New Books in April 2016

We are proud to announce these five books debuting in April.

April 1
Almost Nothing to Be Scared Of
David Clewell

Winner of the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry
 Almost Nothing to Be Scared Of

“David Clewell has a lot to say, peppering his essayistic poems with lopsided wit and keen observations on the spectacle of American culture. His social commentary deserves a gang of listeners for the truth of his insights and the sheer fun of the delivery. By the way, did you know that the Inverted Atomic Drop was a wrestling move?”—Billy Collins

 

April 5
Death on a Starry Night
Betsy Draine and Michael Hinden

Death on a Starry Night is a romp through French art, fine wine, romance, and murder. This is the third novel in the Nora Barnes and Toby Sandler mystery series, as these artful sleuths investigate the mysterious death of Vincent van Gogh.  “Thoroughly engaging. Draine and Hinden’s eccentric and amiable characters (one of whom happens to be a murderer) gather together to share delicious meals, amble through medieval villages, and argue about van Gogh’s art, life, and mysterious death in this charming whodunit.”—M. L. Longworth, author of The Mystery of the Lost Cézanne

 

April 12
Virgil and Joyce
Nationalism and Imperialism in the Aeneid and Ulysses
Randall J. Pogorzelski

Virgil and Joyce illuminates how James Joyce’s Ulysses was influenced not just by Homer’s Odyssey but by Virgil’s Aeneid, as both authors confronted issues of nationalism, colonialism, and political violence, whether in imperial Rome or revolutionary Ireland.  “Joyce emerges here as a literary reader who rethinks Virgil’s Aeneid as a post-imperial epic, a poem about colonialism and national identity.”—Phiroze Vasunia, author of The Classics and Colonial India

 

April 19
The Invisible Jewish Budapest
Metropolitan Culture at the Fin de Siècle
Mary Gluck

The Invisible Jewish Budapest is a groundbreaking, brilliant urban history of a Central European metropolis in the decades before World War I.  “A magnificently consequential book. Gluck examines the vibrant modernist culture created largely by secular Jews in Budapest, in counterpoint to a backward-looking, nationalistic Hungarian establishment and a conservative Jewish religious elite.”—Scott Spector, author of Violent Sensations

 

April 26
City of Neighborhoods
Memory, Folklore, and Ethnic Place in Boston
Anthony Bak Buccitelli

City of Neighborhoods  “This fascinating deep-dive into historically ethnic neighborhoods reveals that old stereotypes have been supplanted by vibrant, multiethnic neighborhoods that now use ethnicity as a means for inclusion. A riveting, insider look into what really happens in Boston’s diverse neighborhoods.”—Timothy Tangherlini, UCLA

 

 

April 27
My Sister’s Mother
A Memoir of War, Exile, and Stalin’s Siberia
Donna Solecka Urbikas

My Sister’s Mother is an American baby boomer’s account of the ordeals of her Polish mother and half sister as slave laborers in Siberia who escaped and survived. “This stunning, heartfelt memoir looks unflinchingly at the scars borne by one Polish immigrant family as their daughter tries to become a normal American girl in Chicago. A gripping study of family dynamics, this is also a must-read for World War II history buffs.”—Leonard Kniffel, author of A Polish Son in the Motherland

Wisconsin announces poetry prize winners

Hood, Lantz, and Vollmer win the Felix Pollak, Brittingham, and Four Lakes Prizes

Charles Hood, Nick Lantz, and Judith Vollmer have been named winners of the annual poetry contests administered by the Creative Writing Program of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Wisconsin Press.

All three prize-winning books will be published in early 2017 by the University of Wisconsin Press, as part of the Wisconsin Poetry Series edited by Ronald Wallace. 

The Brittingham Prize, conferred annually since 1985, and the Felix Pollak Prize, founded in 1994, are awarded to book-length manuscripts of original poetry submitted in an open competition. Each year, a nationally recognized poet chooses the winners. This year’s judge was Susan Mitchell, author of Rapture and Erotikon, winner of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim, and holder of the Mary Blossom Lee Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Florida Atlantic University. The Four Lakes Prize, begun in 2011, is awarded to a new book of poetry submitted by a past winner of the Brittingham or Pollak competitions, selected by an editorial board at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Charles Hood

Charles Hood is the recipient of this year’s Felix Pollak Prize. A professor of English at Antelope Valley College in Lancaster, California, Hood earned his MFA in poetry from the University of California, Irvine. His forthcoming collection, Partially Excited States, is praised by Mitchell as “simultaneously gorgeous, playful, witty, goofy, hilarious, and profound.” She calls it “a brilliant book that encompasses what it is to be human,” and adds that “its poems have all the exuberance and excitement of creation.” Hood’s previous poetry books include South x South and several small press collections and chapbooks.

Nick Lantz

Winner of the Brittingham Prize, Nick Lantz is a past recipient of the Felix Pollak prize for his work The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbor’s House. His new volume, You, Beast, will be his fourth book of poetry. Mitchell calls it a “masterful and deeply moving collection that raises political and social questions urging us toward a new world where humans, animals, plants—even the cockroach—are worthy of respect.” Lantz is an assistant professor of English at Sam Houston State University and received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Judith Vollmer

Judith Vollmer was awarded the Four Lakes Prize for her manuscript The Apollonia Poems.

She previously won the Brittingham Prize for her collection Level Green, and her book Reactor was also published by the University of Wisconsin Press. She is professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg and teaches in the low residency MFA Program at Drew University. The Appollonia Poems, the author’s sixth volume of poetry, has been praised by Alicia Ostriker, who observed, “this book is a trip, or many trips. Here is the creative mind at work and play—its geological layers uncovered, lifetimes and cultures revisited.” She describes Vollmer’s voice as “curious, tender, and flinty, with its own grave and ethereal music.”

