Coming up in June
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The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History
by Aldona Jonaitis and Aaron Glass
Join Aldona:
Tuesday, June 1 at 7 p.m. at the Burke Museum, with University Book Store
Catherine Eaton Skinner, artist of Unleashed, will have a painting featured at the Bellevue Art Museum in June.
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Welcome
Phoebe Daniels!
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The University of Washington Press is pleased to welcome Phoebe Daniels to the marketing department. Phoebe was an intern at the Press in 2009 and she's now rejoining us on May 3 as assistant marketing manager.
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Award winners
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Robert E. Harrist Jr., won the 2009 Levenson
Prize for his book The Landscape of Words, and Justin Thomas McDaniel, won of
the 2009 Benda Prize for his book Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words, both prizes from the Association for Asian Studies.
Greening Cities, Growing Communities, by Jeffrey Hou, Julie Johnson,and Laura Lawson, won a Great Places Award from EDRA (Environmental Design Research Association), co-sponsored by Places and Metropolis Magazine.
Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country, by Marsha Weisiger, won the 2009 Gaspar Perez de Villagra Prize, sponsored by the Historical Society of New Mexico.
Congratulations to all our prize winners in March and April!
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Greetings!
 Later this month we'll be launching our Fall/Winter 2010 catalog but, for the time being, know that there are some great titles on the not-so-distant horizon (plus another exciting digital, interactive catalog complete with more video trailers)! Also, as a sneak peek, we have a new banner above that will soon be on our website. In the meantime, May has a great spread of events and for those of you in Montana, Frances McCue will soon be reading somewhere near you. So stay dry as these spring showers pass -- flowers and books on the way! All the best, Rachael remann@u.washington.edu |
Frances McCue and Mary Randlett
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|  The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs: Revisiting the Northwest Towns of Richard Hugo
Richard Hugo visited places and wrote about them. He wrote about towns:
White Center and La Push in Washington; Wallace and Cataldo in Idaho;
Milltown, Philipsburg, and Butte in Montana. Often his visits lasted
little more than an afternoon, and his knowledge of the towns was
confined to what he heard in bars and diners. From these snippets, he
crafted poems. His attention to the actual places could be scant, but
Hugo's poems resonate more deeply than travelogues or feature stories;
they capture the torque between temperament and terrain that is so
vital in any consideration of place. The poems bring alive some hidden
aspect to each town and play off the traditional myths that an
easterner might have of the West: that it is a place of restoration and
healing, a spa where people from the East come to recover from
ailments; that it is a place to reinvent oneself, a region of wide
open, unpolluted country still to settle. Hugo steers us, as readers,
to eye level. How we settle into and take on qualities of the tracts of
earth that we occupy -- this is Hugo's inquiry.
Part travelogue,
part memoir, part literary scholarship, The Car That Brought You Here Still Runstraces the journey of Frances McCue and photographer Mary
Randlett to the towns that inspired many of Richard Hugo's poems.
Returning forty years after Hugo visited these places, and bringing
with her a deep knowledge of Hugo and her own poetic sensibility, McCue
maps Hugo's poems back onto the places that triggered them. Together
with twenty-three poems by Hugo, McCue's essays and Randlett's
photographs offer a fresh view of Hugo's Northwest.
Frances
McCue is a writer and poet living in Seattle, where she is
writer-in-residence at the University of Washington's Undergraduate
Honors Program. She was the founding director of Richard Hugo House
from 1996 to 2006. McCue is the author of The Stenographer's Breakfast,
winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. Mary Randlett is
a Northwest photographer noted for her portraits of artists and
writers. Mary Randlett Landscapes celebrates her photographs of the
natural world.
To look inside the project, see their book trailer.
Join Frances and Mary on
Friday, April 30 at 5 p.m. at BookPeople, Moscow, IDMonday, May 3 at noon at Choteau Library, Choteau, MTWednesday, May 5 at 5:30 p.m. at Broadway Hotel, Philipsburg, MT
Thursday, May 6 at noon at Rotary Club, Philipsburg, MT
Thursday, May 6 at 2 p.m. at Books and Books, Butte, MTFriday, May 7 at 5:30 p.m. at Fact and Fiction, Missoula, MTMonday, May 10 at 7 p.m. at Country Bookshelf, Bozeman, MTWednesday, May 12 at 5 p.m. at Silver Tea Room, with Placer Village Books, Wallace, IDTuesday, June 1 at 7 p.m. at Village Books, BellinghamSaturday, June 5 at 7 p.m. at Looking Glass Bookstore, Portland, ORSunday, June 6 at 4 p.m. at Powell's
on Hawthorne, Portland, ORWednesday, June 9 at 7 p.m. at University Bookstore |
Ben Mitchell
With John Keeble and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto
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Ruben Trejo: Beyond Boundaries /Aztlan y mas alla
 Ruben Trejo: Beyond Boundaries / Aztlán y más allá is the first comprehensive survey of Trejo's art and career. It
focuses on more than fifty works from 1964 through the present,
including pieces from his delightful life-size, puppet-like Clothes for
Day of the Dead series; works from the Calzones series -- cast bronze
underwear and jalapenos -- that challenge the Spanish machismo culture;
seminal examples of his lifelong exploration of the cruciform image;
and much more. The volume includes biographical and interpretive essays,
as well as a chronology, list of exhibitions, and bibliography.
