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In This Issue
Anthony Barbieri-Low
Looking Together
Robert B. Heilman
Cliff Mass
Lynda Mapes
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Congratulations!

Artisans in Early Imperial China

Anthony Barbieri-Low
 
Artisans in Early Imperial China, by Anthony Barbieri-Low, has completed an impressive awards sweep, winning the 2009 Levenson Prize for pre-1900 China from the Association for Asian Studies, the 2009 Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association, the 2008 James Henry Breasted Award from the American Historical Association, and has been longlisted for an International Convention of Asian Scholars Book Award.
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 May 2009
Greetings!

As April and poetry month come to a close, we'd like to remind you that we've brought together a full listing of our distinguished poetry titles, from the traditional to the contemporary. These are showcased on our website and all are 20% off if you use the order code WWEP in your checkout cart.

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch!

All the best,
Rachael
(206) 221.4995 / [email protected]
 
Looking Together: Writers on Art

Looking Together Edited by
Rebecca Brown and
Mary Jane Knecht

The relationship between writers and artists has long been a collaborative one. Plato used the word ekphrasis to describe what happens when a writer writes creatively, as opposed to critically, about art. Gertrude Stein claimed that her innovative writing style was inspired by the paintings of C�zanne - and then went on to tell Hemingway to study C�zanne if he wanted to learn to write.

In Looking Together, a dozen writers working in a range of styles and forms respond to works of art held in the permanent collection of Seattle's Frye Art Museum or exhibited there. Romantic and ironic, meticulously researched and fanciful, these poems, stories, monologues, and tales are invitations to any curious reader or lover of art to look again at what we see.

Various pairings of writers from the collaboration will be appearing around Seattle. Catch them here

Tuesday, May 5, at 7 p.m. Ryan Boudinot (author of The Littlest Hitler) and Lesley Hazelton (author of Jezebel) at Ravenna Third Place Books

Wednesday, May 13, at 7 p.m. Stacey Levine (author of Girl with Brown Fur) and Melinda Mueller (author of What the Ice Gets) at University Book Store
Robert B. Heilman: His Life in Letters

Robert B. Heilman Edited by
Edward Alexander, Richard Dunn, and Paul Jaussen

Robert Bechtold Heilman was a great literary figure of the twentieth century. This collection of his correspondence includes over 600 exchanges with more than 100 correspondents, among them Saul Bellow, Kenneth Burke, Malcolm Cowley, Richard Eberhart, Charles Johnson, Bernard Malamud, and William Carlos Williams. The letters follow Heilman's career from the time he was a thirty-six-year-old member of Louisiana State University's English Department, through his tenure at the University of Washington from 1948 to 1975, until a few years before his death in 2004. Two of his appointees who spent their entire careers at the University of Washington, Edward Alexander and Richard Dunn, have edited the letters with Paul Jaussen.

The rich representation of letters to as well as from Heilman gives the reader access to decades-long conversations between him and Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, Joseph Epstein, Theodore Roethke, and many others. They provide a sense of Heilman's character, personality, and achievements in the context of American letters. They also afford an inside history of the changes that took place over sixty years, for better and worse, in American universities, literary criticism, and the politics of literature.

Edward Alexander is professor emeritus of English and author of numerous books on Victorian literature and Jewish subjects. Richard J. Dunn is professor emeritus of English and author or editor of eleven books about Victorian novelists. Paul Jaussen is completing his Ph.D. in English. All are at the University of Washington.

Join the editors for a lecture

Thursday, May 7, at 5 p.m. at Allen Auditorium, University of Washington campus, with Gary Lundell of the UW Library's Special Collections

 
Cliff Mass
Weather of the Pacific Northwest The Weather of the Pacific Northwest

The Pacific Northwest experiences the most varied and fascinating weather in the United States, including world-record winter snows, the strongest nontropical storms in the nation, and shifts from desert to rain forest in a matter of miles.  This book is the first comprehensive and authoritative guide to Northwest weather that is directed to the general reader; helpful to boaters, hikers, and skiers; and valuable to expert meteorologists.

