It's finally here! The University of Nebraska Press and Ted Kooser will celebrate the launch of his new book, Lights on a Ground of Darkness, tonight at the W. Dale Clark Library, 215 S. 15th St. in Downtown Omaha tonight at 7 p.m.
Lights on a Ground of Darkness is a remembrance (written as prose, instead of poetry) of the time Kooser spent with his mother’s family in Guttenberg, Iowa, when he was a little boy. The event is free and open to the public, books will be for sale, and Ted will sign copies.
And, if you missed it, Ted appeared on NPR program On Point this morning. You can find the interview, as well as links to poems and an excerpt of Lights on a Ground of Darkness on the On Point Web site.
Enjoy! And hope to see you in Omaha tonight!
Pancho Segura will sign copies of his biography,Little Pancho: The Life of Tennis Legend Pancho Segura today at the U.S. Open. The University of Nebraska Press published Little Pancho, written by Caroline Seebohm, earlier this year.
Pancho Segura has lived the life that feel-good sports movies are made of. He was born to a poor Ecuadorian family and was malnourished and sickly as a child. However, his father was a caretaker at a tennis club, so he was exposed to the sport early in his life. And even though he small and weak, he took to the sport right away.
Through hard work and many, many instances of good luck (it didn’t hurt that Pancho grew into a handsome and charming teenager) Pancho secured a place on the tennis team at the University of Miami, where he won three consecutive NCAA championships (still a record). Shortly thereafter, he turned pro, and was among the first professional tennis player to tour the U.S. and the world. It was a rough life back then: Segura and his fellow players struggled to earn a living and find acceptance in the traditional, sometimes elitist tennis world, which scorned “professionals” as outcasts. Later in his life, he became a coach at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, working with movie stars such as Charlton Heston, Barbra Streisand, and Lauren Bacall, and future pros, including Jimmy Connors.
Segura, for sure, led a varied and full life. And he still loves tennis.
We here at the University of Nebraska Press celebrated the upcoming holiday with pie. Our first ever Pie-A-Palooza was today, and about a dozen UNP employees entered their most beautiful, best tasting and most creative creations. Here’s a pic of the lovely, lovely pies, with more to come on Monday.
Have a safe and happy July 4! Our office will be closed tomorrow for the holiday, but we’ll be back on Monday.
Louise Pound’s birthday party was yesterday, as was the launch party for a new biography about her titled Louise Pound: Scholar, Athlete, Feminist Pioneer.
The University of Nebraska Press attended, and this party was notable for several reasons. Among them:
Hostess Paige Namuth actually met Louise Pound. Her parents were friends of Pound and her siblings, Roscoe and Olivia, and sometimes visited them at their Victorian home in downtown Lincoln (which, sadly, has been torn down). One visit, Louise Pound, who by then was in her 80s, took an interest in Paige, who was then about 10 years old. They spent the afternoon playing outside, and at the end of the visit, Louise gave the girl her ice skates, roller skates and golf clubs. Paige still has them, and they were on display at the party last night. (Paige also gave one golf club to a teenage girl – a promising athlete. She thought Louise would approve).
The party was held at the Antlers Center, a substance abuse recovery center that Namuth helps run, which is housed in an old mansion at the corner of South Street and Sheridan Boulevard. Lucky party attendees got a tour of home, which lore has it, was once owned by a man whose brother lived a block away, so they built an underground tunnel connecting the two homes.
Above is a photograph of Louise Pound’s golf clubs (more pics are on our Facebook page), and follow this link to a story in the Lincoln Journal Star about the event.
Today is the first day of a short but busy week here at the University of Nebraska Press. Tomorrow (Tuesday) evening is a launch party for our book Louise Pound: Scholar, Athlete, Feminist Pioneer, which is (as the title implies) a biography of linguist and notable Nebraskan Louise Pound. The book launch party, which happens to coincide with Louise Pound’s birthday, is at the Antlers Center, at the corner of Sheridan Boulevard and South Street here in Lincoln, from 5 to 7 p.m. Bonus: Some of Pound’s athletic equipment – including skates, golf clubs and tennis racquets – will be on display at the party, which is free and open to the public.
Thursday is the UNP’s inaugural pie-baking contest. This is something I’m looking forward to, as the employees of the UNP are a talented bunch in the departments of both creativity and culinary skills. Look for photographs and recipes on the blog late this week or early next.
And Friday is a holiday – sort of. It’s the day we state employees have off, since July 4 is on a Saturday this year. Bit o' Nebraska trivia: It’s also the day the City of Lincoln is putting on its fireworks display (so as not to interfere with Larry the Cable Guy’s appearance at Memorial Stadium on July 4).
In other news, the Inkwell Bookstore blog has posted images of numerous books featuring Michael Jackson on the cover. Some are pretty cool-looking in terms of cover design, some a pretty cool-looking in terms of content, and some are just plain strange. Also, today’s PW morning report mentions a Jackson bio that was already in the works is set to go to press tomorrow. Wow.
While our chief blogger Cara is still cycling across Nebraska this week, here's another University of Nebraska Press cycling memoir to check out: An American Cycling Odyssey, 1887 by Kevin J. Hayes. In 1887 a twenty-one-year-old newspaperman named George Nellis (1865–1948) rode a bicycle from Herkimer, New York, to San Francisco in seventy-two days, surpassing the transcontinental bicycle record by several weeks. He passed through Nebraska on his trip and he also managed to meet the legendary baseball player A. G. Spalding in Chicago, take in professional baseball games in Detroit and Chicago, participate in several bicycle races in Omaha, attend an opera in Cheyenne, Wyoming, enjoy a circus, and eat over two dozen bananas in one sitting in Osceola, Indiana.
I suspect Nebraska author and long-time University of Nebraska-Lincoln English professor Louise Pound (1872–1958) would've been a fan of riding across Nebraska. A distingished scholar as well as a multiple-sport athlete, in 1895 she earned a Century Road club bar for riding 100 miles in one day. (and she repeated the feat in 1896.) Robert Cochran details Louise's interesting life of scholarship, athleticism, and pioneering feminism in his new biography, Louise Pound.
