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 will be 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 will act as a beta client for CDC in its initial forays into direct to consumer e-book fulfillment.

The fulfillment service will use 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 will allow 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 will reduce 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.

2009 Iowa Short Fiction Award Winners Announced

The University of Iowa Press is pleased to announce the winners of the 2009 Iowa Short Fiction Awards. Kathryn Ma is the winner of the 2009 Iowa Short Fiction Award for her collection All That Work and Still No Boys. Jennine Capó Crucet's How to Leave Hialeah: Stories from the Heart of Miami is the winner of the 2009 John Simmons Short Fiction Award. The recipients were selected by Curtis Sittenfeld, author of American Wife.

Kathryn Ma won the 2008 David Nathan Meyerson Prize for Fiction for her title story; her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices. A Bread Loaf Scholar, she has taught in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Oregon. Ma is a first-generation American whose parents are from Wuxi and Mengzi, China. She was born and raised a Pennsylvania Quaker. Her stories have appeared in the Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Southwest Review, Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She is the Founding Board Chair of the San Francisco Friends School. A lawyer and a graduate of Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, Ma lives in San Francisco with her family.

How do the individual, family, and society connect and collide? In All That Work and Still No Boys, Kathryn Ma exposes the deepest fears and longings that we mask in family life and observes the long shadows cast by history and displacement. She trains the roving lamp of fiction on the immigrant experience, illuminating for us the confounding nature of duty, transformation, and loss. A young boy exposed to racial hatred finds out the true difference between his mother and father. A young Beijing tour guide with a terrible family secret must take an adopted Chinese girl and her American family on an orphanage visit. And in the prize-winning title story, a mother refuses to let her son save her life, insisting instead on a sacrifice by her daughter. In all these stories, the authority of Ma’s intelligence, insight, and wit imparts a sense of grace to the bitter resentments and enduring ties that comprise family love.

Jennine Capó Crucet's writing has appeared in magazines such as Ploughshares, the Northwest Review, and L Magazine and is forthcoming in the Potomac Review. Her fiction has been nominated for the Best New American Voices series, and she's worked as a freelance editor and as a writer for National Public Radio. Her forthcoming story collection also recently received third place in the 34th Annual Chicano/Latino Literary Prize. Crucet is a Miami-born Cuban American writer and comedienne currently living in Los Angeles. The first person in her family to earn a college degree, she graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell.

United in their fierce sense of place and infused with the fading echoes of a lost homeland, the stories in How to Leave Hialeah do for Miami what Edward P. Jones does for Washington, D.C., and what James Joyce did in Dubliners: they expand our idea of a city by exposing its tough underbelly. Coming to us from the predominantly Hispanic working-class neighborhoods of this steamy suburb of Miami, the voices of Hialeah yell out to us from a rowdy all-night funeral, from the private home of a santera, from fights on front lawns, and from underneath abandoned overpasses shading a city’s secrets. Together these voices are the heart of Miami, and in this award-winning collection Jennine Capó Crucet makes them sing.

The short fiction awards are given to a first collection of fiction in English and are administered through the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The honors are national in scope and have been given since 1969. The John Simmons Short Fiction Award (named for the first director of the University of Iowa Press) was created in 1988 to complement the existing Iowa Short Fiction Award.

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.

2008 Iowa Poetry Prize Winners Announced: Winning Collections to Be Published in Spring 2009

Andrew Michael Roberts of Seattle, Washington, and Zach Savich of Leonardtown, Maryland, have been named 2008 recipients of the prestigious Iowa Poetry Prize. Roberts is being honored for his debut collection something has to happen next. Savich’s award-winning collection, Full Catastrophe Living, is also a debut. Both collections will be published in April 2009 by the University of Iowa Press.

The poems in something has to happen next, if given the chance, might peer down inquisitively from a great height; they speak of quietness, namelessness, the reachlessness of love, the fortune of animals and their silence, apocalypse, abandonment, beginnings and endings. Working with brevity and compression, Roberts first imagines “how small I could go with a poem and still maintain some sort of emotional or imagistic center.” Then, released from this limitation, the rest of his poems expand to fill a world with imagery, emotion, and sound.

What Roberts calls “simply a book of small poems” was conceived out of his obsessions with time and catastrophe and love and abandonment—what is always possible, almost attained, but lost at the last minute. When something ends or when everything ends, something else must always happen next—what will it be, and who will be there to name and love and destroy it?