 

 

 

The Greatest Speech in the History of the U.S. Senate Still Resonates Today

(Note: The following opinion piece first appeared on The Daily Call, February 23, 2016. Richard Drake is the author of the UW Press book The Education of an Anti-Imperialist: Robert La Follette and U.S. Expansion.)

By Richard Drake
Special to the Daily Call

Robert La Follette

On 4 April 1917, Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin rose in the Senate to speak in opposition to Woodrow Wilson’s call for war against Germany, a message delivered by the President to a joint session of Congress two days earlier. Wilson had said that to preserve its honor and freedom, the United States had no choice but to fight Germany. The autocratic German government recently had resumed its campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare, which Wilson characterized as an unprecedented evil in the history of civilized nations. Germany had plunged the world into a new dark age, he told the assembled lawmakers. The United States alone, Wilson believed, possessed the power and the moral idealism to bring the war to an honorable and just conclusion “for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples.” In what would become the centerpiece of Allied propaganda about the purpose of the war, the President added, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” At the end of his thirty-six-minute-long speech, nearly everyone present stood and cheered, many patriotically
waving small American flags. La Follette defiantly kept his seat and did not join in the applause.

 

An ominous trend

La Follette’s turn to speak came two days later, in the Senate chamber. The leader of the anti-war faction in the Senate, he would take four hours to make his rebuttal to the President. After reading an anti-war letter from one of his supporters in North Dakota, he began his speech with a warning to the American people about a dangerous trend in the country. As a United States senator, he always had thought that the people deserved his best efforts to speak knowledgeably and honestly about the great issues of the day. Now a new trend could be seen in Washington: “standing back of the President without inquiring whether the President is right or wrong.” He judged it to be an ominous trend for the integrity of American politics.

La Follette thought the President not only wrong but deceptive in his war message. Future propagandists would find in Wilson’s speech an exemplary concoction for their craft. La Follette questioned Wilson’s sincerity in claiming the cause of democracy as the supreme end of America’s war policy. Some palpable facts contradicted the President’s claim. If democracy mattered so much to the United States government, why did we do nothing and say nothing about the plight of Ireland, Egypt, and India whose teeming millions languished in undemocratic servitude to our wartime ally, Great Britain? Nor had our other major allies—France, Italy, and Russia—covered themselves with glory by advancing the cause of democracy in their empires. As making the world safe for democracy could not in truth be presented as the real reason for our entering the war, it would behoove the American people to discover what actually had motivated our leaders to take this dread step.

A war of selfish ambition and cruel greed

To understand the real reasons for America’s involvement in the war, it would be necessary to determine the conflict’s origins in Europe. He guessed that at bottom the Europeans were in the process of wrecking their civilization because of commercial rivalries and imperialistic ambition. He told his fellow senators, “this war, like nearly all others, originated in the selfish ambition and cruel greed of a comparatively few men in each Government who saw the war as an opportunity for profit and power for themselves, and who were wholly indifferent to the awful suffering they knew that the war would bring the masses.” He made the right guess here. Later revelations about secret treaties and historical research in government archives would prove indisputably that the war had broken out in a context of imperialistic striving by all the major combatant nations for territories, markets, and resources.

About American motives for intervening in the slaughter-pen of Europe, La Follette could only raise questions and make suppositions. “Are we seizing upon the war to consolidate and extend an imperialistic policy?” he asked. It looked that way to him, especially in view of our alliance with Britain. He did not think of British imperialism, in the manner of so many Americans at that time and in the future, as a charming eccentricity of a brother democracy. He told the senators, “We are uniting with Great Britain, “an empire founded upon the conquests and subjugation of weaker nations.” It stood to reason that by our alliance with the British we would be implicated in their imperialist agenda. The economics of imperialism made it seem to La Follette as if the United States were engaging in a war to make the world safe for Wall Street, not democracy. From the first Wall Street-funded war loan to the Allies in 1915, La Follette had feared that our economic entanglements with the Allies would lead ineluctably to armed intervention. It turned out to be a legitimate fear. In its spectacular revelations of the 1930s, the Nye Committee would disclose the precise details of the financial arrangements—above all, the war loans—which had done much to bring America into the war.

Washington’s variously motivated Anglophile agenda had led to the double standards with which the American media and government had judged the wartime conduct of the two coalitions. The President appeared to be unaware of these differences. For example, he had described with horror Germany’s enormities in its unrestricted submarine warfare campaign, without thinking to mention Britain’s illegal naval blockade, which had resulted in appalling hardship and injury to German civilians. La Follette sought to flesh out the President’s excessively compressed analysis. He noted that American silence about Britain’s flagrant violations of international law had “helped to drive Germany into a corner, her back to the wall, to fight with what weapons she can lay her hands on to prevent the starving of her women and children, her old men and babes.” In the typical fashion of propagandists, the President mendaciously had omitted all the facts and conditions inconvenient for his argument. Half-truths, deceptions, and lies concealed the truth of why we were going to war.

La Follette’s clear vision

Amos Pinchot, a progressive journalist friend to La Follette, sat in the press gallery that night and remembered: “At the end of his speech, tremendously moved and completely convinced of the immediate and ultimate wisdom of his vision, he stood in silence, tears running down his face.” Pinchot thought that he had the look of a despairing man, “like that of a person who had failed to keep his child from doing itself an irreparable harm.” He then sat down, slumped in his seat, and closed his eyes. Another journalist sitting with Pinchot, Gilson Gardner of the Scripps newspapers, leaned over to him and said, “This is the greatest speech we will either of us ever hear. It will not be answered because it is unanswerable.”

