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In This Issue
Spring/Summer 2012 catalog
Coming in April
New Books In Stock
In the News
Follow us online!
Allan Richardson
Judy Bentley
Kathleen Flenniken
David Martin & Nicolette Bromberg
Open Spaces
Sandra Chait
Jacqueline Francis
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Available now!


S12

Our Spring/Summer 2012 catalog

For video trailers of seven new titles, please see our digital catalog here.
coming in april

The Republic of Nature
This book, destined to become a classic in American and environmental history, will be available April 1. Mark Fiege can be heard on "The Kathleen Dunn Show" on Wisconsin Public Radio on March 30 at 10 a.m. EST. He'll also be appearing in cities all up and down the East Coast, so stay tuned for the full schedule!
New books now in stock

Plume, by Kathleen Flenniken

Anne Hirondelle, by Jo Lauria and Jake Seniuk

Enclosed, by Liza Grandia

The New Earthwork, edited by Twylene Moyer and Glenn Harper

Old and Lost Rivers,
by J.T. Ledbetter
in the news

Kathleen Flenniken, author of Plume, was just named the poet laureate of Washington State. Congratulations!


Jeffrey Ochsner, author of the forthcoming book Furniture Studio and many other UW Press books, including Lionel Pries, was awarded the  2012 Distinguished Professor Award by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.


The Association of American University Presses just announced it's 2012 Book, Jacket, and Journal design awards. UWP won four and big congratulations go out to Ashley Saleeba for her design work on the interiors of Underdog and Seattle Geographies and Thomas Eykemans for his design work on the covers of Darwin's Pharmacy and Red Autobiographies.

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 March 2012
Greetings!

Happy March everyone! It's starting to feel like spring and here at the Press, we're already looking to the fall. I'm delighted to report that there are some amazing books coming your way. In the meantime, get ready for The Republic of Nature by Mark Fiege, which will be published on April 1 -- you're going to love this incredible groundbreaking look at American history!

For all you academics, this is also conference season! UW Press will be at College Art in Los Angeles (February 22-25), Association of Partners for Public Lands in Las Vegas (March 4-8), Asian Studies in Toronto (March 15-18), and American Society for Environmental History in Madison (March 28-31). So if you're at one of these conferences, please come by and say hello!

All the best,
Rachael
[email protected]

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allan richardson

Nooksack Place Names
Place names convey a people's relationship to the land, their sense of place. For indigenous peoples, place names can also be central to the revival of endangered languages. This book takes readers on a voyage into the history, language, and culture of the Nooksack people of Washington State and southern British Columbia as it documents more than 150 places named by elders and mentioned in key historical texts. Descriptions of Nooksack history and naming patterns -- with maps, photographs, and linguistic analyses -- give life to a nearly extinct language and illuminate the intertwined relationships of place, culture, language, and identity.

Allan Richardson is a consulting anthropologist, retired from teaching at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, Washington.

Join Allan
Saturday, March 10, at 2 p.m. at Village Books, Bellingham 

Judy bentley
Hiking Washington's History

Hiking Washington's History

Hiking Washington's History reveals the stories embedded in Washington's landscape. This trail guide narrates forty historic trails, ranging from short day hikes to three- or four-day backpacking trips over mountain passes. Every region in the state is included, from the northwesternmost tip of the continental United States at Cape Flattery to the remote Blue Mountains in the southeast. Each chapter begins with a brief overview of the region's history followed by individual trail narratives and historical highlights. Quotes from diaries, journals, letters, and reports, as well as contemporary and historic photographs, describe sites and trails from Washington's past. Each trail description includes a map and provides directions, so hikers can follow the historic route. Judy Bentley tells readers how to get there, what to expect, and what to look for.

Judy Bentley, who teaches at South Seattle Community College, is an avid hiker and the author of fourteen books for young adults.

Join Judy
Monday, March 12, at 7:15 p.m. for the UW Faculty Auxiliary Meeting, UW Club

kathleen flenniken

Plume  
 The poems in Plume are nuclear-age songs of innocence and experience set in the "empty" desert West. Award-winning poet Kathleen Flenniken grew up in Richland, Washington, at the height of the Cold War, next door to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where "every father I knew disappeared to fuel the bomb," and worked at Hanford herself as a civil engineer and hydrologist. By the late 1980s, declassified documents revealed decades of environmental contamination and deception at the plutonium production facility, contradicting a lifetime of official assurances to workers and their families that their community was and always had been safe. At the same time, her childhood friend Carolyn's own father was dying of radiation-induced illness: "blood cells began to err one moment efficient the next / a few gone wrong stunned by exposure to radiation / as [he] milled uranium into slugs or swabbed down / train cars or reported to B Reactor for a quick run-in / run-out." Plume, written twenty years later, traces this American betrayal and explores the human capacity to hold truth at bay when it threatens one's fundamental identity. Flenniken observes her own resistance to facts: "one box contains my childhood / the other contains his death / if one is true / how can the other be true?"

