University of Iowa Press Announces New Series: Iowa and the Midwest Experience
2009 Iowa Poetry Prize Winners Announced: Winning Collections to Be Published in Spring 2010
E-Books Now Available from the University of Iowa Press
The Making of Theatrical Reputations Is a Finalist for the 2009 George Freedley Memorial Award
University of Iowa Press Announces Two Winners for the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award

Author Events

University of Iowa Press Announces New Series: Iowa and the Midwest Experience

The University of Iowa Press is pleased to announce a new book series, Iowa and the Midwest Experience, edited by William B. Friedricks, professor of history at Simpson College. The series will publish innovative books on the social, cultural, economic, political, and geographical issues that have shaped the history of Iowa and other midwestern states. In addition to presenting current research and suggesting future directions for scholars, the series aims to make midwestern history more accessible to the general public.

William B. Friedricks, director of the Iowa History Center, was recently named the inaugural winner of the Iowa History Prize, awarded by Humanities Iowa to help support and promote awareness of and interest in Iowa history. He is the author of several books including Investing in Iowa: The Life and Times of F. M. Hubbell and In for the Long Haul: The Life of John Ruan. He has appointed an advisory board consisting of Marvin Bergman of the State Historical Society of Iowa; Rebecca Conard, Middle Tennessee State University; Thomas Morain, Graceland University; Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Iowa State University; Dorothy Schwieder, Iowa State University; and Timothy Walch, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library.

“I’m eager to bring the history of Iowa and its neighboring states to the forefront. Midwestern history has long been neglected, and there are so many interesting stories to be told here. Obviously a publication program goes a long way toward creating public enthusiasm as well as giving educators and scholars a great set of resources. As the only university press in the state, the University of Iowa Press is a natural partner in such a venture. The press represents all the best qualities of a publisher, including impeccable editorial, design, and production standards,” said Friedricks.

“We are thrilled to be publishing in the area of midwestern history in a more formal and determined way,” said Holly Carver, director of the University of Iowa Press, “and to be working with a scholar as esteemed as William Friedricks. Bill has been a relentless and creative promoter of Iowa history. He has chosen an advisory board of highly respected scholars and has already poured energy into pursuing significant projects. The fact that he is an author helps enormously in identifying promising manuscripts and guiding them through the publication process.”

Please send inquiries and proposals to William Friedricks or consult the submission guidelines for authors.

2009 Iowa Poetry Prize Winners Announced
Winning Collections to Be Published in Spring 2010

Samuel Amadon of Houston, Texas, and Molly Brodak of Augusta, Georgia, have been named 2009 recipients of the prestigious Iowa Poetry Prize. Amadon's collection Like a Sea and Brodak’s collection A Little Middle of the Night will both be published in March 2010 by the University of Iowa Press.

Drawing equally from Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, John Berryman, and Robert Frost, Samuel Amadon’s Like a Sea is a collection of poems where personality is foregrounded and speech is both bizarre and familiar. Central to this work is “Each H,” a sequence of monologues and dialogues where an unknown number of speakers examine their collective and singular identities at the same time that they distort them. Many styles are represented in Like a Sea, from a sequence of pared-down sonnets to a more traditional lyric to a procedural collage that takes from J. D. Salinger, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Walter Benjamin, Jane Kenyon, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Primo Levi, Eugenio Montale, and Edwin Arlington Robinson. Like a Sea is a book of significant variation and originality.

Amadon's eclectic collection begins with the line “I could not sound like anyone but me,” and through the wide range of forms and styles and voices the poet employs, he tests the true limits of that statement. Hartford, Connecticut, the image of a half-abandoned city, remains a landscape in the background of these poems, casting a tone of brokenness and haplessness. Ultimately the poems in Like a Sea present the confusion and fear of the current moment equally alongside its joyful ridiculousness and possibility. Rather than create worlds, they point out what a strange world already exists.

Samuel Amadon was born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. A recipient of fellowships and scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, he received his BA in English from Boston University and his MFA in poetry from Columbia University. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Tin House, Boston Review, VOLT, and elsewhere. With Stephanie Anderson, he edits Projective Industries, a chapbook series. The author of the chapbooks Advice for Young Couples, Goodnight Lung, and Each H, he is currently a graduate teaching fellow in the Department of English at the University of Houston, where he is working on his PhD in creative writing and literature.

