A short-story collection wins the PEN/Faulkner Award, the $20,000 Story Prize, and the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and is also a finalist for a National Book Award. It is acquired for an HBO Max series, which the author will both executive co-produce and write.
That kind of success is usually linked to major trade publishers and to select titles that industry insiders have anointed as “big books.” This year when those accolades went to Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Life of Church Ladies — an intimate, vulnerable, and finely wrought collection that places at its center the drives and desires of Black women — they did more than make its author a literary force to be reckoned with. They also put her publisher, West Virginia University Press, on the map as a new publishing heavyweight.
Like many academics, I have often considered small university presses to be mostly purveyors of regional books and specialists in particular disciplines. Only recently did I start thinking about West Virginia University Press when I noticed one of its other books — Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) — popping up everywhere. So I got a copy, gleaned much from it, and did an interview with Susan D. Blum, the collection’s editor. Ungrading is part of a series of compelling, influential books on teaching and learning published by West Virginia. So it seemed a good moment to chat with Derek Krissoff, the press’s director, for the Scholars Talk Writing series. We talked about the incredible success of Philyaw’s book, the role of small university presses, and labor issues in the world of scholarly publishing.
First, let’s start with Church Ladies, which came to you after having been rejected by many other publishers (as reported in Slate).
Krissoff: I met Deesha’s agent in Pittsburgh in the summer of 2019. I was getting to know the city and its literary scene. Since West Virginia geography can be mysterious to outsiders, I should note here that Pittsburgh is only 70 miles from Morgantown.
Deesha’s project sparked my interest immediately because my colleagues and I are always looking for ways to help amplify Black voices, especially from the region, and I suspected that Pittsburgh, with its strong network of booksellers and independent journalists, could help launch a successful book.
Deesha has since written thoughtfully about the challenges of being a Black author in Pittsburgh, but from a publishing standpoint, I think my instinct was right, and the city came through. White Whale Bookstore, one of the city’s great indies, sold 388 copies of the book (140 more than Obama’s memoir) in 2020. That local success, combined with robust support from Black literary networks, helped set the scene for the wave of global attention the book has received.
We decided to pursue Secret Lives when our press was enjoying its most significant success to that point — Appalachian Reckoning, a collection of responses to Hillbilly Elegy by a mix of scholars, activists, and literary figures, many of them writers of color and/or members of the LGBTQ community.
We put resources from a success like Appalachian Reckoning toward helping provide a platform for Deesha, and now we’re putting the resources from Deesha’s success into something like our lead title for fall — William H. Turner’s The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns. There can be this sort of virtuous feedback loop when you’re an independent, not-for-profit publisher, and especially if you’re growing.
Many authors don’t quite get that it’s part of their job to promote a book. Marketing is really a partnership between the press and the author. What else helped?
Krissoff: So many good things have happened with this book, and I think they’ve all benefited from close coordination between Deesha and press staff — coordination that may be easier or more effective because we’re small. We’ve been able to respond energetically to opportunities thanks to the manageable size of the list and the comparative ease of establishing unanimity of purpose across a small staff.
One early example is the great blurb from Kiese Laymon [author of Heavy: An American Memoir, and a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Mississippi who is moving to Rice University in January]. Before the book was even announced, the author’s relationship with Laymon got us in the door to obtain a blurb, and the endorsement was so phenomenal that we decided to dedicate the entire first page of the seasonal catalog to making a splash with it. (His blurb started out “Our new decade deserves a new literary force with major literary skills” and got better from there.)
I think having that sincere, high-profile praise helped persuade booksellers, reviewers, and the folks who give awards to take the book seriously — even before they read (and loved) it. It emerged from an entrepreneurial spirit of collaboration that has, I think, persisted every step since then.
A lot of any book’s success comes down to relationships — the author’s, the press’s own, and then the interaction between our complementary networks. And that’s wrapped up in labor and expertise.
There’s glamour to having a National Book Award finalist, but the work that got us there was pragmatic — the time-consuming stuff of putting ongoing effort into cultivating networks over long spans.
Your great series on teaching and learning, with editors Jim Lang, a professor of English at Assumption University, and Michelle Miller, a professor of psychological sciences at Northern Arizona University, has revitalized the genre and had a big influence on teaching and on writing about teaching. Can you talk about that?
Krissoff: Jim Lang, the founding editor, has always said that the series is designed to feature “books written by human beings,” as opposed to the more textbooky prose often characteristic of teaching-and-learning scholarship. I think the series has connected with so many readers because everyone involved has taken that mission to heart, and put a ton of effort into crafting easy-to-read books that are practical and also attuned to the very real political challenges in higher ed — to issues around employment status and embodied identity, for instance.
