Today for University Press Week, we’re interviewing Ramona Reeves, whose debut story collection, It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories, won the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature. Below she talks about being a first-time author with a university press. Q: Tell us a bit about your background and how you became a writer A: I’ve been writing since I was eight or nine. Until I was twelve, I grew up with my mom, grandmother, and great-grandmother. I also was the only child in my house and grew up around a lot of adults. In that environment, I frequently needed…

We “sat down” virtually with Joseph Stanhope Cialdella to talk about his new book, Motor City Green, which explores the history of urban gardens and green spaces in Detroit. Q: What drew you to this topic/subject area? A: I was born and raised in Kalamazoo, MI, which is on the west side of the state, and we didn’t spend much time in Detroit, which is on the east side of the state. That changed when I went to college [at the University of Michigan’s Residential College], and was fortunate to participate in several engaged learning courses where we had the…

Ilja Nieuwland is the author of American Dinosaur Abroad: A Cultural History of Carnegie’s Plaster Diplodocus. He is a historian of science–in particular paleontology–attached to the Huygens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam. American Dinosaur Abroad covers the discovery in 1899 of the Diplodocus carnegii—or Dippy, as it’s known today—by a team of paleontologists sponsored by Andrew Carnegie. Then the longest and largest dinosaur on record, the Diplodocus skeleton was replicated into plaster casts that were gifted to different nations by Carnegie in the years leading up to World War I. In this largely untold history, Nieuwland…

Kate Wisel of Monona, Wisconsin, is the 2019 winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, one of the nation’s most prestigious awards for a book of short stories. Her manuscript Driving in Cars with Homeless Men was selected by National Book Award finalist Min Jin Lee from a field of over 530 entries. Driving in Cars with Homeless Men will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press later this year. “You can hear the crackle of heat and the roar of a powerful fire burning through these pages,” said Lee. “Young angry women, brokenhearted mothers, and men who are…

Ryan Black of Jackson Heights, NY is the 2018 winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. The University of Pittsburgh Press and Pitt Poetry Series will published his collection, “The Tenant of Fire” in fall 2019. Black will also receive a $5,000 cash prize. In explaining his inspiration behind the collection, Black states: “Kirk Semple, a New York Times metro reporter, described Queens, NY, as a “petri dish for what our increasingly diverse and heterogeneous nation is becoming.” The Tenant of Fire is about Queens—its history, both public and personal, real and imagined—and mines the complex, often contradictory, lived…