The greatness of La Follette’s 4 April 1917 speech consists partly of its effectiveness in exposing the obfuscations of President Wilson’s fateful war message, but also of its prophetic character. He foresaw that the war would have an imperialist outcome, no matter which side won. The Paris Peace Conference at the end of the war confirmed these forebodings, as the victors created a spoils-based international order that would lead to the outbreak of the Second World War twenty years later and prepare the ground for the manifold crises in the Middle East that afflict us today.

Lunging from illusion to illusion

Moreover, La Follette rightly sensed that intervention in the war would be an irreversible turning point for the United States, the decisive act of unleashing what William Appleman Williams would call the tragedy of American diplomacy. As the world’s only creditor nation in 1919, the United States became the chief funder and the linchpin of the postwar international order. America’s foreign policy would not be able to escape the gravitational pull of economic forces operating on a global scale. Endless wars would be in the country’s future.

We continue to live the tragedy of American diplomacy today, as our leaders lunge from illusion to illusion with no more idea than President Wilson had about the desolating costs of empire. La Follette thought that it would do no good in the long run to resort to the President’s politically soothing euphemisms to describe our empire. That these euphemisms, either in their original or updated forms, continue in use as the only way leading presidential candidates can talk about American foreign policy is a tribute to Wilson’s genius as a salesman. At the same time, the current political campaign reminds us of La Follette’s greater genius as a true leader.

Richard Drake is professor of history at the University of Montana. He is the author of The Education of an Anti-Imperialist: Robert La Follette and U.S. Expansion; Apostles and Agitators:Italy’s Marxist Revolutionary Tradition; and The Aldo Moro Murder Case, among other works.

Related writings by Richard Drake:

The Education of an Anti-Imperialist: Robert La Follette and U.S. Expansion (Studies in American Thought and Culture). University of Wisconsin Press, 2013.

On The Origins Of the Middle East Morass: This Is When Muslims In The Middle East Turned To Extremism

New Books in March 2016

We are excited to announce six books forthcoming this month!

THE BLUE HOUR
Jennifer Whitaker
Winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry
Selected by Denise Duhamel

Fairy tales both familiar and obscure create a threshold, and the The Blue Hour pulls us over it. With precise language and rich detail, these poems unflinchingly create an eerie world marked by abuse, asking readers not just to bear witness but to try to understand how we make meaning in the face of the meaningless violence.

 

THE BOOK OF HULGA
Rita Mae Reese
Winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry
Selected by Denise Duhamel

The Book of Hulga speculates—with humor, tenderness, and a brutal precision—on a character that Flannery O’Connor envisioned but did not live long enough to write: “the angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth.” These striking poems look to the same sources that O’Connor sought out, from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Edgar Allan Poe to Simone Weil. Original illustrations by Julie Franki further illuminate Reese’s imaginative verse biography of a modern-day hillbilly saint.

REASON AFTER ITS ECLIPSE
On Late Critical Theory
Martin Jay

Martin Jay tackles a question as old as Plato and still pressing today: what is reason, and what roles does and should it have in human endeavor? Applying the tools of intellectual history, Reason after Its Eclipse examines the overlapping, but not fully compatible, meanings that have accrued to the term “reason” over two millennia, homing in on moments of crisis, critique, and defense of reason.

 

FEEDING MANILA IN PEACE AND WAR, 1850–1945
Daniel F. Doeppers

Policymakers and scholars have come to realize that getting food, water, and services to the millions who live in the world’s few dozen megacities is one of the twenty-first century’s most formidable challenges. As these populations continue to grow, apocalyptic scenarios—sprawling slums plagued by hunger, disease, and social disarray—become increasingly plausible. In Feeding Manila in Peace and War, 1850–1945, Daniel F. Doeppers traces nearly a century in the life of Manila, one of the world’s largest cities, to show how it grew and what sustained it.

 

SEVEN YEARS OF GRACE
The Inspired Mission of Achsa W. Sprague
Sara Rath

Distributed for the Vermont Historical Society

Seven Years of Grace is a dramatized account of the life of Achsa Sprague (1827–1862), who in the decade preceding the American Civil War lectured to audiences of thousands on Spiritualism, the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and prison reform. She presented herself as a medium, lecturing and singing hymns in a state of trance. Alone on stage, she drew acclaim and admiration but also jeers, ridicule, and condemnation. A skeptic in Oswego, New York, asked, “Why is it that all the world should run nightly mad to hear her in a pretended trance?” A Milwaukee newspaper proclaimed her words “profound twaddle from beginning to end.” Yet Achsa’s crowds continued to grow in size and enthusiasm. Grounded in the extensive collection of Achsa Sprague’s papers at the Vermont Historical Society, Seven Years of Grace is both a fascinating tale and a revealing window into the past.

DEATH STALKS DOOR COUNTY
Patricia Skalka

The first book in the Dave Cubiak Door County Mystery Series, now in paperback

Six deaths. A grief-stricken investigator. Betrayal. Why?

“Can a big-city cop solve a series of murders whose only witnesses may be the hemlocks? An atmospheric debut.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Murder seems unseemly in Door County, a peninsula covered in forests, lined by beaches, and filled with summer cabins and tourist resorts. That’s the hook for murder-thriller Death Stalks Door County, the first in a series involving ranger Dave Cubiak, a former Chicago homicide detective.”—Milwaukee Shepherd Express

Read more here.

