, an anthology that made connections between the two struggles and included fiction, non-fiction and poetry by herself as well as such writers as Nikki Giovanni and Alice Walker.

Mitcham and Bambara were elected to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame by a board of judges appointed by the University of Georgia Librarian. The board includes academicians, civic leaders and librarians, the heads of the University of Georgia Press and The Georgia Review, and recent Hall of Fame inductees. The board votes following the conclusion of the annual ceremony.

Making its debut at this year’s ceremony in September was a special issue of The Georgia Review, the university’s award-winning 65-year-old literary magazine, which features work by and commentary on 33 of the 43 Hall of Fame members.

“We really ought to call this group the ‘Georgia Writers in the World Hall of Fame,’ because there is nothing merely local or regional about so many of their achievements,” said Stephen Corey, editor of The Georgia Review. “One of my greatest pleasures in having produced this issue is the thought of copies going out across the United States, and in more limited fashion into many other countries around the world, to show readers what a universal group of writers is gathered here.”

The Georgia Writers Hall of Fame is administered by the University of Georgia’s Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which holds the most comprehensive collection of books by Georgians in existence along with the papers of many Georgia writers.

A date for the 2013 induction ceremony has not been set. For more information, see here.

Short Takes

LOVE, IN THEORY receives a starred review in Kirkus. "Levy’s award-winning short-story collection masterfully explores the vagaries of romantic love. . . . Levy’s prose is deeply philosophical and sometimes heady but never pompous. It depicts infidelity and loss yet avoids melancholy and sentimentality, as the characters often don’t have the expected reactions to difficulties—they are too cerebral for that. . . . Readers will likely savor this collection, a 2011 winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, for its intoxicating language and introspection. A smart, insightful collection of stories about life and love."

In the winter issue of ForeWord, Michele Gillespie's KATHARINE AND R. J. REYNOLDS is listed as one of "ten outstanding books that enlighten our understanding of America. . . . Michele Gillespie offers readers of all persuasions an eminently readable take on the wonders and warts of one of the American South’s most compelling time periods."

Rebecca Lave's new book, FIELDS AND STREAMS, looks at the criticisms and praise for Dave Rosgen's controversial work regarding stream restoration. "[S]he argues that restoration practitioners can be effective if they use Natural Channel Design but adapt it to local stream conditions and layer other techniques on top." Indiana University profiles Lave and FIELDS AND STREAMS in a recent press release.

Southern Spaces reviews AN EMPIRE OF SMALL PLACES. "Robert Paulett has given us a refreshing consideration of life in the eighteenth-century deerskin trade. His focus on disparate groups occupying the same arena but living different experiences challenges us to reimagine the complexities of life among multiple cultures and changing landscapes. . . . [H]is work adds new information and a different perspective to studies of the American South."

Amina Gautier's AT-RISK is reviewed in the recent issue of the Iowa Review. In it, the reviewer what this collection of stories has to offer the reader. "Ultimately, these aren’t stories that surprise us at the end, but rather ones that surprise us with how those ends are reached. . . . A thought-provoking read, AT-RISK offers no easy solutions to the problems of inner city poverty and racial discrimination. In the end, we may not be able to love these children and teenagers enough to change their circumstances, but Gautier ensures that we will, in fact, love them."