Our busy May has segued into a busy June and this weekend five WLU Press employees will be jetting off to Salt Lake City to mingle with other university press professionals and learn as much as we can cram into one weekend about new trends in publishing, to share what each of us is doing well and swap tips about challenges. The AAUP conference is a great weekend, and I’m sure we’ll come back buzzing and raring to go. Thankfully, for me, anyway, it’s my last trip for a while. I’m looking forward to staying home and working at the office by day, enjoying the summer evenings by night.

The end of June brings the American Library Association conference in Washington, and Lisa Quinn, an acquisitions editor with WLUP, will be staffing our booth. Libraries are major buyers of our books and we look forward to showing off our new titles to the thousands of conference attendees.

Last but certainly not least, please stop by the launch of Covering Niagara: Studies in Local Popular Culture if you can. It is being held on Monday, June 21 at 3pm at Pond Inlet, Brock University, St. Catharines. Editors Joan Nicks and Barry Keith Grant will be on hand to sign books, which can be purchased at the event. Refreshments will be served and there is a cash bar. We hope you can make it.

Tweet This Post

It’s hard to believe that another May has come and gone. It is one of our busiest months—first with the last-minute push to get our newest books out before the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences—and then with Congress itself. This year’s event was hosted by Concordia University in the heart of Montreal, and what a treat it was to spend the week there. We had marvelous weather for the most part, and the city night life is hopping. As for the book fair, we were run off our feet chatting to our current and prospective authors, talking up our books to interested academics and general public alike, and rushing from one event to the next.

Highlights: Two of our books were named award-winners in the Gabrielle Roy Prize for best book of literary criticism, granted by the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures. Wider Boundaries of Daring: The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women’s Poetry, edited by Di Brandt and the late Barbara Godard, is the winning book in the English-language category, and Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic was named a finalist. Congratulations to all the contributors to both books!

The best-selling books of the fair were Troubling Tricksters: Revisioning Critical Conversations and the newly released The Gendered Screen: Canadian Women Filmmakers. They fairly hopped off the shelves!

Tweet This Post

Yesterday we received the sad news that Barbara Godard had passed away suddenly as a result of complications due to illness.  Barbara was a long-time friend of the press, as a contributor to our book on translation, Writing Between the Lines (ed. Agnes Whitfield), as the book review editor of Topia, and most recently as co-editor, with Di Brandt, of Wider Boundaries of Daring: The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women’s Poetry.

Barbara’s work, and her mentoring of and collaboration with colleagues, has had and will continue to have a large impact on Canadian literature and cultural studies. She will be missed.

For other tributes to Barbara and her work, see rob mclennan’s blog, York University News, Coach House Books, and yourkeyed blog.

Tweet This Post

On the day of her birth and in the centenary year of her death, this seems a good time to pay tribute to Florence Nightingale, pioneer of professional nursing. WLU Press is the proud publisher of the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, edited by Lynn McDonald, and will later this year release Volume 14 in the series, with just two left to go.

When I (Clare) first started at the press, Vols. 1 and 2 were just coming out, and it was hard to imagine that one day there would be 16. An enormous amount of work by Lynn McDonald and her team has meant continuous volumes, with the two most recent focusing on the history of nursing.

Florence Nightingale is most known as the “lady with the lamp” from the Crimean War, but much of what has been written about her has been full of error and a misreading of the primary sources. The Collected Works presents Florence Nightingale’s own writings on subjects as diverse as politics, social welfare, religion, health care, and India, to name just a few.

The Collected Works can be found at most academic libraries, but if these large works are too daunting for you and you would still like accurate information about Nightingale, look for Florence Nightingale at First Hand, a slim volume of her writings. The book presents a Florence Nightingale for the twenty-first century: she was a prodigiously astute researcher, a bold systems thinker, and a witty writer well connected with political and intellectual leaders.

On this day especially, we celebrate nurses and nursing and honour the legacy of an amazing woman.

Tweet This Post

As National Poetry Month draws to a close we are heartened to see the birth on a new online journal for the discussion of all things poetry. The Influency Salon has as its mission,

the reception and distribution of poetry thinking— reading diverse works of poetry, conversing about them, and measuring their ways and means, forms and motives. Via page and ear, our editors listen deeply and care persistently. We figure how the work matters. We expect a conversation about poetry to be public, present, and relevant. We want to gather in the room of poetry, and talk our heads off.

The first issue features, among other things, an essay by poet Jacqueline Larson (former editor with WLU Press) on Sina Queyras’ Expressway. The page includes a reading by Sina Queyras, an editors’ roundtable, and other discussion.

The whole site is a goldmine of talk about poetry. Why not head on over and check it out?

Tweet This Post