UPP welcomes Nicholas A. Brown and Sarah E. Kanouse, authors of the forthcoming Re-Collecting Black Hawk: Landscape, Memory, and Power in the American Midwest as the first of our authors to be featured in a Q&A. UPP: What was your inspiration for Re-Collecting Black Hawk? NB: There’s no one moment that inspired the project; rather it was an organic outgrowth of our artistic and scholarly interests and quirks of personal history that all came together at the right time. I actually grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, surrounded by references to Black Hawk. As a kid I walked to Blackhawk Country…

According to Sarah Galo at BuzzFeed Books, Pitt Poetry Series has published some poets that you must read. Two of our poets made the list: Paisley Rekdal and Rickey Laurentiis. Paisley Rekdal’s The Invention of the Kaleidoscope is a book of poetic elegies that discuss failures: failures of love, both sexual and spiritual; failures of the body; failures of science, art and technology; failures of nature, imagination, memory and, most importantly, the failures inherent to elegiac narratives and our formal attempt to memoralize the lost. But the book also explores the necessity of such narratives, as well as the creative possibilities implicit within the “failed…

Entries must be postmarked by April 30, 2015. The 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize Competition The University of Pittsburgh Press announces the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for a first full-length book of poems. Named after the first director of the Press, the prize carries a cash award of $5,000 and publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press in the Pitt Poetry Series under its standard royalty contract. The winner will be announced in the fall; no information about the winner will be released before the fall announcement. The Starrett Prize is our only venue for first-book poetry manuscripts….

The New York Times features Power on the Hudson by Robert Lifset in its article about a landmark case of ecology vs. energy production at Storm King Mountain. How a Hudson Highlands Mountain Shaped Tussles Over Energy and the Environment By Andrew C. Revkin |  April 14, 2015 Remembering Storm King | Lecture by Robert D. Lifset In the time that I have I want to think about three questions. First, why are we here? What precisely happened in the Hudson River valley in the 1960s and ‘70s? What was the nature of this environmental struggle? Second, why did it happen?…

Barbara Hamby’s collection On the Street of Divine Love, is the silver winner in the poetry category of the 2014 Florida Book Awards. Sharon Crowley, who has published two prize-winning books with the University of Pittsburgh Press, has been honored with the 2015 CCCC Exemplar Award, the most prestigious honor bestowed by the Conference on College Composition and Communication.