New & Noteworthy

Susan Wheeler’s Meme, the latest offering from the University of Iowa Press's Kuhl House Poets series, has been selected as a finalist for this year's National Book Award.

Wheeler, who formerly taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, said of the selection, “As Ma would have said, 'Well, I'm flabbergasted.' (As she would have been!) I'm also tremendously honored for the company and the consideration.”

The awards will be presented Nov. 14 at a ceremony in New York City.

A meme is a unit of thought replicated by imitation. Occupy Wall Street is a meme, as are Internet ideas and images that go viral.

But what could be more potent memes than those passed down by parents to their children? Wheeler reconstructs her mother’s voice—down to its cynicism and its mid-20th-century midwestern vernacular—in “The Maud Poems.” That voice takes a more aggressive, vituperative turn in “The Devil—or —The Introjects.” In the book’s third long sequence, a generational inheritance feeds cultural transmission in “The Split.” A set of variations on losses and break-ups—wildly, darkly funny throughout and, in places, devastatingly sad—“The Split” brings Wheeler’s lauded inventiveness, wit, and insight to the profound loss of love.

"This is a well-deserved honor for Susan. The National Book Award stands as the pinnacle of recognition for individual literary works, the nominees represent the best of the best in a given year,” says Jim McCoy, UI Press director. “Wheeler's talent and hard work shines on every page. This is such a personal work it can't help but touch anyone who reads it. She's an absolute delight to work with. Congratulations also to Mark Levine, who edits our Kuhl House Poets series. It is his vision that makes this possible. The Press is so honored to be publishing Meme.”

Poet Mary Jo Bang, author of The Bride of E, says, "In Meme, the traditional elegy dissolves into excited bursts of imitated idiomatic speech interwoven with writing from a different register—the coolly removed, self-insightful lyric. That the elaborately constructed edifice that is personality can be reconstructed with such fascinating economy and delightful indirection is amazing. These poems are pure poetic genius."

And poet Rae Armantrout, author of Money Shot, says, "Meme is a haunted work. We are ushered in by the disembodied voice of a mother figure, scolding and teasing in the time-stamped slang of past decades. The anachronism is both funny and terribly sad. 'Don't come in here all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,' the voice says. And it turns out that's fair warning. This cracked Virgil leads us into a consciously Dantean underworld ('Had you entered the thicket in darkness / . . . Had you been mid-life, not in haze but in crisis?'). Wheeler has created a total (and to me terrifying) linguistic environment in which hell is the introjected voices of other people, the hungry ghosts of our recent past."

Wheeler is the author of the poetry collections Bag ‘o’ Diamonds, which received the Norma Farber First Book Award of the Poetry Society of America and was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award;Smokes, which won the Four Way Books Award in 1998; and Source Codes;Ledger, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; and Assorted Poems. Her novel,Record Palace, was published in 2005. On the creative writing faculties at Princeton University and The New School's graduate program, she lives in Rocky Hill, N.J.

Like the historic stone building, home of the UI Press, from which this series draws its name, the Kuhl House Poets combine the best of dedicated craft and contemporary vision. This provocative series reawakens readers to a fresh consideration of the possibilities of language and feeling by publishing work that is formally and verbally inventive, adventurous work that takes its own path outside established routes of either traditions or experimental poetry.

In thrilling poems of metamorphosis and birth, death and dissolution, Stephanie Pippin’s debut collection, The Messenger, returns us to a world unshorn of wildness. Delivering accident and hunger, love and grief, Nature in these poems is beautiful and brutal, “a hellish magnificence” that both invites and denies the meanings we project onto it. Refusing the domesticated comfort of our usual myths, Pippin reminds us of our place as creatures among others in a world where “what isn’t dead / is dying,” and where the thrill of predatory flight commingles with the desperation of the prey.  

This mesmerizing and astonishingly assured collection confronts readers with the hard master of necessity—that “angel stinking of his own / excitement”—leaving them bare before what Mallarmé called “the horror of the forest,” helpless to do anything to save what we love. The poems deliver a message as harrowing as it is essential, insisting that our sole task is to look on while we can, and to love harder. 