The book's personal story and its historical one converge with enriching interplay and wide technical variety, introducing characters that range from Carolyn and her father to Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and Manhattan Project health physicist Herbert Parker. As a child of "Atomic City," Kathleen Flenniken brings to this tragedy the knowing perspective of an insider coupled with the art of a precise, unflinching, gifted poet.

Join Kathleen, the new Washington State poet laureate, on
Sunday, March 18, at 3 p.m. at Open Books, Seattle

Thursday, March 29, at 7 p.m. at Odegaard Library for the opening of the "Particles on a Wall" exhibition

Monday, April 2, at 7 p.m. at Elliott Bay
david martin & nicolette Bromberg
Shadows of a Fleeting World

Shadows of a Fleeting World   
Pictorialism emerged in the early twentieth century as a prominent style of fine art photography. Artists engaged in this style were interested in the effects of transient light and Japanese compositional elements. They developed innovative darkroom techniques to create unique soft-focus photographs that reflected contemporary painting styles. Historically, pictorial photography was narrowly defined by certain characteristics that gave an inaccurate assessment of its important contributions to the medium. Recent rediscoveries from American regional camera clubs, including the Seattle Camera Club (SCC), reveal that the movement was broader and more varied than previously thought. Shadows of a Fleeting World provides a rare glimpse into the regional Pictorialist movement.

David F. Martin is an independent art historian and curator specializing in women and minority artists of the Pacific Northwest. Nicolette Bromberg is visual materials curator, Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries.

Join David and Nicolette on
Sunday, March 18, at 4 p.m. at Eagle Harbor Books, Bainbridge Island
penny harrison, bob sack, tom grant, & roy hemmingway
HAROPE

Open Spaces 
Since its beginnings, Open Spaces has been on the cutting edge of innovative ideas about the Pacific Northwest -- an intelligent, provocative, beautifully conceived magazine for thoughtful readers who are searching for new ways to understand the region, themselves, and many of the major issues of our time. This lasting collection from the magazine is an invaluable resource for students and educators, as well as decision makers in government, business, and other sectors looking for real-world answers to ongoing conflicts.

Penny H. Harrison is the editor and publisher of Open Spaces magazine. She was formerly an assistant attorney general for Oregon, specializing in natural resource issues. Robert Sack is a specialist in sleep disorders medicine and a contributor on the subject to The New England Journal of Medicine. Tom Grant is a widely known jazz pianist who has toured the world with jazz greats and whose records are a staple of Smooth Jazz. Roy Hemmingway was Oregon Governor Vic Atiyeh's appointee to the Northwest Power Planning Council and Governor John Kitzhaber's policy advisor for salmon and energy.

Join Penny, Bob, Tom, and Roy on
Tuesday, March 20, at 6:45 p.m. at the Lake Oswego Library, Oregon
sandra chait
Seeking Salaam

Seeking Salaam 
In conversations with more than forty East African immigrants living in Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, Sandra Chait captures the immigrants' struggle for identity in the face of competing stories and documents how some individuals have been able to transcend the ghosts from the past and extend a tentative hand to their former enemies.

Sandra M. Chait immigrated to the Unites States from South Africa. She received her doctorate in English from the University of Washington where she taught African literature and served as associate director of the university's Program on Africa. She is currently an independent scholar in Seattle.

Join Sandra on
Wednesday, March 21, at 7:30 p.m. at Horizon House, with Elliott Bay 
Jacqueline Francis

Making Race 
Malvin Gray Johnson, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Max Weber were three New York City artists whose work was popularly assigned to the category of "racial art" in the interwar years of the twentieth century. The term was widely used by critics and the public at the time, and was an unexamined, unquestioned category for the work of non-whites (such as Johnson, an African American), non-Westerners (such as Kuniyoshi, a Japanese-born American), and ethnicized non-Christians (such as Weber, a Russian-born Jewish American). The discourse on racial art is a troubling chapter in the history of early American modernism that has not, until now, been sufficiently documented. Jacqueline Francis juxtaposes the work of these three artists in order to consider their understanding of the category and their stylistic responses to the expectations created by it, in the process revealing much about the nature of modernist art practices.

Most American audiences in the interwar period disapproved of figural abstraction and held modernist painting in contempt, yet the critics who first expressed appreciation for Johnson, Kuniyoshi, and Weber praised their bright palettes and energetic pictures - and expected to find the residue of the minority artist's heritage in the work itself. Francis explores the flowering of racial art rhetoric in the 1920s and 1930s, and analyzes its underlying presence in contemporary discussions of artists of color. Making Race is a history of a past phenomenon which has significant ramifications for the present.

Jacqueline Francis is a senior lecturer at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco.

Join Jacqueline on
Thursday, March 29, at 7 p.m. at University Press Books, Berkeley