Ruben
Trejo (1937-2009) was born in a Chicago, Burlington and Quincy railroad
yard in St. Paul, Minnesota, where his father, a mixed Tarascan Indian
and Hispanic from Michoacán, Mexico, and his mother, from Ixtlan in the
same Mexican province, had found a home for the family in a boxcar while
his father worked for the railroad. Trejo became the first in his
family to graduate from college, and in 1973 he moved to the Pacific
Northwest, where he began a thirty-year association with Eastern
Washington University as teacher and artist.
Influenced and inspired by such writers and artists as
Octavio Paz and Guillermo Gómez-Pena, he explored a dynamic,
multidimensional worldview through his sculpture and mixed-media pieces
and created a body of work that deftly limns his identity as an artist
and a Chicano. Throughout his long teaching career, he worked tirelessly
to create opportunities for young Chicanos through tutoring and
mentoring.
Ben Mitchell, writer and teacher, is senior curator of
art at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane, Washington.
Tomás Ybarra-Frausto is former professor of Spanish and
Portuguese at Stanford University and former associate director for
creativity and culture at the Rockefeller Foundation. John
Keeble, professor emeritus at Eastern Washington University, is the
author of four novels, including Yellowfish and Broken Ground.
See
the exhibition corresponding to the book at the Museum of Arts
& Culture in Spokane starting May 1.
Join Ben and John at
Thursday, May 6 at 7 p.m. at Auntie's Books, Spokane
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Gardner McFall
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|  Amelia: The Libretto
In the new opera Amelia, a first time mother-to-be, whose psyche has
been scarred by the loss of her pilot father in Vietnam, must break free
from anxiety to embrace healing and renewal for the sake of her husband
and child. Set against a thirty-year period from the 1960s to the
1990s, the story interweaves one woman's emotional journey, the American
experience in Vietnam, and elements of myth and history to explore our
fascination with flight and the dilemmas that arise when vehicles of
flight are used for exploration, adventure, and war. This is an
intensely personal libretto by American poet Gardner McFall, whose
father was a Navy pilot who served in Vietnam and was lost in the
Pacific. It moves from loss to recuperation, paralysis to flight, as the
protagonist, Amelia, ultimately embraces her life and the creative
force of love and family.
Librettist Gardner McFall is the author
of two volumes of poetry, The Pilot's Daughter and Russian Tortoise, as
well as two children's books. She lives in New York and teaches at
Hunter College.
Amelia, the opera, opens on May 8. More details can be found at Seattle Opera.
See a book trailer on Amelia.
Join Gardner on
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Christopher Howell
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|  Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected
"A magnificent collection, by an exceptional voice and talent, one that
enriches all of us writing and reading poetry in these times." -
Christopher Buckley
This generous volume of new and selected
poems by Christopher Howell encompasses three decades of his
distinguished work, drawing upon all of his previous books. Dreamless and Possible chronicles his wide range of interests, expressed by
blending elements of the surreal with biography, imagist economy with a
storyteller's informality. It also shows the development of his
signature style, reflected, as poet Albert Goldbarth has written, in
poems "connected by deep thought worn lightly, and by large vision writ
in small details."
Christopher
Howell has previously published eight books of poetry, most recently Light's Ladder. He has received numerous awards for his writing,
including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and two
Washington State Book Awards, and his work has three times been included
in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. He is professor of English and
creative writing at Eastern Washington University, and lives with his
family in Spokane.
"Finally having the best of Christopher
Howell's work of the past 30 or so years is a great gift to the readers
of poetry. His voice is grave, irreverent, funny (at times) and his
newest poems are also lighted by (I know this is a dangerous word)
wisdom. Godspeed this book into the hands of many readers!" - Thomas Lux
"Sometimes reading a
poet feels like surfacing. You find yourself in a huge world, achingly
strange and familiar. Howell's work has that charge: the clarity of
trance and the jolt of waking. His new book is the distillation of an
oeuvre, attentive to the future and the origins, incandescent with loss.