Poet Mary Jo Bang says "These fierce poems form a Darwinian compendium with speakers who empathically merge with everything feathered and furred. There’s a odd democracy here, the fresco swan on the Pompeii wall and the clamp of a falcon digging its talons into a glove both speak equally of mystery, fragility, and the future we stand to lose when we turn our backs on nature: ‘The weight of this / is more than you imagined.’ These poems have a Keatsian beauty to them, and a Keatsian truth. In other words, everything we need to know."

Stephanie Pippin's poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2010, Ploughshares, Boston Review, and The Iowa Review. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

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 Natural Selections by Joseph Campana, Grand & Arsenal by Kerri Webster, Like a Sea by Samuel Amadon, and A Little Middle of the Night by Molly Brodak.

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. Natural Selections by Joseph Campana and Grand & Arsenal by Kerri Webster will be published by the University of Iowa Press in the spring of 2012.

With a boldness of vision that might overwhelm a lesser talent, Joseph Campana’s Natural Selections is a collection guided by a focused intelligence and yet containing wonderment and awe at its heart. From wandering the paths of the imagination, to driving through sparsely populated countryside, or listening for the voices of animals, these poems find the simplicity and strangeness of middle America, a complex metaphysics of place and an uncanny perspective reminiscent of landscapes of Grant Wood. Birds and beasts, frequent storms, country roads, a fraught election, and some of Ohio’s literary guardian angels (James Wright, Hart Crane, and Sherwood Anderson), haunt the poems. Whether enigmatically refracted or brutally direct, Natural Selections attends to the way life is beautifully, violently, and unexpectedly marked by place.

Joseph Campana teaches Renaissance literature at Rice University. His poems have appeared in Slate, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Conjunctions, Colorado Review, and many other venues. His first book of poetry, The Book of Faces, was published in 2005. He is also the author of The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (2012).

Kerri Webster’s award-winning Grand & Arsenal speaks from the intersection of public and private fear, of anxiety and awe, vanishings and reappearances, where a city both rises and falls and worlds are simultaneously spoken into being and torn down by words. Grand & Arsenal begins “Bless me I am not myself,” but it is not long before the probability of being blessed is revealed to be as remote as the concept of a whole self. Thus begins the book’s defining struggle. This endeavor is enacted by a multitude of voices, which move from rush to stumble and back again—meanwhile using all the tools we use as a culture to hold fear at arm’s length. We hear a familiar irony, humor, and understatement, but most importantly these poems allow for the fleeting triumph of an undefended voice, which appears often to emerge tentatively from a sort of exhausted collapse.

Kerri Webster is the author of a previous full-length collection, We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone (2005), well as two chapbooks: Psalm Project (2009) and Rowing Through Fog (2003). Writer in Residence at Washington University in St. Louis from 2006 to 2010, she currently lives and writes in her native Idaho.

Recent winners of the prize include Cloud of Ink by L. S. Klatt, Unbeknownst by Julie Hanson, Like a Sea by Samuel Amadon, and A Little Middle of the Night by Molly Brodak.

The University of Iowa Press is pleased to announce the winners of the 2011 Iowa Short Fiction Awards. Will Boast is the winner of the 2011 Iowa Short Fiction Award for his collection Power Ballads. Josh Rolnick's Pulp and Paper is the winner of the 2011 John Simmons Short Fiction Award. The recipients were selected by Yiyun Li, author of Vagrants.

Will Boast was born in England and grew up in Ireland and Wisconsin. His fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices 2009, Narrative, Glimmer Train, the Southern Review, Mississippi Review, and other publications and is forthcoming in the American Scholar. He holds an MFA from the University of Virginia and is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Currently, he lives and writes in San Francisco, and also moonlights as a performing musician around the Bay Area. He's working on both a novel and a memoir.    

Power Ballads is collection of ten stories devoted to those working musicians who have spent their young lives in practice rooms and recital halls, devoting themselves utterly to their instruments, only to toil in the obscurity of coffee shops, casinos, and small-town music festivals. The loosely connected stories feature several recurrent characters born out of the sometimes glamorous, sometimes dreary nocturnal world of musicians. For all of them, music is most often simply work, but in rare moments it becomes a source of grace and transcendence, speaking about the things we can never seem say to each other. The characters in Power Ballads—techno DJs, aging head-bangers, jobbers, songwriters, groupies, critics, and the occasional rock star (and the people who have to live with them)—need music to survive, yet they are often lost when the last note is played, the last set ends, the lights go up, and they have to return to regular life.