Even though the series titles aren’t general-interest books in the way that The Secret Lives of Church Ladies is, they have, like Deesha’s book, succeeded by catalyzing supportive communities of readers. In that sense I think they’re identifiably West Virginia University Press books, even though most of the series authors have no explicit connection to our region.
What do you see as the role of the smaller university presses?
Krissoff: I’m sure it varies, but I see our press and other university presses in our cohort as sharing DNA with small independent publishers oriented around more literary or activist concerns, and grounded in a strong sense of place.
We’re community publishers, emphasizing editorial independence, responsiveness to the communities where we’re based (which are often less served by the big general-interest publishing conglomerates in New York), and cooperation with other small actors like indie bookstores and alternative media.
I’m often struck by how many administrators and even faculty members don’t quite grasp the value and importance of having a university press, or understand the professional aspects of the work.
Krissoff: Church Ladies has been a publishing event, and I’m proud that my colleagues and I were able to reward our university’s support for WVU Press by propelling our parent institution’s name and reputation so successfully into the public sphere. Social justice is a priority at our campus, and we absolutely draw on the university’s intellectual resources to further the mission of cultivating a diverse and inclusive publishing program. That includes initiatives like our new series Borderless, edited by a team including Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, who coordinates social-justice affairs at our university’s Eberly College of Arts and Sciences.
Let’s talk about publishing output and labor issues. You tweeted about this in the spring: “The modest decrease in title output at West Virginia has coincided with growth in sales and a healthier attitude, I think, toward labor — including asking fewer people to do underpaid peer review. If we want to talk about sustainability I think this stuff deserves to be in the mix.” Can you elaborate?
Krissoff: My tweet about title output, growth, and labor emerged from thinking about the pandemic and what comes after. Like a lot of university presses, our sales have grown over the past year and a half, and not just on the strength of Church Ladies. We have edited collections doing well, books by scholars and activists dedicated to getting beyond caricatures of our region, and more.
Books have shown to be enormously resilient — in part, because dedicated and supportive communities continue to coalesce around them, even (or especially) during challenging times. Think of masked booksellers doing curbside pickup, tireless Bookstagrammers, or literary festivals that pivoted quickly to virtual programming.
So where are the problems?
Krissoff: This is where labor comes in, which is the big cost in publishing. We pay everyone, from our staff to authors to freelancers to peer reviewers. It’s not always enough, which is part of why I’d like to commit to a slightly smaller portfolio focused on books that seem likely to reward the investment instead of, for instance, growing title output and asking even more peer reviewers to do undercompensated work.
Last year there were lots of conversations about whether paywalls should be taken down, the ethics of the Internet Archive’s “emergency library,” and so on. In all that back-and-forth, I’d encourage people to keep the actual work in the mix: Ask who’s doing it, how (and whether) they get paid, and where those resources to pay workers come from.
An approach to publishing that foregrounds the skilled labor involved will, I think, result in improved publishing. It’s also consistent with the community orientation that my colleagues and I strive to cultivate.
So what’s a better way to think about the role of university presses?
Krissoff: Viewed as part of some indistinguishable monolith called scholarly publishing, university presses can seem like a problem to solve. If, on the other hand, you imagine these presses as public-facing extensions of our universities — uniquely positioned to build bridges between the academic world and bookstores, media reviewers, writers, artists, activists, and so on — then the understanding of our work flips. We’re no longer a drain on the broader ecosystem’s resources destined for transformation once some technophilic revolution arrives but instead an investment on our universities’ part in robust public engagement.
I think that if people trust publishers to publish, instead of imagining that our industry is at the cusp of some transformation, then success stories like The Secret Lives of Church Ladies become possible.
And we’re far from alone in this — Ohio State also had a National Book Award finalist recently, the University of Texas Press had a bona fide New York Times best seller in 2019, and the list goes on. I’m interested in centering those success stories for audiences that may never have heard anything positive about university-press publishing.
What do you hope faculty members will understand about university presses?
Krissoff: I’d encourage prospective authors to jettison the idea that university presses are gatekeepers. We’re not keeping people from anything — we’re helping authors make things that connect successfully with people.
And we’re doing it from a position that can feel tenuous, since university-press professionals never have tenure, and our industry so often comes in for criticism. We hope faculty members will support us, which means not just publishing with us and buying our books but serving as advocates.
It feels like every time there’s a statement about a potential university-press closure (almost always reversed, I should note), there’s the same verbiage about the inevitable transformation of the scholarly communications ecosystem, like when universities decided to stop paying for fax machines.
If our potential authors and other friends cultivate a counternarrative by championing our work, that can be a huge part of university-press growth.
At West Virginia I think we’ve seen exactly that — people across the university and in our wider networks consistently celebrating our successes, and those of our authors — in a way that gives us confidence to continue publishing good books.
