Ethel Spencer, the third daughter of the seven Spencer children born between 1884 and 1895, was a curious and observant child. She wrote her childhood memoir in 1959 while she was professor at Carnegie Tech (today’s Carnegie Mellon University). It served as a memento of the joy-filled years she shared with her brothers and sisters in Pittsburgh’s affluent Shadyside neighborhood. The Spencers of Amberson Avenue, later published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1983, explores the family of Charles Hart Spencer, an employee of Henry Clay Frick, and his wife Mary Acheson from the viewpoint of young Ethel. Through the eyes of Ethel, the reader is…

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…

Sally McMurry is the 2018 winner of the Philip S. Klein Book Prize from the Pennsylvania Historical Association for Pennsylvania Farming: A History in Landscapes. Pennsylvania Farming, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in October 2017, presents the first history of PA agriculture in sixty years. McMurry goes beyond a strictly economic approach and considers the diverse forces that helped shape the farming landscape, from physical factors to cultural repertoires to labor systems. Above all, the people who created and worked on Pennsylvania’s farms are placed at the center of attention. More than 150 photographs inform the interpretation, which…

A note from Peter Kracht, director at the University of Pittsburgh Press: We are pleased to introduce the new University of Pittsburgh Press colophon. The logo is a graphic representation of the Cathedral of Learning, iconic symbol of the University of Pittsburgh. Its soaring design was intended to inspire the students and scholars of the University. Begun in 1926 and finished a decade later, it is still the second-tallest academic structure and neo-Gothic building in the world. Its completion in 1936 marked the very same year as the founding of the University of Pittsburgh Press. While it reaches for the sky, the Cathedral’s…