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Greetings!
Summer is officially here!  And while our event schedule is a bit light, leaving time to enjoy these sunny days, rest assured that we're planning a full fall for you! If you haven't seen our Fall/Winter 2010 catalog and, with it, all-new trailers from six of our upcoming titles, see it here! In July be sure to catch Jeff Hou & Julie Johnson at Village Books (the store is celebrating its 30th anniversary this month -- congratulations!) and Robert Mitchell, UW alumnus of the Comparative Literature program and current faculty member at Duke University, at Town Hall Seattle. All the best, Rachael remann@u.washington.edu  |
Jeff Hou and Julie Johnson
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|  Greening Cities, Growing Communities: Learning from Seattle's Urban Community Gardens
Although there are thousands of community gardens across North America,
only Seattle and a few other cities include them in their urban
development plans. While the conditions and experiences in Seattle may
be unique, the city's programs offer insights and lessons for other
cities and communities. Greening Cities, Growing Communities examines:
- Planning and design strategies that support the development of urban
community gardens as sustainable places for education and recreation
- Approaches to design processes, construction, and stewardship that
utilize volunteer and community participation and create a sense of
community
- Programs that enable gardens to serve as a resource
for social justice for low income and minority communities, immigrants,
and seniors
- Opportunities to develop active-living
frameworks by strategically locating community gardens and linking them
with other forms of recreation and open space as part of
pedestrian-accessible networks
Greening Cities, Growing
Communities focuses on six community gardens in Seattle where there has
been a strong network of knowledge and resources. These case studies
reveal the capacity of community gardens to serve larger community
issues, such as food security, urban ecosystem health, demonstration of
sustainable gardening and building practices, active living and
pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, and equity concerns. The authors also
examine how landscape architects, planners, and allied design
professionals can better interact in the making of these unique urban
open spaces, and how urban community gardens offer opportunities for
professionals to have a more prominent role in community activism and
urban sustainability.
Jeffrey Hou and Julie M. Johnson are
associate professors of landscape architecture at the University of
Washington. Laura J. Lawson is associate professor of landscape
architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Join Jeff and Julie on
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John Keeble
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| Yellowfish: A Novel
 Wesley Erks, itinerant machinist and "high class jack-of-all-trades,"
takes a hefty fee for smuggling a group of illegal Chinese immigrants
("yellowfish") from Vancouver, B.C., to San Francisco in the 1970s.
Three are teenaged "Hong Kong boys," one of whom has been grievously
injured. The fourth, a fugitive and the son of a rich Chinese casino
owner, means to settle a grudge with a Chinese American secret society,
the Triad, but is himself being pursued. The tale of the perilous
journey of these five men, along with a woman who becomes implicated in a
double-cross, is filled with vivid fictional and historical characters.
The whole of it conjures the story of the West itself.
John
Keeble is the author of four novels, including Yellowfish and Broken Ground, a collection of short stories, Nocturnal America, and a work of
nonfiction, Out of the Channel: The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince
William Sound.
Join John on
Monday, July 12 at 8 p.m. at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.
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Robert Mitchell
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| Bioart and the Vitality of Media
 Bioart -- art that uses either living materials (such as bacteria or
transgenic organisms) or more traditional materials to comment on, or
even transform, biotechnological practice -- now receives enormous
media attention. Yet despite this attention, bioart is frequently
misunderstood. Bioart and the Vitality of Media is the first
comprehensive theoretical account of the art form, situating it in the
contexts of art history, laboratory practice, and media theory.
Mitchell
begins by sketching a brief history of bioart in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, describing the artistic, scientific, and social
preconditions that made it conceptually and technologically possible. He
illustrates how bioartists employ technologies and practices from the
medical and life sciences in an effort to transform relationships among
science, medicine, corporate interests, and the public. By illustrating
the ways in which bioart links a biological understanding of media --
that is, "media" understood as the elements of an environment that
facilitate the growth and development of living entities -- with
communicational media, Bioart and the Vitality of Media demonstrates how
art and biotechnology together change our conceptions and practices of
mediation. Reading bioart through a range of resources, from Immanuel
Kant's discussion of disgust to Gilles Deleuze's theory of affect to
Gilbert Simondon's concept of "individuation," provides readers with a
new theoretical approach for understanding bioart and its relationships
to both new media and scientific institutions.
Robert Mitchell is
associate professor of English at Duke University. He is the author,
with Catherine Waldby, of Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell
Lines in Late Capitalism and, with Phillip Thurtle, of Data Made Flesh:
Embodying Information and Semiotic Flesh: Information and the Human Body.
Join Robert on
Wednesday, July 14 at 7:30 p.m. at Town Hall Seattle, Downstairs with University Book Store.
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Frances McCue
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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 Runs traces
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.
Watch the book trailer: http://www.youtube.com/user/UWashingtonPress#p/a/u/2/J8_W1FZn06w
Join Frances on
Thursday, July 15 at 6:30 p.m. at King County Library at Greenbridge, White Center, with Elliott Bay Book Co.
Saturday, July 17 from noon to 2 p.m. at Costco, White Center, Seattle, WA
Sunday, July 18 from noon to 2 p.m. at Costco, Aurora Village, WA
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