A Mysterious Life and Calling

Preacher, teacher, and postmistress, Charlotte Levy Riley was born into slavery but became a popular evangelist after emancipation

 

A MYSTERIOUS LIFE AND CALLING
From Slavery to Ministry in South Carolina  

Reverend Mrs. Charlotte S. Riley
Edited with an introduction by Crystal J. Lucky; Foreword by Joycelyn K. Moody

University of Wisconsin Press   January 2016

    Professor Crystal J. Lucky

Crystal Lucky lived up to her name when she found a forgotten autobiography of a former slave in the library archives at Wilberforce University in Ohio. Lucky, an associate professor of English and the director of the Africana Studies Program at Villanova University in Philadelphia, is also an ordained elder, church official, and pastor’s wife. So, she was thrilled and astonished to discover the unknown memoir of an African American woman who was a licensed minister and popular preacher in the Carolinas after emancipation from slavery.

Reverend Mrs. Charlotte Levy Riley had called her book, “A Mysterious Life and Calling.” As Lucky began to read it, she knew that she had found something—and someone—extraordinary. Lucky has now published Riley’s memoir with the University of Wisconsin Press, providing an introduction and notes on events, society, and religious practice in the periods before, during, and after the Civil War and Reconstruction, and placing Riley’s story in the context of other spiritual autobiographies and slave narratives.

“[Crystal] Lucky has truly uncovered a gem with this autobiography of Charlotte S. Riley, a former slave who became a reverend in the African Methodist Episcopal church after emancipation. . . . An important, informative achievement.”—Publishers Weekly

Born into slavery in 1839 in Charleston, South Carolina, young Charlotte Levy was taught to read, write, and sew despite laws forbidding black literacy. Raised a Presbyterian, she wrote of her conversion at age fourteen to the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, embracing its ecstatic worship and led by her own spiritual visions.

Riley’s memoir is a revelation on many counts, including life in urban Charleston before and after emancipation, her work as a preacher at multiracial revivals, the rise of African American civil servants in the Reconstruction era, and her education and development as the only woman preacher in South Carolina. She was a licensed female minister in a patriarchal church, a feat rarely achieved at that time by women anywhere in the country, whether black or white. She also became a teacher of newly emancipated black people and their children, and postmistress of Lincolnville, an all-black incorporated town outside of Charleston where she owned a home and spent most of her adult life.

“An astounding find! Riley’s autobiography shifts and revises what we thought we knew about black autobiography, antebellum autobiography, memoirs of spiritual awakening, narratives of slavery, and the history of South Carolina.” —Joycelyn Moody, University of Texas at San Antonio

Riley published her memoir privately in the early twentieth century, but as of yet Lucky has not discovered the year of its publication. “What is clear,” Lucky says, “is that the events span the nineteenth century and the earliest years of the twentieth. Charlotte was born to enslaved parents, John and Sarah Levy, in Charleston on August 26, 1839.”

“As an enslaved girl in one of the busiest cities in the antebellum South, young Charlotte was spared some of the physical hardships of chattel slavery. She even received a modest education at a school run by a local widow, where she learned to read, write, sew, and do basic math. Her mother died when she was very young, so an uncle and a grandmother helped to raise her. Eventually, she began to live with and serve her grandmother’s white mistress, which closely aligned her with affluent, white Charlestonians. At the close of the Civil War, Charlotte married a free black architect, was shortly thereafter abandoned by her husband, began to worship and work with the A.M.E. Church, taught in a church-sponsored school, and received her local preacher’s license in 1871, just one year after African American men obtained the right to vote. She really is quite remarkable.”—Crystal Lucky

As the Reverend Charlotte S. Riley, the newly freed woman worked tirelessly to position African American men, women, and children to benefit economically, educationally, and spiritually from the vast changes that were happening throughout the United States as a result of Emancipation. She taught basic literacy skills and Bible classes to children and adults and traveled hundreds of miles to preach, despite debilitating health problems. In her travels, she also began to assist African American communities and mentor leaders in resisting the backlash of racial violence and the rise of Jim Crow laws. She took a role in organizing sharecroppers, assisting the newly formed Colored National Labor Union, and aiding the Honorable Robert Brown Elliott, the first African American commanding general of the South Carolina National Guard.

Although a memoir like Riley’s is quite rare, Lucky points out, “The power of narrative was important for women, whose physical presence was consistently scrutinized. Riley was aware of her tenuous public position; she repeatedly refers to herself in her autobiography as a ‘woman preacher’ rather than as a preacher or minister.” For some, her existence posed problems. “She faced skepticism from whites and blacks about whether a ‘real woman’ could be a preacher and, in turn, whether a preacher could really be a woman.”

A few accounts by nineteenth-century black preaching women in the northern states are known, but this is the first discovery of such a memoir written in the American South. Herman Beaver, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, notes, “This edition will be in people’s hands for a very long time. A Mysterious Life and Calling is a valuable primary source that can be referenced and studied in so many literary and cultural contexts.”

A Mysterious Life and Calling: From Slavery to Ministry in South Carolina by the Reverend Charlotte S. Riley will be published in January 2016 by the University of Wisconsin Press and can be ordered from local and online booksellers, or requested from libraries. Publicity contact: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu

Surprising? Mysterious!

Today kicks off the fourth annual University Press Week organized by the American Association of University Presses. The University of Wisconsin Press and more than forty other presses are participating in the AAUP’s annual blog tour during the week. This tour highlights the value of university presses and the contributions they make to scholarship and our society. This year’s theme is Surprising! so the blogs will highlight some of the surprising things university presses publish. Check the tour every day for new posts!