Andrew Michael Roberts received a BA in education from Washington State University, a BA in English from Portland State University, and an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, where he was a Juniper Fellow and received the distinguished teaching award. He is currently Youth Art Works Manager at the Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize, his work has been published in such journals as Tin House, the Iowa Review, LIT, Gulf Coast, the Cincinnati Review, the Colorado Review, and Fugue. He is the author of two chapbooks, Give Up (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2006) and Dear Wild Abandon, which won the Poetry Society of America National Chapbook Award in 2007 and was published by the society in 2008.

Merging the spirits of Don Quixote, Shakespearean fools, Theodore Roethke, Frank O’Hara, James Merrill, and the Marx Brothers, Zach Savich's collection does more than showcase the innovative fluency of its roving forms and moods: these poetic hybrids are not hothouse blossoms but minotaurs. With ebullient intelligence and high-stakes insistence on the panic, lust, and suffering of the sensual world, Full Catastrophe Living uses the self as an instrument to investigate art, love, and the hardest honesty. In producing “a planetarium, the space inside equivalent to all around,” this exuberant debut seeks to make the grass seem more like grass, not “because of a lived loss of sense, but because of how much grass even / Imagined grass around us is.”

In meditations, songs, slapstick sequences, sonnets, narratives, and tightly carved fragments, Savich explores the conflicts between romance and reality, between inventing a new world and staying true to this one. His poetry, motivated by the steady underrumble of necessity, is like a shoebox diorama that catches a solar eclipse: “Now the cardboard orange juice carton dissolves in rain. / You: I could never say tread without hearing tremble.” Relishing both traditional and experimental poetics, Savich’s poems take refreshing, ecumenical risks to show the “strange grace / of bells that ring with a rag’s polishing.” Like a Fourth of July band conductor guiding planes to land, their wit alters what’s real. This book will change how readers think about poetry, language’s expressive capacity, and the robust world around us.

Zach Savich was born in East Lansing, Michigan, in 1982. He received a BA in English from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop; he is currently in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, where he is a teaching assistant. His poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including the Colorado Review, the Beloit Poetry Journal, jubilat, Court Green, and the Denver Quarterly. He is an editor at Thermos Magazine.

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 Sunday Houses the Sunday House by Elizabeth Hughey, American Spikenard by Sara Vap, Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk by Joshua Marie Wilkinson, and Raw Goods Inventory by Emily Rosko.

Author Events

David Watts, The Orange Wire Problem and Other Tales from the Doctor's Office

San Francisco, California

Tuesday, June 9

7:00 PM

Reading at The Bookshop West Portal

80 West Portal Avenue

415/564-8080

Patricia L. Bryan and Thomas Wolf, Midnight Assassin: A Murder in America’s Heartland

Emerald Isle, North Carolina

Thursday, June 18

3:00 - 5:00 PM

Booksigning at Emerald Isle Books

8700 Emerald Drive

252/354-5323

5:30 - 6:30 PM

Happy Hour with Carolina Girls Book Club at Beans-N-Screens coffee shop

Emerald Plantation Shopping Center

252/354-4336

7:00 - 8:30 PM

Dinner with the authors at Ribeyes of Cape Carteret in the Angus Room

104 Golfin Dolphin Drive

Cornelia F. Mutel, The Emerald Horizon: The History of Nature in Iowa

Muscatine, Iowa

Friday, June 26

7:00 PM

Project Aware educational program at the Saulsbury Bridge Recreation Area

3300 Cedar Street

563/264-5922

Cornelia F. Mutel, The Emerald Horizon: The History of Nature in Iowa

Cedar Rapids , Iowa

Friday, September 11

6:30 - 8:30 PM

Prairie walk, followed by talk and book-signing at the Prairiewoods Franciscan Spirituality Center

120 East Boyson Road

319/395-6700

David S. Faldet, Oneota Flow: The Upper Iowa River and Its People

Moline, Illinois

Thursday, November 12

7:00 PM

Illustrated talk and reading: "Oneota Flow: Deep History of Birds and People on the Mississippi Flyaway" for the Quad City Audubon Society at the Butterworth Center.

1105 Eighth Street

309/765-7970

For more information or to schedule an event with one of our authors, please contact our associate marketing manager, Allison Thomas.