We are delighted to be participating once again in the University Press Week blog tour. This year’s #UPWeek theme, RaiseUP, highlights the role that the university press community plays in elevating authors, subjects, and whole disciplines that bring new perspectives, ideas, and voices to readers around the globe—in partnership with booksellers, librarians, and others. Today’s blog tour focuses on creative voices.
University presses might not be the first publishers you think of when you’re looking for a new novel or poetry collection to read, but many university presses publish creative writing. Today we’re highlighting the wide variety creative writing that we publish.
Essays
The Virtues of Disillusionment by Seven Heighton. This delightful essay is based on Heighton’s inaugural writer-in-residence talk at Athabasca University. Heighton mathematically evaluates the paradox of disillusionment while considering his own illusions and their impact on his writing. A meditation on language and philosophy, The Virtues of Disillusionment exposes the secret tragedy of hope and examines how illusions affect creativity, art, and society. It also suggests ways to harness the power of illusions and considers how disillusionment can lead to freedom.
![[book cover] Unforgetting Private Charles Smith](https://www.aupress.ca/app/uploads/120283_Unforgetting-Private-Charles-Smith-cover.jpg)
Found poetry
In Unforgetting Private Charles Smith, Canadian poet and academic Jonathan Locke Hart urges us to consider the life of a single soldier. Hart discovered Charles Smith’s diary from the First World War in the Toronto Reference Library and was struck by a voice full of life, and the presence of a rhythm, a cadence that urged him to bring forth the poetry in Smith’s words. From the fragments of information about this ordinary man’s life, Hart creates a legacy for Smith by setting the words of the young soldier’s diary in poetic form. Accompanying this poetry is a poignant essay describing how Hart pieced together a forgotten soldier’s story.
Bilingual poetry
kiyâm by Naomi McIlwraith explores the beauty of the intersection between nêhiyawêwin, the Plains Cree language, and English, âkayâsîmowin. Written to honour her father’s facility in nêhiyawêwin and her mother’s beauty and generosity as an inheritor of Cree, Ojibwe, Scottish, and English, kiyâm articulates a powerful yearning for family, history, peace, and love.
![[book cover] Amma's Daughters](https://www.aupress.ca/app/uploads/120274_Ammas-Daughters-cover.jpg)
Memoirs
Amma’s Daughters by Meenal Shrivastava is a stunning work of nonfiction that follows the life of Shanti, the author’s grandmother as she fights for women’s rights in India. Shrivastava writes from her mother’s perspective who, throughout her life, became the keeper of a history often untold: the story of how women relentlessly and selflessly sacrificed in support of India’s independence.
Follow the tour around the world!
- Northwestern University Press
- University of Notre Dame Press
- University of Michigan Press
- University of Toronto Press
- Bristol University Press
- Bucknell University Press
- University of Toronto Press Journals
More University Press Week fun! Check out the Raise UP Reading List on LitHub. Celebrate Canada’s university presses with 49th Shelf’s curated reading list. Join our Canadian colleagues today (November 10) for a virtual discussion about the importance of Indigenous voices in university press publishing.