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Mystery fiction from the University of Wisconsin Press is both a hit and a fit

James DeVita

James DeVita is Wisconsin’s preeminent stage actor, acclaimed this year by the Wall Street Journal as “the best classical actor in the United States today.” But DeVita jokes that he’s really a writer with an acting habit. A successful playwright and author of much-praised YA novels, DeVita published his first novel for adults this year, a gritty crime thriller set in Chicago and Wisconsin. The twist? A WINSOME MURDER stars a hard-bitten detective who finds insights in Shakespeare’s bloodiest plays.

“An engaging mystery that’s a feast of literary allusions. . . . [Detective James] Mangan’s ‘verbal quirks,’ snatches of prose or poetry that pop into his head and help him solve cases, make him an unusually distinctive sleuth.” —Publishers Weekly

This combination of regional settings and brainy themes epitomizes the successful range of mystery fiction that UWP has been publishing in recent years. DeVita hopes to spin his debut mystery into a series (in between acting stints at the Milwaukee Rep, American Players Theatre, and touring performances). Several other UWP authors are already on a roll with their own mystery series.

Michael Hinden and Betsy Draine

Summers spent in the Dordogne region of France inspired Betsy Draine and Michael Hinden, professors emeriti of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to start their Nora Barnes and Toby Sandler Series. Like their sleuths, Draine and Hinden are a married couple who enjoy travel, art, and fine food and wine. After writing two nonfiction books about Dordogne, they collaborated on MURDER IN LASCAUX, sending their detective duo into the famous cave filled with Cro-Magnon paintings as well as into French castles, chateaus, and restaurants.

“A whodunit that nicely balances a breezily light travelogue with urgency and suspense. Readers will hope this is the first of a series,” wrote Publishers Weekly.

Readers’ hopes were answered with a second book in the series, THE BODY IN BODEGA BAY, in which art historian Nora and antiques dealer Toby are at home in California, sorting out a criminal tangle of Russian art and Alfred Hitchcock memorabilia. And in Spring 2016, Nora and Toby will be back in the south of France with DEATH ON A STARRY NIGHT. French art, fine wine, romance, and murder mingle as academics squabble over how Vincent Van Gogh died.

Wisconsin’s most popular vacation destination is the setting for Patricia Skalka’s Dave Cubiak Door County Mysteries. Door County is the “Cape Cod of the Midwest,” a scenic peninsula jutting into Lake Michigan. Skalka, a former writer for Reader’s Digest and a native of Chicago, has mapped out plots for seven Dave Cubiak mysteries, inspired by time spent at her Door cottage over the years. 

In DEATH STALKS DOOR COUNTY, Skalka introduced Dave Cubiak, a morose homicide detective hoping to find solace in a new job as a park ranger. But there is no peace for Cubiak, as six deaths mar the holiday mood of summer vacationers. She followed up quickly with DEATH AT GILLS ROCK, in which newly elected Sheriff Cubiak follows an old trail of lies and betrayal.

“In her atmospheric, tightly written sequel, Skalka vividly captures the beauty of a remote Wisconsin peninsula that will attract readers of regional mysteries. Also recommended for fans of William Kent Krueger, Nevada Barr, and Mary Logue.”—Library Journal, *starred review

ASSAULT WITH A DEADLY LIE is the eighth installment in Lev Raphael’s series featuring English professor (and part-time sleuth) Nick Hoffman, set in a Michigan college town. Raphael draws on his experience as an Edith Wharton scholar, a prominent gay writer, and the son of Holocaust survivors to fashion a stunning and suspenseful tale of slander, prejudice, harassment, moral courage and cowardice, and the militarization of local police.

Lev Raphael

“It’s a terrifying thought: the idea that someone can accuse you of a crime, and a SWAT team shows up at your door and drags you away. . . . Raphael makes it quite clear that no one is immune.”—Mystery Scene

Jerry Apps

Popular Wisconsin writer Jerry Apps has produced six novels set in fictional Ames County, Wisconsin, some with mystery themes. His bestseller has been IN A PICKLE, in which the heavy-handed tactics of the H. H. Harlow Pickle Company are wreaking havoc with small farmers’ way of life.

“Apps utterly wins us over.  . . . [He} invests the novel with the kind of realism, precise detail, and local color that only someone who had lived the story could do.”—Booklist 

Recent Book Awards and Honors

Click on the book covers for more information on each book.

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Rigoberto González, author of the UW Press books Butterfly Boy and Autobiography of My Hungers  *  Awarded the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement by the Publishing Triangle

The City of Palaces: A Novel by Michael Nava
Winner, International Latino Book Award for Latino Fiction, Latino Literacy Now  *  Second place, International Latino Book Award for Historical Fiction, Latino Literacy Now   *   Finalist, Gay Fiction, Lambda Literary Awards

Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia by Michelle Caswell 
Winner, Waldo Gifford Leland Award, Society of American Archivists 

Understanding and Teaching U.S. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History, edited by Leila J. Rupp and Susan K. Freeman
Winner, Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Anthology

My Favorite Tyrants by Joanne Diaz
Winner, Midwest Book Award for Poetry, Midwest Independent Publishers Association

Otherwise Unseeable by Betsy Sholl

Winner, Maine Literary Award, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance

The Sleeve Waves by Angela Sorby
Outstanding Achievement in Poetry Award, Wisconsin Library Association  *  Honorable Mention, Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award, Council of Wisconsin Writers

The Offense of Love: Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris, and Tristia 2  by Ovid, translation by Julia Dyson Hejduk
Finalist, National Translation Award, American Literary Translators Association

 Selected Epigrams by Martial, Translated by Susan McLean
 Finalist, Literary Translation Award, PEN Center USA

Living a Land Ethic: A History of Cooperative Conservation by Stephen A. Laubach
Finalist, Midwest Book Award for Nature, Midwest Independent Publishers Association  *  
Finalist, Midwest Book Award for History, Midwest Independent Publishers Association

 

Assault with a Deadly Lie: A Nick Hoffman Novel of Suspense by Lev Raphael  

Finalist, Midwest Book Award for Mystery/Thriller Fiction, Midwest Independent Publishers Association

Christina Stoddard talks about poetry, Mormonism, feminism, gang violence, and revenge

Christina Stoddard is the author of the poetry collection HIVE, for which she is the winner of the 2014 Brittingham Prize in Poetry. Hive has just been published by the University of Wisconsin Press. We spoke with Stoddard about this fierce debut collection of poems about brutality, exaltation, rebellion, and allegiance.

