Turning Pages: University Press Week and More!
University Press Week and the Texas Book Festival
Celebrating University Press Week
This coming week is University Press Week, our favorite holiday here at the New Books Network. Listen to our interview with Anthony Cond, president of the Association of University Presses and director of Liverpool University Press.
For a complete list of UP Week events, see here
For the gallery of 103 publications, see here
To work at a university press, see here
Event: Texas Book Festival
The Texas Book Festival (TBF) will be held in Austin, Texas on November 16th & 17th. Featuring the work of over 250 authors across 31 genres, TBF’s mission is to connect writers and readers through experiences that celebrate the culture of literacy, ideas, and imagination.
Almost every session and event is free and open to the public. The festival will also honor this year’s recipient of the Texas Writer Award, the poet, educator, and editor Naomi Shihab Nye. She is the author of numerous works including Grace Notes: Poems About Families, Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems, The Tiny Journalist, Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners, Sitti’s Secrets, Habibi, This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World and The Tree is Older than You Are: Poems & Paintings from Mexico.
If you are outside of Austin, tune into their YouTube channel to see selected sessions from the Texas Book Festival, including interviews from previous years with authors including Stacey Abrams, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, and Mitchell S. Jackson.
TBF also runs Reading Rock Stars, a program that brings nationally recognized authors and illustrators to Title I elementary schools. Their Real Reads program presents writers to middle and high schools across Texas. The organization also awards Texas Library Grants, which has given over $3.5 million in grants to more than 600 libraries across the state since its inception in 1995. To learn more about TBF’s work and year-round programming including the annual Lit Crawl Austin, visit their website.
Editor Caleb Zakarin also spoke with TBF’s literary director, Hannah Gabel, which you can listen to here:
How to Tell People You’re Dying
Daniel Moran offers an English Literature professor’s perspective on the best way to tell the world that you’re dying. The great filmmaker David Lynch recently confirmed that he is suffering from emphysema. Dan takes the opportunity to celebrate Lynch’s writerly genius and offers some advice on why less is almost always more (with a hat-tip to to the ever-essential Elements of Style).
Channel Spotlight: New Books in Folklore
Our Folklore Channel highlights scholarship that investigates stories of mythical heroes, fairy tales, and the supernatural. The scholars featured illuminate the historical context that informed these myths and the values, beliefs, and social orders of their time. Folklore provides a window into how people have thought about gender, social identity, and our place in the world. Other scholars focus on how particular myths and legends have been reinterpreted over time to bring new meaning to old stories.
Today, we showcase three great, recent episodes that explore women’s roles as characters and authors in the creation and adaptation of folklore.
In Women’s Lore: 4,000 Years of Sirens, Serpents and Succubi, Sarah Clegg examines how mythical, female figures such as Lamasthu, a Mesopotamian demon who preys on babies and pregnant women, have evolved across 4,000 years. Through these myths, Clegg explores ideas of women, womanhood, and sexuality.
In The Lost Princess: Women Writers and the History of Classic Fairy Tales, Anne Duggan highlights the works of women writers who wrote fairy tales about dynamic, intrepid heroines.
In Snake Sisters and Ghost Daughters: Feminist Adaptations of Traditional Tales in Chinese Fantasy, Cathy Yue Wang turns to the process of adapting traditional Chinese fantastical texts to interrogate and challenge patriarchal paradigms embedded in these stories.
For more episodes like these, subscribe to the New Books in Folklore feed.
Thanks for the shout-out!