What’s that cliché saying again… When it rains, it pours? Because that is exactly what is happening right now with UNP awards. David L. Preston has been selected to receive the 2010 Annual Archives Award for Excellence in Research for his book, The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the Frontiers of Iroquoia, 1667-1783. The award is given by the New York State Archives for extensive research using the records at the Archives as a Hackman Resident in 1999 and the publication of the book this year.The Texture of Contact is a landmark study of Iroquois and … Continue reading UNP author wins research award

Good things come in threes, right? UNP is proud to share that Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa is the third consecutive Nobel Prize in Literature winner to publish with our press. He was a contributor to The Global Game: Writers on Soccer published in 2008. The Global Game is a collection of writings that reflect the universal and infinitely varied ways in which soccer connects with human experience.  UNP is also the publisher of Nadirs (Nebraska, 1999) by 2009 Nobel Laureate Herta Mueller, as well as Onitsha (Nebraska, 1997) and The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts (Nebraska, 2002) by … Continue reading UNP contributor wins Nobel Prize in Literature

Coastal Encounters is a collection of research about the transformation of the Gulf South in the Eighteenth Century. It reveals the history of the coast’s collision of European, African and Native peoples with different perspectives about the changes that occurred. One of the contributors is Shannon Lee Dawdy, who is one of the nation’s leading researchers on topics related to New Orleans and the Caribbean. She has also just been named a 2010 MacArthur Fellow. Dawdy received the award  — also known as a "genius grant" — from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which includes a $500,000 … Continue reading UNP contributor wins the genius grant

Two UNP authors — Jay Gallentine and Margaret D. Jacobs — recently won three prestigious national awards, and we couldn’t be more proud.   Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft, by Jay Gallentine, won the annual Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award, which is sponsored by the American Astonautical Society. Ambassadors from Earth tell the story behind the first unmanned space probes and planetary explorers. It includes everything from the Sputnik and Explorer satellites in the 1950s to the Voyager Missions of the 1970s. Gallentine uses original interviews with keyplayers, never-before-seen photos and journal excerpts to illustrate the … Continue reading UNP authors win three national awards

Like much of the writing world, the University of Nebraska Press is still processing all of the people, panels, parties, signings, conversations, and (naturally), the books of this year’s AWP conference. A great time was had by authors and publishers alike, but that is not the purpose of this post. No, the purpose of this post is to congratulate Jonis Agee, University of Nebraska-Lincoln creative writing professor, Bison Books author (Sweet Eyes, 2003), and winner of this year’s  George Garrett Award for Community Service, given each year by AWP. The award was given in recognition of Jonis’ teaching and mentoring … Continue reading Congratulations Jonis Agee, winner of the 2010 AWP George Garrett Award!

One of the first things I did on Thursday when I learned that Herta Müller, author of UNP title Nadirs, had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, was call translator Sieglinde Lug. Lug, professor emeriti at Denver University, didn’t answer my call. Or the calls of various international media seeking a comment. She was inside a studio, recording audio books for the blind. And by the time she got the news that Müller, who Lug has met, had won the prize, most of the rest of the world already knew. When she called me back on Friday, an exhilarated Lug … Continue reading UNP reprinting Nadirs, and a few words from the translator