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I needed to write a poem that was absolutely boiling over with rage.

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Where did the title of the book come from? Why Hive?   Beehives are actually an important symbol in Mormon culture, and have been dating back to pioneer times. The exact reason why is not known for sure, but there are a few theories. One is that honeybees embody many qualities that the Church teaches its members to prize: harmony, industriousness, order, communal labor. Everyone performing their assigned role and everyone working together for the common good. Bees are cohesive and single-minded, not individual. Bees don’t deviate from the path they’re given—and thematically that is perfect for my book, which is about a teenage girl who is doing exactly that: deviating from the path she’s supposed to follow. Utah’s nickname is the Beehive State—even though they don’t really raise bees there and Utah doesn’t produce a lot of honey.

I gather from the book that you did not grow up in Utah, however.   No, I didn’t. I was born in the Pacific Northwest and grew up in Tacoma, WA, which is where the book is set. But my father is from Utah, and we visited relatives there often, so I’m familiar with a few cities in Utah.

How long did it take you to write the book?  That’s a little difficult to answer, because I spent many years

Christina Stoddard

trying to write it and mostly failing. Originally what I produced weren’t poems, they were more like polemics. I was a very angry person in my teens and twenties, and I had to work through that anger first. A few of the poems have existed in some form for more than a decade. But most of the book was written over a period of three years, 2010 to 2013, after I had taken some creative writing workshops from poets Claudia Emerson and Ellen Bryant Voigt. Those women gave me the keys that unlocked everything else.

What sorts of keys?  I took a summer workshop at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, from Claudia Emerson, and when she read the group of poems I had turned in for class, Claudia basically told me that it seemed like I was phoning it in. She said I wasn’t pushing myself in either form or subject matter, and she challenged me to do better.

Really?  Yes. That hurt at first, certainly, but I decided there were two options: I could either give up and go sulk in the corner, or I could fling myself off a cliff of experimentation and see what happened. I chose the cliff. I started trying to write lyric poems, whereas previously my style had been very chatty, straightforward and plain, very rooted in story, what are often called narrative poems. A narrative poem has a beginning, middle, and end, and there’s usually a lot of context about what’s going on.

I took that new lyrical work and applied the next summer to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. I had no idea if the poems were any good—they were way outside of my comfort zone. But I got accepted, and I took a workshop with Ellen Bryant Voigt. Ellen once  . . .  Full interview continued here

Jan Vansina, pioneering historian of Africa, receives lifetime achievement award from AHA

For reclaiming the “unknowable” history of Africa in seven landmark books from the University of Wisconsin Press

Jan Vansina. Photo by Catherine A. Reiland / African Studies Program, UW-Madison. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Jan Vansina, one of the world’s foremost historians of Africa who literally wrote the book on using Oral Tradition as History, was honored at the January 2015 convention of the American Historical Association with its Award for Scholarly Distinction. The honor is awarded for outstanding lifetime achievements in the field of history. Vansina was cited in particular for his many innovations in scholarly methodology, institution-building, and mentoring.

Vansina is considered one of the founders of the field of African history in the 1950s and 1960s, a time not so long ago when there was still a widely held view that cultures without written texts had no history, or that their history was unknowable. Up to that point, “African” historiography focused entirely on the history of European colonizers in Africa, not on the history of Africans.

Vansina was an early recipient of the “Distinguished Africanist” award by the African Studies Association of the United States, and in 2000 he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society.

In an interview with the University of Wisconsin Press, where he has now published eight books over the course of fifty years (seven on Africa and one on his Belgian childhood), Vansina looked back at how his books published by UWP have influenced the study of Africa’s history, both within Africa and around the world.

“My own case shows that the kind of specialized scholarly books published by university presses typically lead to further research by others and do so for a whole generation or longer. In a field that is new, such as African history was when I began, university presses publish specialized works of scholarship that commercial publishers take no interest in. And I have found that just placing research findings in archives is not enough: publication is absolutely essential to the advancement of research. Indeed, I would argue that university presses are as essential for research in the humanities and social sciences around the globe as are laboratories for research scientists.”

As a young employee of a Belgian research agency sent to the Congo in 1952, Vansina discovered that he could analyze the oral tradition stories he heard from Kuba informants by using the same methods he had learned for extracting historical information from European medieval dirges. This was a historiographical breakthrough that gave the study of pre-colonial African history both the scholarly justification and the self-confidence it had been lacking.

Vansina recalls the impact of his first book with UW Press in 1966, Kingdoms of the Savanna: 

“It was a preliminary historical overview of an area and period in Africa that was little known in academic circles at that point. It was quickly translated into French and published in Kinshasa, and it won the Herskovits Prize for best book from the African Studies Association.”

