University of Nebraska Press

UNP ForeWord Book of the Year Award Winners

The ForeWord Book of the Year Awards have been announced, and two of our books were winners. Stolen Horses by Dan O’Brien won silver in the Fiction-General category, and Quotidiana by Patrick Madden took bronze in the Essays category.

Stolen Horses describes the conflict between long-time residents and affluent newcomers in the ranch town of McDermot, Nebraska. McDermot is an ideal place for those who want to escape from their hectic city lives, but the town means something very different to these people than it does to its original inhabitants. This disagreement between new and old interests escalates, leading to mysterious deaths and pushing locals to fight the forces of “progress.”

Quotidiana is a collection of essays in which Patrick Madden sheds a new light upon everyday occurrences. His stories of selling garlic, changing diapers, and estimating how many grains of sand are on the earth, among others, remind the reader that the world is full of overlooked and underappreciated wonders.

The University of Nebraska Press is honored to work with talented and praiseworthy authors such as Dan and Patrick. Congratulations to both recipients!

An Edgar Award

Last night, the Mystery Writers of America announced the winners of the 2011 Edgar Allan Poe Awards in New York City.

And the best fact crime award went to… Scoreboard Baby: A Story of College Football, Crimeand Complicity by Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry.

Rob Taylor was there to accept the award on behalf of the University of Nebraska Press and the authors.

Check out the press release here for the other winners.

Congrats guys!

Winner of the Seymour Medal

1921: The Yankees, the Giants, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York by Lyle Spatzand Steve Steinberg takes place at the dawn of the roaring twenties whenbaseball was struggling to overcome two of its darkest moments: the death of a player during a Major League game and the revelations of the 1919 Black Sox scandal. At this critical juncture for baseball, two teams emerged to fight for the future of the game. They were also battling for the hearts and minds of New Yorkers as the city rose in dramatic fashion to the pinnacleof the baseball world.

1921 is the winner of the 2011 Seymour Medal, sponsored by the Society for American Baseball Research,which honors the best book of baseball history or biography. The awards committee called 1921 “an important addition to baseball literature.”

The authors will receivetheir medal at the Seymour Medal Conference, May 13-14 in Cleveland, Ohio.

Another UNP book, Joe Cronin: A Life in Baseball by Mark Armour, was a finalist.

Congrats to the authors!

Author finalist for Oregon award

Paul VanDevelder was announced as a finalist for the Frances Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction for his book Savages and Scoundrels.

His UNP book, Coyote Warrior, was named an editor’s choice by Audubon saying “[VanDevelder] holds a mirror up to postcolonial America itself, showing how we are entwined and indebted to those who have lived here for thousands of years.”

VanDevelder has been an investigative reporter, photojournalist, and documentary filmmaker for more than twenty years. His award-winning work has appeared in the New York Times, National Geographic Traveler, Audubon, Esquire, and the Seattle Times.

Other finalists for the award are Paul Collins for The Book of William, Tom Krattenmaker for Onward Christian Athletes and Barry Sanders for Unsuspecting Souls and The Green Zone.

The awards ceremony announcing the winners will take place Monday, April 25, 2011. Vote for the People’s Choice Award.

Congrats Paul!

UNP author in two blogs and award finalist announced

Sonya Huber, author of Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir, was a guest writer on the blog Largerhearted Boy on Jan. 14. The blog is currently featuring a series called Book Notes, where authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates to their book.

Cover Me is about Huber’s personal experiences navigating the nation’s health-care system and brings an awful and necessary dose of reality to the political debates and propaganda surrounding health-care reform.

For Huber, her music selections hightlight each chapter in a different light. Everything from "Pink Houses" by John Mellencamp to “Sabotage” by The Beastsie Boys is incorporated on the list. To read the full playlist, check out the blog here.

Huber also had an interview with Creative Loafing talking about her health care experience and how she came to write her memoir. Read the full interview here.  

On another note, Scoreboard, Baby is a finalist for the Edgar Awards! Congrats to Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry. The awards will be announced on April 28, 2011.