Dreamless and Possible is a testament, a stunning and visceral
collection from one of America's most necessary poets." -D. Nurkse
"Christopher
Howell exults in 'the common mysteries of lives,' and his capacious
vision is especially displayed here with poems from over the course of
thirty years, during which he has written dramatic monologues, rhymed
lyrics, haunting narratives and elegies that are both redemptive and
terribly sad. And while the bewildering world 'sways on its pins,' we
come away from his poetry with the curious belief that we are - somehow,
strangely, by what?-blessed." - Lucia Perillo
Join Christopher on
Friday, May 7 at 7:30 p.m. at Open Books
Sunday, May 16 at 4 p.m. at Powell's on Hawthorne, Portland, OR
Wednesday, May 19 at 7 p.m. at Village Books, Bellingham
Friday, May 21 at 7 p.m. at Auntie's Books, Spokane
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Marshall Brown |
| The Tooth that Nibbles at the Soul:
Essays on Music and Poetry
The Tooth that Nibbles at the Soul brings together Marshall Brown's new
and previously published writings on literature and music. These essays
engage questions that are central to the development of literature,
music, and the arts in the period from Romanticism at the end of the
eighteenth century to the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth, a
period in which the modern evolution of the arts is coupled with a rise
in the significance of music as artistic form.
With a special
focus on lyric poetry and canonical composers including Mozart, Bach,
Beethoven, Brahms, and Schubert, Brown ties the growing prominence of
music in this period to the modernist principle of abstraction. Music,
as Brown provocatively notes, conveys meaning without explicitly saying
anything. This principle of abstraction could be taken as the overriding
formula for modernist art in general; and it explains why in this
period music becomes the model to which all the other arts, in
particular painting and literature, aspire.
Marshall Brown is professor of comparative literature
at the University of Washington. He is the editor of Modern Language
Quarterly and coeditor, with Susan Wolfson, of Reading for Form. He is a
translator, with Jane K. Brown, of Harald Weinrich's The Linguistics of Lying and Other Essays.
Join Marshall on
Thursday, May 20 at 7 p.m. at University Book Store
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Marsha Weisiger
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| Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country
Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country offers a fresh interpretation of
the history of Navajo (Diné) pastoralism. The dramatic reduction of
livestock on the Navajo Reservation in the 1930s -- when hundreds of
thousands of sheep, goats, and horses were killed -- was an ambitious
attempt by the federal government to eliminate overgrazing on an arid
landscape and to better the lives of the people who lived there.
Instead, the policy was a disaster, resulting in the loss of livelihood
for Navajos -- especially women, the primary owners and tenders of the
animals -- without significant improvement of the grazing lands.
Environmental historian
Marsha Weisiger examines the factors that led to the poor condition of
the range and explains how the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Navajos,
and climate change contributed to it. Using archival sources and oral
accounts, she describes the importance of land and stock animals in
Navajo culture. By positioning women at the center of the story, she
demonstrates the place they hold as significant actors in Native
American and environmental history.
Marsha L. Weisigeris associate professor of history at New Mexico State University.
Join Marsha on
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Ken Tadashi Oshima
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|  International Architecture in Interwar Japan: Constructing Kokusai Kenchiko
Ken Tadashi Oshima traces the many interconnections among Japanese, European, and
American architects and their work during the interwar years by
examining the careers and designs of three leading modernists in Japan:
Yamada Mamoru (1894-1966), Horiguchi Sutemi (1895-1984), and Antonin
Raymond (1888-1976). Each espoused a new architecture that encompassed
modern forms and new materials, and all attempted to synthesize the
novel with the old in distinctive ways. Combining wood and concrete,
paper screens and sliding/swinging glass doors, tatami rooms and
Western-style chairs, they achieved an innovative merging of
international modernism and traditional Japanese practices. Their
buildings accommodated the demands of modern living while remaining
appropriate to Japan's climate, culture, and economy.
Oshima uses a
wealth of photographs to vividly capture the character of the burgeoning
architectural media of those years and to generously illustrate the
works and visions of these pioneering modernists.
Ken Tadashi
Oshima is associate professor of architecture at the University of
Washington.
Join Ken on
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Alvin Ziontz
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|  A Lawyer in Indian Country: A Memoir
In his memoir, Alvin Ziontz reflects on his more than thirty years
representing Indian tribes, from a time when Indian law was little known
through landmark battles that upheld tribal sovereignty. He discusses
the growth and maturation of tribal government and the underlying
tensions between Indian society and the non-Indian world. A Lawyer in
Indian Country presents vignettes of reservation life and recounts some
of the memorable legal cases that illustrate the challenges faced by
individual Indians and tribes.
Join Alvin on
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