In The Weather of the Pacific Northwest, University of Washington atmospheric scientist and popular radio commentator Cliff Mass unravels the intricacies of Northwest weather, from the mundane to the mystifying. By examining our legendary floods, snowstorms, and windstorms, and a wide variety of local weather features, Mass answers such interesting questions as:

o Why does the Northwest have localized rain shadows?
o What is the origin of the hurricane-force winds that often buffet the region?
o Why does the Northwest have so few thunderstorms?
o What is the origin of the Pineapple Express?
o Why do ferryboats sometimes seem to float above the water's surface?
o Why is it so hard to predict Northwest weather?

Mass also considers possible local effects of global warming. The final chapters guide readers in interpreting the Northwest sky and in securing weather information on their own.

Cliff Mass, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington and weekly guest on KUOW radio, is the preeminent authority on Northwest weather. He has published dozens of articles on Northwest weather and leads the regional development of advanced weather prediction tools.

Catch Cliff Mass on

Sunday, May 10, at 1 p.m. at Rose Theater, Port Townsend

Friday, May 22, at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble, University Village

Lynda Mapes
Breaking Ground Breaking Ground: The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe and the Unearthing of Tse-whit-zen Village

In 2003, a backhoe operator hired by the state of Washington to work on the Port Angeles waterfront discovered what a larger world would soon learn. The place chosen to dig a massive dry dock was atop one of the largest and oldest Indian village sites ever found in the region. Yet the state continued its project, disturbing hundreds of burials and unearthing more than 10,000 artifacts at Tse-whit-zen village, the heart of the long-buried homeland of the Klallam people.

Excitement at the archaeological find of a generation gave way to anguish as tribal members working alongside state construction workers encountered more and more human remains, including many intact burials. Finally, tribal members said the words that stopped the project: "Enough is enough."

Soon after, Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe chairwoman Frances Charles asked the state to walk away from more than $70 million in public money already spent on the project and find a new site. The state, in an unprecedented and controversial decision that reverberated around the nation, agreed.

In search of the story behind the story, Seattle Times reporter Lynda V. Mapes spent more than a year interviewing tribal members, archaeologists, historians, city and state officials, and local residents and business leaders. Her account begins with the history of Tse-whit-zen village, and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century impacts of contact, forced assimilation, and industrialization. She then engages all the voices involved in the dry dock controversy to explore how the site was chosen, and how the decisions were made first to proceed and then to abandon the project, as well as the aftermath and implications of those controversial choices.

This beautifully crafted and compassionate account, illustrated with nearly 100 photographs, illuminates the collective amnesia that led to the choice of the Port Angeles construction site. "You have to know your past in order to build your future," Charles says, recounting the words of tribal elders. Breaking Ground takes that teaching to heart, demonstrating that the lessons of Tse-whit-zen are teachings from which we all may benefit.

Lynda V. Mapes is an award-winning journalist with a twenty-year career in newspaper reporting, much of it with the Seattle Times. She is the author of Washington: The Spirit of the Land.

Join Lynda here

Thursday, May 14 at 7 p.m. at the Burke Museum with University Book Store. Artifacts from the Tse-whit-zen Village excavation will be on display

Sunday, May 17 at 2 p.m. at Seattle Public Library with Elliott Bay Book Company

Friday, May 29 at 7 p.m. at Seattle REI with Pacific Northwest Archaeological Association
 




COMING SOON

Solidarity Stories

This June, the Press is pleased to publish Solidarity Stories: An Oral
History of the ILWU by Harvey Schwartz. In this collection of firsthand
narratives, union leaders and rank-and-file workers - from the docks
of Pacific Coast ports to the fields of Hawaii to bookstores in
Portland, Oregon - talk about their lives at work, on the picket
line, and in the union.

Workers recall the back-breaking, humiliating conditions on the
waterfront before they organized, the tense days of the 1934 strike,
the challenges posed by mechanization, the struggle against racism
and sexism on the job, and their activism in other social and political
causes. Their stories testify to the union's impact on the lives of
its members and also to its role in larger events, ranging from civil
rights battles at home to the fights against fascism and apartheid
abroad.

You can join Harvey Schwartz Saturday, June 13 at 7:30 p.m. at Elliott Bay Books to
learn more about the ILWU and its workers.

All the best,
Rachael Levay
University of Washington Press