As part of my freelance work with Kent State University Press, I’m spending some of this winter drumming up awareness of Ghosts of an Old Forest, by Deborah Fleming, a retired professor of English at Ashland University. It’s a task made considerably easier by the success of Fleming’s previous book, also with Kent State. Resurrection of the Wild won the 2020 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, judged that year by Jelani Cobb, Daniel Menaker, and Judith Thurman.
Those are marquee names, and my Kent State colleagues got to celebrate at a ceremony emceed by Seth Meyers — not the kind of thing most readers typically associate with university-press publishing. But Kent State is not alone in its success, even among its small cohort of university presses in Ohio. Last fall the tiny University of Akron Press had the winner of the National Book Award for poetry with Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s Something About Living. (That ceremony was overseen by Kate McKinnon.) Ohio State University Press had a National Book Award finalist in the highly competitive nonfiction category back in 2020 with How to Make a Slave and Other Essays, by Emerson College’s Jerald Walter. Just in one state, the list of nationally recognized books from university presses is impressive. Expand out and you get much more, including Percival Everett’s Erasure, the inspiration for the Oscar-nominated movie American Fiction. It was originally published by the University Press of New England. Imagine the world without these books.
It may be surprising to hear, but we’re in a golden age for university-press publishing. Driven by mission and tolerant of risk, these houses are publishing some of the most-vital books around. And not just vital in the sense of “50 specialists will read them, and they’ll shape influential-but-poorly-understood research” (although that’s important too). University presses — including small ones — are publishing big books.
I’m not alone in this assessment. In 2022, Margaret Renkl wrote an essay in The New York Times with the headline “University Presses Are Keeping American Literature Alive,” using as evidence titles from the presses at the University of Georgia, Ohio University, Vanderbilt University, and West Virginia University (I was director of WVU Press at the time). It’s an incredible endorsement of university presses’ work from the country’s most-influential perch. “University presses are a crucial community within the larger ecosystem of American publishing,” Renkl wrote, “but they remain largely invisible, even to many passionate readers.”
The narrative that university presses are all in trouble is significantly overstated.
If Renkl is correct and university presses remain under the radar despite their successes, perhaps it’s because of a tendency to focus on how books get published instead of on what gets published. Experiments designed to transform academic and university-based publishing sometimes seem to crowd out news of actual, individual books. Many observers focus on tweaks to the business model, “automated editorial tools,” and other technological innovations. It’s part of a Silicon Valley-friendly worldview characterized by enthusiasm for change.
As the fixation on disruption reaches new intensity with the push for artificial intelligence, though, there’s a corresponding uptick in gloom and even resistance. Authors are angry about reports that some publishing houses (including some of the biggest university presses) are licensing their books to train AI. There have been significant layoffs at Oxford University Press, which happens to be particularly AI-curious. Authorship itself may not be immune: the University of California at Los Angeles brags of developing course materials generated by AI.
I don’t mean to paint with too broad a brush, and there may be worthwhile developments at the disruptive end of publishing. But the tradition of craft in university-press publishing is at least as important — and worthy of wider celebration than it receives.
In the United States, most university presses have a program that includes trade books aimed not primarily at libraries, course adoption, or reference shelves, but at general-interest readers. These can be essays or fiction or poetry but also can include regional titles, perspectives on current events, and books about food. Just last year, to pick a prominent example from outside the narrowly literary world, the University of Nebraska Press had a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize with a work of history, Elliott West’s Continental Reckoning.
Some critics see trade books as a distraction or necessary concession — a way to help offset the costs of university presses’ true mission of publishing monographs. That view is misguided, in part because many of the authors of such general-interest books are based at colleges, but also because the trade books from university presses often wouldn’t be published (or published the same way) by commercial houses. In an interview, Percival Everett expressed pleasure about publishing Erasure with the University Press of New England, adding: “All the other houses ran away from it.” There’s a slogan. University presses: The publishers who don’t run away.
Many of these fearless presses are responding to significant threats even as they publish nationally recognized work. Akron was slated for closure in 2015 before being spared the chopping block and then having two titles recognized as part of the National Book Awards — Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s winner this year and Leslie Harrison’s The Book of Endings, which was shortlisted in 2017. Everett’s original publisher, the University Press of New England, was actually shut down in 2018 before Brandeis University Press, a member of the New England consortium, resurrected it in 2021. Happy outcomes in both cases, but reasons to balance celebration with vigilance.
There are real challenges, but the narrative that university presses are all in trouble is significantly overstated. And that narrative might be arrested if more emphasis were given to celebrations of university-press success. When a book from a university press is feted by celebrities or becomes a New York Times bestseller, is it an outlier? Sure, but outliers in other areas of the university — a Rhodes scholar, a Nobel-winning physicist, a bowl-bound football team — are justly held up to reflect positively on the larger endeavor, building enthusiasm for more-modest but very real accomplishments among the rest of the university community. Bringing that approach to publishing could mean seeing university presses not as something to fix or radically transform via technological innovation, but as something to invest in.
Putting success at the center of conversations about university presses means putting craft at the center of those conversations, and serves as a reminder that, at their best, university presses aren’t publishing information or research or “content” but books — crafted with care by skilled professionals who are animated by the values of the university community.
And those values should include holding up the importance of books, even in a time of rapid technological change. I was shaken by Rose Horowitch’s recent Atlantic essay alleging that college students are no longer capable of reading whole books. If colleges are committed to sending the message that reading books is a priority, then investing in the people who make real books, at the highest level, is that much more valuable. The way higher ed talks about its university presses is the way it talks about books. Let’s be sure to do so with excitement and pride.
