Books in the Culture, Politics, and the Built Environment series address the intersecting relationships between the built environment and a range of cultural forces, exploring the ways buildings, cities, and landscapes impact—and are in turn shaped by—the formulation and function of deep social, economic, and political structures. They also examine the agency of the built environment as it actively helps to shape class, race, and gender identities. These books are notable for their innovative topics and approaches. The scope of the series is international and open to multidisciplinary work, but it is primarily focused on publishing spatial histories that have…

The University of Pittsburgh Press is pleased to welcome Jorge Coronado as the new series editor for Illuminations: Cultural Formations of the Americas! Featuring cutting-edge books on Latin American and inter-American societies, histories, and cultures that offer new perspectives from postcolonial, subaltern, feminist, and cultural studies, this series takes its inspiration from the idea of the illumination, which the critic Walter Benjamin defined as “that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to someone singled out by history at a moment of danger.” By emphasizing this recovery of the past in the context of a perilous present, the series concerns…

The University of Pittsburgh Press is thrilled to announce Be Holding, the fourth book of poetry from Bloomington, Indiana-based poet and writer Ross Gay, is the winner of the 2021 PEN America Jean Stein Book Award. Published in UPP’s Pitt Poetry Series, Be Holding is the first book published by a university press to win the prestigious Jean Stein Prize. “I think this book is so much not only this desire, but this practice. The practice being understanding that we are made of each other. . . . I want to honor the mycelial way poems are made. But not…

Joanna Pearson of Carrboro, North Carolina is the 2021 winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, one of the nation’s most prestigious awards for a collection of short stories. Pearson’s Now You Know It All was selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward P. Jones. The University of Pittsburgh Press will publish Pearson’s collection in October 2021. “Joanna Pearson’s Now You Know It All offers a splendid array of stories that reminded me page after page of old-fashioned stories when writers built their pieces brick by brick and built them to last.” said Jones. “Pearson is not after the quick two-page,…

Laura Kolbe of Brooklyn, NY is the 2020 winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for her collection Little Pharma. Kolbe, a physician, medical ethicist, and poet, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press/Pitt Poetry Series next fall. “The earliest of these poems were written in my first year of medical school in 2012, with the bulk of them written during my medical residency, a grueling and surreal time in my life,” said Kolbe, a native of Lehigh County, Pennsylvania. “Writing the poems felt like growing a subsistence garden—what do I need to make to survive? Or…