Although historians were accustomed to studying kingdoms, the book used a very innovative mix of oral and written sources to provide a history of pre-colonial kingdoms in central Africa. At the time, a review of the book in the American Historical Review recognized Vansina’s innovation:

“This signal contribution to African history, and the writing of history more generally, has emerged from the scholarship of one who is ranked by many as among the foremost of the contemporary historians of sub-Saharan Africa.”—American Historical Review

“Over the next twenty-five years or so,” Vansina remembers, “several scholars were inspired by the book to pursue their own research in the past of the various kingdoms I wrote about, so that by the year 2000, individual monographs had been written about nearly all the major kingdoms of the southern savannas (at least five in RD Congo, three in Zambia, and three in Angola).

The impact of Kingdoms outside academia was rather colorful, Vansina recalls. “In Central Africa many in the Congo read it, and it became coveted underground reading for those in the Angolan insurrection against their Portuguese overlords. Its popular impact was especially strong in the lower Democratic Republic of Congo (or RD Congo), where local demand has been strong enough to produce a translation in Kikongo around 1990 and another one in Lingala. In the 1970s there was even a local church calling itself ‘The Church of the Kingdoms of the Savanna.’ ”

In 1978, Vansina published a scholarly monograph, The Children of Woot, on the history of a single kingdom in RD Congo. He comments, “The one completely new feature for a history book was the inclusion of its long lexical appendix, as essential to the argument. A monograph like this is not expected to have a host of readers when it is published but it is expected to attract small numbers of researchers for many years thereafter. Thus even today this book and especially its data have not been superseded by anything else.”

Oral Tradition as History, a methodological work published in 1985, is Vansina’s book that is most widely known and used in fields beyond African history. “It is a manual about how to handle a certain kind of oral history worldwide, not just in Africa. Some twenty-five years earlier as a young man, what I had written about oral tradition had made a splash and led to extensive debates. This new book was a complete reworking that took into account valid observations made by critics, but still showed the extent to which oral histories of this sort could be relied upon. It has had an active life. For example, it was recently translated into Indonesian Malay.”

Vansina continued to innovate with his book Paths in the Rainforests (1990), a historical overview built primarily on linguistic and archaeological data reaching more than two thousand years into the past. It attempted a history of the peoples in the Central African rainforests, a large area that had been written off as “without history.”

“But I wrote it as history, introducing new concepts, and included a very large appendix showing the results of comparative linguistic data. No one had ever attempted anything similar, certainly not on that scale, and this book was therefore a bit of a gamble, but it convinced most social anthropologists and archaeologists. I am gratified that from that time onward it has served as an incentive for much further research by others. This year an archaeologist wrote me to say that his discoveries conformed to the predictions the book had made. The most important results of Paths in the Rainforests, though, have been in the field of history, where others have now used similar techniques in their own work, including very deep historical research on the Great Lakes region of East Africa.”

“Until the publication of Paths in the Rainforests, it was difficult to make more than superficial attacks on the widespread myth that Central African peoples live in ‘impenetrable jungles as their ancestors have lived for thousands of years.’ . . . Jan Vansina’s Paths makes a truly significant contribution to African history by providing a solid framework for the description and integration of a millennium of evolution of the many societies of the vast rainforests.”—Curtis A. Keim, African Studies Review

As the field of African history matured, Vansina was one of the first to look back at it in a combination historiography and memoir, in his 1994 book Living with Africa. David Henige, longtime African studies librarian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and co-editor of a UW Press book series in African studies, commented on the significance of the memoir.

“Jan Vansina’s academic career is virtually simultaneous with the field of African history itself. His centrality in the burgeoning field in the 1950s and 1960s was so intense that he was actually called a ‘Culture Hero’ in print, after the anthropological concept that a single figure epitomizes in the collective memory an entire epoch.” —David Henige, University of Wisconsin

Also in 1994, the horrific violence and mass killings in Rwanda returned Vansina’s attention to research he had done in Rwanda from 1957 to 1961. The rich and extensive documentation he had collected was available in an archive there, but no one had made use of it for publications.

“I knew from that research that Rwanda’s past, and historical memories of that past, were quite relevant to a fuller understanding of the genocide and people’s motivations. I also felt that knowledge of Rwanda’s pre-colonial history could contribute to political choices about its future.

So, I first wrote a book in French about the main social and political developments of the country, directed as much towards Rwanda’s governing elite as towards historians. But the new elite came mostly from Uganda and used English, not French. So I translated the work into English and UW Press published it as Antecedents to Modern Rwanda in 2004.”

“Though its narrative and its major interpretations have been accepted by most academics, and also led to the publication of two academic debates about its significance, in Rwanda there is official silence about the book. It has not been formally banned in Rwanda, but the history I present runs counter to the official ideology and now also to the official history the government promulgates. But I know that actually the book has been widely read in Rwanda, even discussed, but no one will publicly admit to this. I hope that it will eventually be recognized and lead to further research in Rwanda.”

Most recently, in 2010, Vansina experimented with another new approach to African history. “Being Colonized: The Kuba Experience in Rural Congo, 1880–1960, was my deliberate attempt to write a book for undergraduates. It presents the history of a colony through the eyes of a colonized people. I used sidebars and illustrations, a format still rather uncommon in works of African history. I resisted reducing the historical complexity of the period to simple formulas. The anecdotal evidence so far has it that while most students like it, many find all those names and the very complexity of the history a bit overwhelming as well. But I hope it will inspire others to experiment further with approaches for undergraduates that will open new perspectives to them.”

Jan Vansina’s legacy also includes an extraordinary impact beyond academia. When the journalist Alex Haley was researching the family history that would become his famous book Roots, a powerful and groundbreaking story of enslaved African Americans, he could find no written documents that directed him to a point of origin in Africa. Eventually, someone suggested that he contact Jan Vansina, who had been doing innovative research on African oral traditions.