The language of Molly Brodak’s first full-length collection, A Little Middle of the Night, is ever shifting, brightly sonic, and disarming while exploring the margin between nature and art, darkness and beauty, dreams and awakenings. As echoed in one epigraph from Emerson, these poems capture “the Exact and the Vast” of consciousness in intense lyric verse with an angular and almost scientific sensitivity. Here is a speaker intent on discovery: “Oh whole world, we choose / another.”

This award-winning collection simmers with wit as Brodak confronts tragedy, childhood losses, transcendent love, and the question of art itself. Tinged with a suffering—“I was the littlest wastebasket. / I was my own church. Except— / scared. scared”—that rises above personal sorrow, her fierce and painterly poems redefine nature and art and what exists between: “Lately, there is spangled shade in my space / and a cold apple orchard to tend in place of consciousness.” As Reginald Shepherd said about the poems in her first collection, the chapbook Instructions for a Painting, Brodak’s world is “‘small enough / to sing in all directions,’ and large enough to take us there.”

Michigan-born Molly Brodak is currently a lecturer in English and humanities at Augusta State University. Her work has appeared in the Colorado Review, FIELD, Ninth Letter, the Journal, the Northwest Review, the Laurel Review, the New Orleans Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Instructions for a Painting was chosen by Reginald Shepherd for the 2007 GreenTower Press Midwest Chapbook Series. She attended the Savannah College of Art and Design and received her BA in English from Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, and her MFA in creative writing from West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Awarded annually by the University of Iowa Press, the Iowa Poetry Prize is one of the leading national poetry awards. The acclaimed competition is open to new as well as established poets. Recent winners of the prize include Full Catastrophe Living by Zach Savich, something has to happen next by Andrew Michael Roberts, Sunday Houses the Sunday House by Elizabeth Hughey, and American Spikenard by Sarah Vap.

E-Books Now Available from the University of Iowa Press

The University of Iowa Press is proud to announce that as of May 15, 2009, it is offering a select group of its titles as e-books, available directly from the publisher's website. In conjunction with its distribution partner, the Chicago Distribution Center, and BiblioVault, a digital content repository hosted by the University of Chicago Press, the press is acting as a beta client for CDC in its initial forays into direct to consumer e-book fulfillment.

The fulfillment service uses Adobe's Digital Editions software, which is available free of charge for personal computers, Macs, and a varied and growing list of mobile platforms. Digital Editions offers an excellent user interface, similar in look and feel to Adobe Reader, as well as bookmarking and text-searching capabilities. The fulfillment system allows the University of Iowa Press not only to sell e-books directly through its website, but to distribute complimentary review copies, desk copies, and examination copies to media and scholarly partners. This aspect of the service reduces the number of printed copies that are distributed for free, reducing the press's carbon footprint and allowing it to raise awareness as a committed member of the Green Press Initiative.

University of Chicago Press director Garrett Kiely says, "Being able to present e-books via Digital Editions is a wonderful opportunity for the Chicago Distribution Center's client presses to move directly into the growing digital market with a minimum of stress. We are pleased that a publisher as respected as the University of Iowa Press has agreed to act as a beta press for this project."

Holly Carver, director of the University of Iowa Press, adds, "Not only are we taking advantage of a brand-new avenue for our titles, but we are saving paper and postage by offering e-books in place of traditional paper review and examination copies. We hope to continually add a vibrant mix of older and newer titles to this program and look forward to working with all our partners to increase the availability and visibility of our books. There are a myriad of e-distribution options beginning to appear and we are pleased that our relationship with the Chicago Distribution Center, the premier fulfillment operation in academic publishing, has allowed us to explore this opportunity."

For more information on the University of Iowa Press e-book initiative, please contact Jim McCoy, Marketing Manager, 319-335-2008, james-mccoy@uiowa.edu, or visit us online at www.uiowapress.org.

The Making of Theatrical Reputations Is a Finalist for the 2009 George Freedley Memorial Award

The University of Iowa Press is proud to announce that The
Making of Theatrical Reputations by Yael Zarhy-Levo has been
chosen as a finalist for the 2009 George Freedley Memorial Award.