Josh Rolnick’s short stories have won the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize and the Florida Review Editor’s Choice Prize. His stories have also been published in Harvard Review, Western Humanities Review, Bellingham Review, and Gulf Coast, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices. He grew up in Central Jersey, and divided his summers and winters between the Jersey Shore and Upstate New York. A reporter, editor, and journal publisher, he has lived in Jerusalem, London, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Menlo Park, CA, and Iowa City. He currently lives in Akron, Ohio, with his wife, Marcella, and three sons, Meyer, Heshel, and Lev.

The eight stories in Pulp and Paper trace the effects of life-changing events on everyday people. In “Funnyboy,” grief stricken Levi Stern attempts to come to terms with the banality of his son’s accidental death at the hands of high school cheerleader Missy Jones. In “Pulp and Paper” two neighbors, Gail Denny and Avery Mayberry, are attempting to escape a toxic spill as a result of a train derailment when a moment of compassion alters both their futures forever. “Innkeeping” is the story of a teenager’s simmering resentment toward the burgeoning relationship between his widowed mother and a long-term guest. And in “The Herald,” a devoted reporter on a small-town newspaper attempts to break a big story to salvage his career (and his ego), only to find his over-eagerness sabotages it instead.

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.

Attention media, reviewers, and bloggers: the University of Iowa Press is now a subscriber to NetGalley, a new online service for the electronic delivery of galleys and press materials. It provides us with the wonderful opportunity of distributing these materials to the media electronically and saving thousands upon thousands of pages of paper.

What’s great about NetGalley is that you will be able to register and use this service to view new titles from us at no cost. You can read galleys and review copies online, download PDF versions, read on your Kindle or Sony Reader, and search within galleys. Through NetGalley, you can view marketing materials, book trailers, photos, author bios, cover art, and more. Plus, NetGalley will reduce our environmental impact by utilizing digital content to get our titles into your hands faster!

Registration is free. Please visit www.netgalley.com to register and to request our galleys and review copies. Find our titles by searching for the University of Iowa Press in the public catalog area.

For inquiries about the University of Iowa Press, our authors and titles, or NetGalley, please contact Allison Means at [email protected].

The University of Iowa Press is proud to announce that Stagestruck Filmmaker: D.W. Griffith and the American Theatre by David Mayer has been chosen as a finalist for the 2010 Richard Wall Memorial Award. Formerly known as the Theatre Library Association Award, the prize was renamed in 2010 to honor the memory of the late Richard Wall, longtime TLA member and Book Awards Chair.

An actor, a vaudevillian, and a dramatist before he became a filmmaker, D. W. Griffith used the resources of theatre to great purpose and to great ends. In pioneering the quintessentially modern medium of film from the 1890s to the 1930s, he drew from older, more broadly appealing stage forms of melodrama, comedy, vaudeville, and variety. In Stagestruck Filmmaker, David Mayer brings Griffith’s process vividly to life, offering detailed and valuable insights into the racial, ethnic, class, and gender issues of these transitional decades.

Combining the raw materials of theatre, circus, minstrelsy, and dance with the newer visual codes of motion pictures, Griffith became the first acknowledged artist of American film. Birth of a Nation in particular demonstrates the degree to which he was influenced by the racist justifications and distorting interpretations of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. Moving through the major phases of Griffith’s career in chapters organized around key films or groups of films, Mayer provides a mesmerizing account of the American stage and cinema in the final years of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century.

Griffith’s relationship to the theatre was intricate, complex, and enduring. Long recognized as the dominant creative figure of American motion pictures, throughout twenty-six years of making more than five hundred films he pillaged, adapted, reshaped, revitalized, preserved, and extolled. By historicizing his representations of race, ethnicity, and otherness, Mayer places Griffith within an overall template of American life in the years when film rivaled and then surpassed the theatre in popularity.

David Mayer is emeritus professor in the Department of Drama, University of Manchester. He is the author and editor or coeditor of numerous publications in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American popular entertainment. His books include Harlequin in His Element: English Pantomime, 1806–1836 and Playing Out the Empire: “Ben-Hur” and Other Toga-plays and Films.

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.

The University of Iowa Press is proud to announce that as of May 15, 2009, it is 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 is acting as a beta client for CDC in its initial forays into direct to consumer e-book fulfillment.

The fulfillment service uses 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 allows 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 reduces 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, [email protected], or visit us online at www.uiowapress.org.