Blog

We are excited to announce our new interns for the 2019-2020 academic school year! Get to know Isaiah Holbrook and Ashley Hay and what OSU Press books they are currently reading for the summer.

Isaiah

I’m a second-year MFA candidate at OSU where I study fiction. My writing veers more into Young Adult literature as I explore themes of identity, queerness, and religion, and the complexities that derive from them. I also find myself writing about the concept of family, specifically motherhood, and examining family dynamics that differ from mine. As an avid reader, I am most attracted to YA novels, especially ones that tread along the intersections of identity, power dynamics in a relationships, feminism, activism, and the process of recovering from trauma. Outside of my genre, I’m becoming more familiar with nonfiction, specifically narrative essays and memoirs, on similar topics.

In a closely-watched media auction, the EO Media Group, a family-owned company that has been publishing newspapers since 1908, outbid Adams Publishing on Monday for the Bend Bulletin and its sister publication the Redmond Spokesman. The central Oregon company originally placed a bid of $2.5 million, but ended up offering $3.65 million.

We’re delighted to tell you that The Red Coast is now available!

Aaron Goings, Brian Barnes, and Roger Snider present an accessible and engaging history of radicalism and anti-radicalism in Southwest Washington from the late nineteenth century until World War II, focusing on Wobblies, “Red” Finns, and Communists.

The authors write that The Red Coast demonstrates “that at one time Southwest Washingtonians organized by the thousands to protest injustices great and small, ranging from the horrors of laboring in a deadly workplace to the insult of a short paycheck.”

Interested in the linguistic heritage of the Pacific Northwest? Northwest Voicesis for regional residents, language lovers, and anyone interested in learning more about the fascinating ways that language, culture, and place intersect.

In Northwest Voices, editor Kristin Denham gathers perspectives from a variety of contributors, including a middle school teacher, a tribal linguist and language teacher, and the leader of the Lushootseed Language Institute, among others. These chapters cover everything from place names in the Pacific Northwest to Indigenous language revitalization to addressing the common belief that the region is “accent-less”.

It's May, and we are welcoming springtime flowers and a brand new book here at the OSU Press office! Edge of Awe: Experiences of the Malheur-Steens Country is fresh off the press. This anthology explores the perspectives and experiences of visitors to this beautiful region in eastern Oregon with a special focus on birds and featuring illustrations and poetry by Ursula K. Le Guin. Today on the blog, editor Alan Contreras speaks with OSU Press Griffis Publishing Interns Carolyn Supinka and Zoë Ruiz.

Want to learn more about an important part of ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest? Field Guide to the Grasses of Oregon and Washington is a beautifully illustrated guide to all species, subspecies, and varieties in the region. Co-author Cindy Talbott Roché visits the OSU Press blog to answer some questions that our OSU Press Griffis Publishing Interns Carolyn Supinka and Zoë Ruiz had about the book and the process of studying grasses.

Congratulations to OSU Press author Kenneth R. Coleman!

His first book, Dangerous Subjects: James D. Saules and The Rise of Black Exclusion in Oregon, won the Frances Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction at the 2019 Oregon Book Awards.

Dangerous Subjectsexamines the history of black exclusion in Oregon through the story of James D. Saules, a black sailor who was shipwrecked off the Oregon coast in 1841. Coleman follows Saules’ story as he settles in Oregon and is faced with mounting dangers and racism from white settlers and the government as Oregon Trail emigrants arrive in the region.

Welcome back to Part 2 on our blog series on literature about rivers!

We're thrilled to feature this guest blog post by Peter Brewitt, author of Same River Twice: The Politics of Dam Removal and River Restoration.

*****

There’s always a dam.

The neighborhood where I live in South Carolina is built around a lake, created by a dam. The pond down the street from my wife’s home in Vermont? Plugged up by a dam. The environmental studies center where I teach? Just below one dam, which hides another, older dam – we see it when the water’s low. This afternoon I biked through Columbus, Ohio, where I attended the American Society for Environmental History conference earlier this month. In a brief ride I saw two dams.

Here at the OSU Press office in Corvallis, we’ve been watching the high flows on the Willamette this week and rivers are on our mind. Today we’re featuring three recent Press books that tell the story of rivers, in Oregon and around the world.

Speaking for the River: Confronting Pollution on the Willamette, 1920s-1970s

Though the state of Oregon has a reputation for being green, one of its major rivers, the Willamette, has struggled with pollution throughout history and in the present day. James Hillegas-Elting looks to the past to explain the present, examining the complex political and technological issues that challenge this Or