Today's successful plays and playwrights achieve their prominence not simply because of their intrinsic merit but because of the work of mediators, who influence the whole trajectory of a playwright's or a theatre company's career. Critics and academic writers are primarily considered the makers of reputations, but funding organizations and various media agents as well as artistic directors, producers, and directors also pursue separate agendas in shaping the reputations of theatrical works. In The Making of Theatrical Reputations, Zarhy-Levo demonstrates the processes through which these mediatory practices by key authority figures situate theatrical companies and playwrights within cultural and historical memory.

To reveal how these authorizing powers-that-be promote theatrical events, companies, and playwrights, Zarhy-Levo presents four detailed case studies that reflect various angles of the modern London theatre. In the case of the English Stage Company's production of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, she centers on a specific event. She then focuses on the trajectory of a single company, the Theatre Workshop, particularly through its first decade at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, London. Next, she explores the career of the dramatist John Arden, especially its first ten years, in part drawing upon an interview with Arden and his wife, actress and playwright Margaretta D'Arcy, before turning to her fourth study: the playwright Harold Pinter's shifting reputation throughout the different phases of his career.

Zarhy-Levo's accounts of these theatrical events, companies, and playwrights through the prism of mediation bring fresh insights to these landmark productions and their creators.

Established in 1968 to honor the late George Freedley—theatre historian, critic, author, and first curator of the New York Public Library Theatre Collection—the George Freedley Memorial Award honors the best English-language work about live theatre published in the United States. This award is sponsored by the Theatre Library Association, an organization that supports librarians and archivists affiliated with theatre, dance, performance studies, popular entertainment, motion picture and broadcasting collections and promotes professional practices in acquisition, organization, access, and preservation of performing arts resources in libraries, archives, museums, private collections, and the digital environment.

Yael Zarhy-Levo is a senior lecturer (associate professor) in the Department of Literature at Tel-Aviv University. She is the author of The Theatrical Critic as Cultural Agent: Constructing Pinter, Orton and Stoppard as Absurdist Playwrights.

University of Iowa Press Announces Two Winners for the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award

Now in its 40th year, the New Writers Award seeks to recognize promising young writers and provide undergraduate students an opportunity to meet with writers in early stages of their careers. Judges are professors of literature and writers in residence at the Great Lakes Colleges. The winners of the 2009 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for both fiction and creative nonfiction were published by the University of Iowa Press.

The creative nonfiction winner is Family Bible by Melissa Delbridge. The following excerpt is from the judges’ comments: “Some of the best memoirs do more than describe an individual life; they capture a time and place along with the particular psychological and cultural texture of a self. Family Bible shows that the real work of honesty lies in discovering a language capable of shaping the truth into reality on the page. There is dry wit and southern sass, yet Delbridge offers substance as well as style, asking hard questions about the ways in which we internalize trauma. Delbridge resists the self-pity we might otherwise expect from a childhood like hers. In a sense, the narrative perspective can be understood in the context of the ironic title. What the reader gets is not an un-self-examined application of simple scriptural lessons but a hard-edged reminder never to cast the first stone.”

The winner in the fiction category is Desert Gothic by Don Waters. The following excerpt is from the judges’ comments: “These are the stories of unrepentant outsiders . . . told on behalf of those who cannot tell. The textures are rich, the lexicon hard and fast and eidetic. The dramas are found in the seams of life and they are real and fleet. The consequences are unanticipated and just right. Many of these characters want to believe in something, but they can’t stop being imperfect. Although you wouldn’t expect figures such as Mormons on motorcycles, egotistical long distance runners, and writers obsessed with Mark Twain in one volume, Waters weaves these lives together through their connection with the Southwestern landscape, and ultimately through their fear of death. The language is economical and precise, gritty and engaging.”

Melissa Delbridge has published essays and short stories in the Antioch Review, Southern Humanities Review, Third Coast, and other journals. She is an archivist in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University. Delbridge lives with her family in Orange County, North Carolina, where she spends her leisure time letting the dogs in and out, making pickles, plotting vengeance, substantiating rumors, and working on a novel.

Don Waters was born and raised in Reno, Nevada, and now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He’s received numerous honors for his writing, including fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Jentel Foundation, as well as the McGinnis-Ritchie Award from the Southwest Review. His stories have been published in such venues as Epoch, StoryQuarterly, the Kenyon Review, the Southwest Review, the Santa Monica Review, ZYZZYVA, the Cimarron Review, and Grain.