UPK author wins Eugene Feit Award for Civil War History

By Whitney Hale, Jacob Smith, and Mack McCormick

University Press of Kentucky (UPK) author Brian R. McEnany has been chosen to receive the Eugene Feit Award for Civil War History for For Brotherhood and Duty: The Civil War History of the West Point Class of 1862.

The Feit Award is given by the New York Military Affairs Symposium (NYMAS) to authors writing on Civil War history. The organization is devoted to increasing public knowledge, awareness, and understanding of the interrelationship of war, society and culture through the presentation and dissemination of diverse scholarly viewpoints. The NYMAS Civil War Book Award was instituted in 2002, and it became the Feit Award in 2010.

In For Brotherhood and Duty, McEnany follows the cadets of the West Point class of 1862 from their initiation, through coursework, and on the battlefield, focusing on 12 Union and four Confederate soldiers. Drawing heavily on primary sources, McEnany presents a fascinating chronicle of the young classmates, who became allies and enemies during the largest conflict ever undertaken on American soil. Their vivid accounts provide new perspectives not only on legendary battles such as Antietam, Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, and the Overland and Atlanta campaigns, but also on lesser-known battles such as Port Hudson, Olustee, High Bridge, and Pleasant Hills. Generously illustrated with more than 100 photographs and maps, this enthralling collective biography illuminates the war’s impact on a unique group of soldiers and the institution that shaped them.

McEnany graduated from the United States Military Academy with the class of 1962 and served in artillery assignments in Germany, Korea and the United States, and combat service in Vietnam. A retired lieutenant colonel and operations research analyst, he is the author of several historical articles about West Point during the Civil War.

UPK previously won the Arthur Goodzeit Book Award for Best Book on Military History from the NYMAS for The Schlieffen Plan: International Perspectives on the German Strategy for World War I, edited by Hans Ehlert, Michael Epkenhans, and Gerhard P. Gross; this is the first book from UPK to win the Feit Award.

Reprinted with permission from UKNow. 

UPK Announces New Book Series on Poetry and Prose

By Whitney Hale

The University Press of Kentucky (UPK) and Centre College have announced the inaugural writers to appear in a new book series — the University Press of Kentucky New Poetry and Prose Series. The first two authors to have their books selected for inclusion are fiction writer Rion Amilcar Scott and poet Brianna Noll. Their books will be published in the next academic year. These works were selected from more than 120 submissions and represent some of the most innovative and powerful work in new American writing.

The University Press of Kentucky New Poetry and Prose Series seeks to publish creative works that exhibit a profound attention to language, strong imagination, formal inventiveness, and awareness of one’s literary roots.

Scott’s short story collection will be published in the fall of 2016. His work centers on the fictional town of Cross River, Maryland, an African-American community that was founded in 1807 by rebellious slaves after a successful insurrection. Grappling with the experiences of adolescence, brotherhood, mistaken identity, child raising, abuse, but particularly hope, each story showcases Scott’s unique ability to flesh out intricately imagined characters and to narrate from a variety of perspectives, often revolving around children who display more wisdom, compassion, and tact than their adult counterparts.

A member of the English faculty at Bowie State University, Scott was awarded a Kimbilio Fellowship. He has published work in The Kenyon Review, Crab Orchard Review, among others and is the author of "Wolf Tickets." Series editor Lisa Williams calls it "a wildly impressive and ambitious collection of stories, which affirms that it can be the smallest human choices — of tenderness, kindness and cruelty — that make our people, and our world, what it is."

Noll’s collection of poetry, due out in the spring of 2017, explores the intersection of the scientific and the fantastical. Her subjects range from woolly mammoths and star-nosed moles to Japanese origami and Greek myth. In poems that are taut and lyrical, short-lined, enjambed and always enticing on a sentence level, Noll sometimes speaks in the voice of other creatures as she explores what it might mean to be an "other."

Noll is a founder and current poetry editor of the literary magazine The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Quarterly, American Poetry Journal, Kenyon Review Online and The Georgia Review. "Never simply descriptive," Williams describes Noll’s poems as "alchemic, composed of sharp observation and philosophic questioning, weaving together human perception, received knowledge, intellectual and emotional exploration, and profound watchfulness."

