Today for University Press Week we are featuring an interview with Will Masami Hammell, who recently joined the Press as Senior Acquisitions Editor to build new lists in Asian Studies and Africana Studies.  Below he discusses his personal and professional background as well as his editorial process. Q; What drew you to the University of Pittsburgh Press? A: I’ve admired the gumption of the Press since my earliest days as an editor. When I was starting out in acquisitions at Temple University Press, I lost my first competitive project to the Pitt Latin American Series, and I remember my less-than-mature…

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower, winner of the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. Her work has appeared in ESPN, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best New Poets 2014, 2016, and 2019, among others. She is the recipient of support from the Fine Arts Work Center, The Frost Place, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Priest has facilitated poetry workshops with incarcerated juvenile and adult women, and has taught writing, comedy, and African American Arts & Culture at the university level. She received her MFA in poetry with a certificate…

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…

Pittsburgh is more than just a home for author Kathleen George: the city and its people are a source of inspiration. A native of Johnstown, George has lived in the city for many years, teaches theatre arts and creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, and has written several novels and short stories based in the Pittsburgh region, including The Johnstown Girls. Her latest, The Blues Walked In, is a period fiction novel set against the backdrop of Pittsburgh’s once-bustling Hill District. It’s 1936, and a nineteen year-old Lena Horne is walking to her father’s hotel in the Hill after a long tour with Nobel Sissel’s orchestra. Along the…

Pitt Poetry Series: New & Selected 2018 30% discount on all books. Use code PC692 at checkout to receive sale prices. Order online at www.upress.pitt.edu or call 800-62-2736. Discount applies only to books listed in our 2018 Pitt Poetry Series catalog. Sale ends April 30, 2018 at 11:59 p.m. EDT. Books not yet published or temporarily out of stock will be charged to your credit card when the book is available.