CONGRATULATIONS The University of Pittsburgh Press has been proud to take this journey with Ross Gay, and to share the acclaim for his brilliant collection, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. May his future as a poet be bright and rewarding! Congratulations to all of the winners of the 2015 National Book Award: Robin Coste Lewis, Neal Shusterman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Adam Johnson. Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude Ross Gay University of Pittsburgh Press Pitt Poetry Series 2015 National Book Award Finalist “The Bloomington Community Orchard must have spread its roots into Ross Gay, an Indiana University English professor, as the organic poems in his third collection bear fruit,…

The University of Pittsburgh Press (Pitt Poetry Series) is proud to share the news that Ross Gay is one of five finalists for the National Book Foundation, National Book Awards, in the poetry category, for his brilliant collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. The winner will be announced on November 18. In our minds he has already won. Here are ten reasons to love Ross Gay:   Gratitude 1: Ross Gay views joy in contemporary poetry as a radical act “I was noticing, like, “Holy shit, look at these wonderful poets and these wonderful readings.” But I felt like there wasn’t a whole lot…

Nate Marshall, author of Wild Hundreds, winner of UPP’s Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, talks about his love for Chicago’s South Side, hip-hop culture’s influence on his work, and fantasy football. UPP: You are very passionate about the South Side of Chicago, as evidenced in Wild Hundreds, in various interviews and on social media. How would you explain that passion? NM: The South Side is a beautiful place. It can be a hard and complicated place but those are the most rewarding loves. It’s like what Algren says about loving Chicago “you may well find lovelier lovelies but never a lovely so real.”…

As Cuba and the United States work to normalize relations, we feature a number of books on the island nation. Here’s a sampling: Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art Edited by Alejandro de la Fuente and Elío Rodriguez Valdés   Grupo Antillano: The Art of Afro-Cuba Edited by Alejandro de la Fuente   The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Foreign Policy Patrick Haney and Walt Vanderbush   The Cuban Economy Archibald Ritter  

White Spots— Black Spots Difficult Matters in Polish-Russian Relations, 1918–2008 Edited by Adam Daniel Rotfeld and Anatoly Torkunov RUSSIAN HISTORY/ POLISH HISTORY   “A remarkable book. Analyzes most of the big issues between the countries, from the Polish-Soviet war following the Bolshevik revolution, through the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in September 1939, the mass murder of thousands of Polish officers by Soviet security forces at Katyn in 1940, all the way to relations between Putin’s Russia and today’s Poland, a leading member of NATO and the EU. . . . This is a specific Polish-Russian story, but we all…