Two books will be published each academic year as part of the University Press of Kentucky New Poetry and Prose Series. Submissions of poetry and fiction are accepted for the series between April 15 and June 1. Submissions postmarked no later than June 1 should be mailed to University Press of Kentucky, Attn: New Poetry and Fiction, 663 S. Limestone Street, Lexington, KY 40508.

The series is edited by Lisa Williams, Paul L. Cantrell Associate Professor of English and director of the creative writing program at Centre College. Williams is the author of three collections of poetry, "Gazelle in the House," "Woman Reading to the Sea" and "The Hammered Dulcimer," and a recipient of the Rome Prize, the Barnard Women Poets Prize, the May Swenson Poetry Award, and an Al Smith Individual Artist Grant from the Kentucky Arts Council. The series advisor board includes Camille Dungy, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Silas House, Davis McCombs and Roger Reeves.

University Press of Kentucky is the scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, representing a consortium that now includes all of the state universities, five private colleges and two historical societies. The editorial program of the press focuses on the humanities and the social sciences. Offices for the administrative, editorial, production and marketing departments of the press are found at UK, which provides financial support toward the operating expenses of the publishing operation.

Reprinted with permission from UKNow. 

Books from UPK and UK Libraries faculty featured in Courier-Journal gift guide

The Louisville Courier-Journal featured five books connected to the University Press of Kentucky and UK Libraries on their holiday gift giving list for 2015.

The article, available to read online, lists the following UPK books:

Kentucky by Design: The Decorative Arts and American Culture, edited by Andrew Kelly, published by UPK.

The Birth of Bourbon: A Photographic Tour of Early Distilleries, by Carol Peachee, published by UPK.

The Manhattan Cocktail: A Modern Guide to the Whiskey Classic, by Albert W.A. Schmid, published by UPK.

Venerable Trees: History, Biology and Conservation in the Bluegrass, by Tom Kimmerer, published by UPK.

A fifth book on the newspaper’s list is Row by Row: Talking With Kentucky Gardeners, by Katherine Black, a former archivist at UK Libraries. Photos in the book are by Deirdre Scaggs, associate dean of the UK Libraries Special Collections Research Center. The book is published by Ohio University Press.

Twenty UPK authors attend Kentucky Book Fair

By Whitney Hale, UK Public Relations and Marketing

The 34^th annual Kentucky Book Fair took place in Frankfort, Kentucky, on Saturday, November 14, 2015. The fair featured more than 200 authors and editors showcasing their most recent books, including several writers from University Press of Kentucky (UPK). Twenty of the 2015 authors were from University Press of Kentucky.

UPK authors participating in the Kentucky Book Fair included:

• Terri Blom Crocker, The Christmas Truce: Myth, Memory, and the First World War;

• Peter P. Bosomworth, F. Douglas Scutchfield, and Paul Evans Holbrook Jr., The Letters of Thomas Merton and Victor and Carolyn Hammer: Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam;

• Theodore A. Hallam, Gerald L. Smith, Karen Cotton McDaniels, and John A. Hardin, The Kentucky African-American Encyclopedia;

• James Archambeault, Kentucky Horse Country: Images of the Bluegrass ;

• Roberta Simpson Brown and Lonnie E. Brown, Haunted Holidays: Twelve Months of Kentucky Ghosts;

• Kathryn Canavan, Lincoln’s Final Hours: Conspiracy, Terror, and the Assassination of America’s Greatest President;

• Robert Crane and Christopher Fryer, Crane: Sex, Celebrity, and My Father's Unsolved Murder;

• Kathleen Driskell, Next Door to the Dead: Poems;

• Richard Holl, Committed to Victory: The Kentucky Home Front During World War II;

• Tom Kimmerer, Venerable Trees: History, Biology, and Conservation in the Bluegrass;

• William Lynwood Montell, Tales from Kentucky Nurses;

• Carol Peachee, The Birth of Bourbon: A Photographic Tour of Early Distilleries; and

• Aimee Zaring, Flavors from Home: Refugees in Kentucky Share Their Stories and Comfort Foods.