Cervantes Prize winner

Ana Maria Matute earned this year's Cervantes Prize, which is given annually to a Spanish or Latin American writer for lifetime achievement. Founded in 1976 by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the Cervantes Prize is the highest award given for contributions to Spanish literature. Matute is the third woman to receive this prestigious honor. 

In 1997, we published an English translation of her book, Celebration in the Northwest (Spanish title: Fiesta al Noroeste), as part of our European Women Writers series. Previous winners include the 2010 Nobel Prize Winner in Literature Mario Vargas Llosa, who was also a contributor to The Global Game: Writers on Soccer.

UNP author wins 2010 Athearn Prize

UNP congratulates Margaret D. Jacobs again on winning the 2010 Athearn Western History Association Prize for her book White Mother to a Dark Race. We just received this photo from the annual awards banquet at the WHA Conference in Lake Tahoe on Friday, Oct. 15. Jacobs is a professor of history and the director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She has also won the 2010 Bancroft Prize and the Armitage-Jameson Prize sponsored by the Coalition for Western Women’s History.

 
 
Heather Lundine, UNP managing editor; Margaret D. Jacobs, author; John R. Wunder, President of the Western History Association and UNL professor of history.  

UNP author presented with AAS Emme Award

Jay Gallentine was presented with the AAS Emme Award Tuesday night! This annual award is sponsored by the American Astonautical Society and recognizes outstanding books which advance public understanding of astronautics through originality, scholarship and readability.

 

Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft, tells the story behind the first unmanned space probes and planetary explorers. It includes everything from the Sputnik and Explorer satellites in the 1950s to the Voyager Missions of the 1970s. Gallentine uses original interviews with keyplayers, never-before-seen photos and journal excerpts to illustrate the lives and legacies of the Americans and Soviets who experienced space exploration like no one else.

                 

Jay with Michael Ciancone, who is the Chair of the AAS History Committee.

 

Congratulations Jay from every at UNP!

Bill Russell receives medal from President Obama

The White House announced yesterday that President Obama will be giving Bill Russell, a former NBA star, the Medal of Freedom. This high civilian honor is presented to individuals who have made contributions to the security or the national interest of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.

Bill Russell is a former Boston Celtics Captain who led the team to eleven championships in thirteen years and was named NBA’s Most Valuable Player 5 times. He then went on to be the first African American to coach in the NBA. Russell is also an impassioned advocate of human rights and marched along side Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Dandy Dons by James W. Johnson describes for the first time how the unprecedented accomplishment of the Dons, led by coach Phil Woolpert and future hall-of-famers Bill Russell and K. C. Jones, paved the way for black talent in major college basketball and transformed the sport.

 

 

They Cleared the Lane by Ron Thomas shows how in the first half of the twentieth century pro basketball was tainted by racism, as gifted African Americans were denied the opportunity to display their talents. Thomas tells the largely untold story of what basketball was really like for the first black NBA players, including Bill Russell.

UNP author announced as laureate

Some exciting news! 

Author of Just Breathe Normally, Peggy Shumaker, was announced as the new Alaska State Writer Laureate 2010-2012 by The Alaska State Council on the Arts. As State Writer Laureate, Shumaker will represent the Council and the State of Alaska in communities, conducting workshops and readings as well as connecting Alaskan writers with each other and with the outside world. She succeeds former poet laureate Nancy Lord, who is the author of Rock, Water, Wild (University of Nebraska Press, 2009).

 
In Just Breathe Normally, a traumatic cycling accident causes Shumaker to search for meaning within extremity. The book can be defined by a moving memoir of childhood and family that testifies to the power of collective empathy in the transformations that make and remake us throughout our lives.

  
Kirkus Reviews said “Shumaker displays a rare gift. . . . [H]er scattered memories come together to form a riveting and exceptionally touching story. . . . An entrancing meditation on absolution and memory.”

 
So congrats to Peggy on being the new Alaska State Writer Laureate!