Vansina suggested to Haley that the few words, names, and stories that had been passed down to Haley from an enslaved African ancestor named Kunta Kinte might be from the Mandingo people in Gambia, a culture with a very rich oral tradition recited by trained griots. Eventually Haley’s quest led him to a griot in a remote Gambian village who had memorized the history of a large, extended Kinte family. Two hours into the recitation, the griot mentioned a young man, Kunta, who went away from his village to chop wood and was never seen again. This astonishing connection was the beginning of a great movement of reclamation of African heritage by African Americans.

Now 85 years old and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Vansina recently published his eighth book with the University of Wisconsin Press, departing from African history to write a memoir of his youth in war-torn Belgium: Through the Day, Through the Night: A Flemish Belgian Boyhood and World War II.

“Not only a personal narration about the Flemish struggle to achieve cultural and political recognition, Vansina’s Through the Day, Through the Night is also a lesson on how history and memory work.”—Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Université Laval, Canada

But Vansina is not done yet; the rich research notes and knowledge of primary sources that he’s accumulated over a lifetime of scholarship will doubtless result in continuing innovative and influential work on the history of Africa.

Does education about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history matter? You bet it does.

LEILA J. RUPP is the co-editor of the newest book in the Harvey Goldberg Series for Understanding and Teaching History published by the University of Wisconsin Press. She and Susan K. Freeman are co-editors of UNDERSTANDING AND TEACHING U.S. LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, AND TRANSGENDER HISTORY. Rupp is a professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Freeman is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at Western Michigan University.

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by Leila J. Rupp

It’s been 35 years since the first March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, making it an appropriate moment to evaluate where the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movement is now. In 1979, just 10 years after Stonewall, 2 years after Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign, and 1 year after the murder of Harvey Milk, more than 100,000 people gathered in Washington to demand equal rights for gay, lesbian, and bisexual people.

We hear a great deal these days about what has changed: gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military, same-sex couples rushing to the altar, positive representations of queer people in the media. But the official demands of the march—passage of a comprehensive lesbian/gay rights bill in congress, issuance of a presidential executive order banning discrimination based on sexual orientation, repeal of all anti-lesbian/gay laws, an end to discrimination in lesbian mother and gay father custody cases, and protection of lesbian and gay youth—remain mostly unmet.

ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, if signed into law, might have satisfied the first demand. ENDA finally passed in the Senate last fall, but it is now losing the support of gay organizations because of the broad religious exemptions with the potential to gut the bill, given the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Hobby Lobby case. President Obama signed an executive order adding transsexuals to those federal employees already protected on the basis of sexual orientation and banning discrimination on the basis of gender and sexual identity by companies with federal contracts, going somewhat beyond the second demand. As for the other three—well, anti-gay laws remain on the books, lesbian mothers and gay fathers still can’t count on a fair deal, and no one has yet figured out how to “protect lesbian and gay youth from any laws which are used to discriminate against, oppress, and/or harass them in their homes, schools, jobs, and social environments,” as the final march demand put it.

And that’s the demand I’ve been thinking a lot about lately as a historian and California resident. Not so much about protecting students from oppressive laws, but about what, if anything, they know about Anita Bryant, Harvey Milk, Stonewall, and marches on Washington. California’s Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Responsible (FAIR) Act, signed into law in 2011, is the nation’s first legislation requiring public schools to teach about the contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans alongside those marginalized by gender, ethnicity, race, and disability. This in contrast to Tennessee, for example, where the state legislature has considered a Classroom Protection Act, known as the “Don’t Say Gay Bill,” which would prevent teachers from talking about sexual orientation and even require them to notify parents if they suspect children might be queer.

Given the bullying that goes on in the schools and the high rate of suicide of queer youth, does education matter? You bet it does. When four gay or bisexual students in the Anoka-Hennepin, Minnesota, school district committed suicide, and the school district’s gag order prevented staff from talking about issues of sexual orientation, the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the Southern Poverty Law Center, supported by the Justice Department, filed and won a lawsuit against the school district. The suit cited a California climate study that showed that any mention of queer people or issues increased student safety and improved the climate for queer students. Robert King, a teacher at Palisades Charter High School in southern California, tells a story about the impact of including LGBT content as part of one day’s lecture on civil rights movements. He was talking about Stonewall when a student, Jack Davis, raised his hand and came out to the class. His classmates applauded, got up out of their seats, and hugged him. In an essay published later, Davis wrote that he had been “looking for a way to come out to everyone,” and the mention of Stonewall gave him the opportunity. Walking out of class, the “weight of the world seemingly lifted from my shoulders . . . and I was ecstatic.”

If the mere mention of Stonewall in part of one lecture on one day can mean so much to a vulnerable student, just think what a transformed curriculum could do, not just in California, but across the country. It would go a very long way toward crossing at least one of the demands from 1979 off the list.

A transformed curriculum is of value to all students and teachers, whatever their orientation. LGBT history can provide both a fuller understanding of U.S. history and contextualization for the modern world. A book I have co-edited with Susan K. Freeman—Understanding and Teaching U.S. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History—is the first book designed for university and high school teachers who want to integrate queer history into the standard curriculum. Full of classroom-tested advice, rich information, and inspiring stories, it is a valuable resource for anyone who thinks history should be an all-inclusive story.

Leila J. Rupp is professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and coeditor, with Susan Freeman, of Understanding and Teaching U.S. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History, published in the Harvey Goldberg Series for Understanding and Teaching History from the University of Wisconsin Press. Rupp is the author of many books, including A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America and Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women.

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