Sponsored by The State-Journal, and co-sponsored by the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, Joseph-Beth Booksellers, UPK and the Kentucky Humanities Council, the Kentucky Book Fair attracts thousands of avid readers and patrons from across the country. Founded in 1981, the Kentucky Book Fair is the state's leading literary event. Since its inception, the fair has recognized outstanding Kentucky authors and editors. The largest and oldest event of its kind in the state, the Kentucky Book Fair has three key goals:

· to honor the profession of writing in the form of a one-day celebration;

· to provide a format for authors to meet their reading public; and

· to raise money through the sale of books and donate all profits to mostly school and public libraries throughout Kentucky

The proceeds benefit libraries that have few resources to expand collections, replace old books or fund literacy-related causes. Those contributions to date total more than $375,000.

Excerpted with permission from UKNow.

University Press of Kentucky authors recognized by Association of the United States Army

UPK display at Association of the United States Army annual meeting

The University Press of Kentucky published, or will soon publish, eight out of the nine books featured at the annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army (AUSA). UPK authors: Major General David Zabecki, Kathleen Galvin (attending for her father, the late General John R. Galvin), Colonel Douglas V. Mastriano, Lieutenant Colonel Brian R. McEnany, and Colonel James Scott Wheeler attended the AUSA meeting in October, along with UPK staff.

Major General Zabecki and Colonel Mastriano both received special recognition from the AUSA for their contributions to military historiography as part of the program. 

From left to right: Major General David Zabecki, Kathleen Galvin (attending for her father, the late General John R. Galvin), Colonel Douglas V. Mastriano, Lieutenant Colonel Brian R. McEnany, and Colonel James Scott Wheeler

University Press of Kentucky releases hauntingly good books for Halloween

The University Press of Kentucky (UPK) has released two eerie publications just in time for Halloween: Next Door to the Dead: Poems by Kathleen Driskell and Haunted Holidays: Twelve Months of Kentucky Ghosts by Roberta Simpson Brown and Lonnie E. Brown.

When Kathleen Driskell moved into a disused church in Louisville, Kentucky, she found that there was a cemetery next door in which the 112 residents' stories and secrets could not stay buried. Through Driskill’s imagination, the lives and afterlives of the deceased and their people come into vivid focus in this thought-provoking collection of poems. Composed with both surprising humor and riveting profundity, her poems compel us to examine our own mortality as well as how we impact the finite lives of those around us.

In Haunted Holidays, celebrated storytellers Roberta Simpson Brown and Lonnie E. Brown have assembled a hair-raising collection of paranormal tales for readers of all ages. More than just a collection of Halloween ghost stories, the Browns' Haunted Holidays takes readers on a fireside journey through the hauntings of holidays throughout the calendar year, including tales of the ghost who hated Labor Day and the child who made good on his promise to return a silver dollar on the Fourth of July. The volume preserves and promotes oral traditions and reveals the importance of sharing beliefs, traditions and values with a new generation of listeners.

Individuals interested in meeting these writers can see them at the Kentucky Book Fair from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 14, at the Frankfort Convention Center, where Driskell, the Browns, and many others will be on hand to greet the public and sign copies of her book.

By Whitney Hale and Weston Lloyd. Reprinted with permission from UKNow. 

New book features writing, photography from UK Libraries faculty

Row by Row: Talking with Kentucky Gardeners chronicles the stories of gardeners across the state of Kentucky as they work to produce food from the land. 

The new book from Ohio University Press is written by former UK Libraries archivist Kate Black. Kate served as the curator of the UK Libraries Appalachian Collection from 1986 until her retirement in 2013. 

The photos in the richly-illustrated book are by Deirdre Scaggs, UK Libraries Associate Dean for the Special Collections Research Center. The Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History transcribed many of the interviews and serves as the archival repository for the collection.

More about the book is available on the website of Ohio University Press.