Notes from Betsy…on Spring books

Posted on May 7, 2013 by nyupressblog

Greetings from NYU Press Publicity! My Instagram account is flooded with images of cherry blossoms, dogs rolling in grass, and ballpark festivities. SPRING HAS SPRUNG! To celebrate the spring season, I thought it would be fun to catch up on a few of the big media hits so far. Some of the tantalizing bits of knowledge you will take away include: can jury duty really be enjoyable?; how does media spread?; why this country needs two presidents; what if the United Nations was based in Detroit?; living in New York City through one reporter’s eyes; is the United States really post-racial?; and exciting titles to look out for.

WHY JURY DUTY MATTERS

Author Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is on a quest to convince us that jury duty is fun, and at the very least, our most important civic duty apart from voting. Listen to his convincing interviews on WAMU’s “The Kojo Nmadi Show”; KPCC’s “Airtalk” and WYPR’s “Mid-Day.” The Baltimore Sun makes mention—and Greta Van Susteren knows a good thing when she sees one. Also, May is Juror Appreciation Month! See Andrew’s piece on The Atlantic’s website.

SPREADABLE MEDIA

The name Henry Jenkins will stop any media junkie, cos-play boy or girl, and Comi-con regular in their tracks. Find out what all the hype is about: Jenkins and co-author, Sam Ford, on KBOO-FM; Sam Ford’s article on WSJ.com’s “Speakeasy;” an interview with the authors on New Books in Journalism; and a shout-out on Mediabistro’s journalism & tech blog, 10,000 Words. Jenkins and his co-authors also made an appearance at SXSW!

TWO PRESIDENTS ARE BETTER THAN ONE

Two heads are better than one; good things come in pairs; and according to our author, two presidents would be better than one. Need some convincing? No problem! See author David Orentlicher’s interview with the Chicago Tribune; his appearance on C-SPAN’s “Book TV”; and his radio interviews with KPCC’s “Airtalk” and Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Joy Cardin Show.”

CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

Probably the coolest coverage so far for Capital of the World was the essay Foreign Policy commissioned from author Charlene Mires—they asked her to imagine if Detroit had won the bid to become the home of the United Nations, and how that would have affected the future of the city. Other coverage included a review in the Wall Street Journal; an interview on C-SPAN’s “Book TV”; a feature in PRI’s “The World” ; a spot in the New York Times‘ Bookshelf; and an hour with KERA’s “Think.”

HABITATS

New Yorkers are obsessed with where other New Yorkers live. In Habitats, New York Times writer, Constance Rosenblum gives readers that fly-on-the-wall experience in some of the most fabulous, wild, and unbelievable homes across the 5 boroughs. The New Republic reviewed the book and our sadistic history of real estate voyeurism, while NY1 raved about the collection here. And if you’re in Manhattan next Tuesday, 5/14, stop by the 92Y Tribeca at noon to hear Connie read from some of her favorite sections!

GHOSTS OF JIM CROW

Electing an African American president had many declaring that the United States had finally moved beyond race. F. Michael Higginbotham argues we still have a long way to go in his new book, Ghosts of Jim Crow. You can hear more of what he has to say in interviews with Oregon Public Radio; Dallas Public Radio; and Balitmore Public Radio.

Look out for the next round-up coming soon! We have some exciting titles pubbing in the next few months including We Will Shoot Back, A Death at Crooked Creek, and Rebels at the Bar, so more fantastic coverage is surely on the way.

UB Law’s Higginbotham takes on the lingering effects of Jim Crow

Posted on April 12, 2013 by nyupressblog

[Note: This article originally appeared in the Daily Record here. ]

In May 2004, University of Baltimore School of Law professor F. Michael Higginbotham gave a speech to mark the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court’s historic ruling that found segregated public schools were inherently unequal.

Despite the dismantling of the Jim Crow laws, “people need to clearly understand that there are separations that still exist in society,” F. Michael Higginbotham says.

“I started to think about how far we have come and how much progress we have made, but also how much further we needed to go,” Higginbotham said.

That was the spark that led to an almost nine-year journey culminating with the publication of his new book, Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-Racial America.

At the core of the book is the existence of what Higginbotham called a “racial model” — created during slavery and nurtured by the segregationist Jim Crow laws and practices after the Civil War — that still exists in our society, with many people of both races still desiring isolation.

“What I am trying to do is get those individual people with those views to begin a conversation about how to recognize those views and how to end this racial model,” Higginbotham said.

There is also an element of racial victimization — both internally, among African-Americans, and externally, in laws and practices that discriminate against them, said Higginbotham, who served as the law school’s interim dean last year.

“It’s a failure of blacks themselves to value education and other upward-mobility vehicles and they turn to crime because of these perceived notions,” Higginbotham said.

Higginbotham has been at UB Law for about 25 years and teaches a class on race law. He grew up in Ohio and Beverly Hills, Calif., and attended Brown University for his bachelor’s degree before Yale Law School.

Some of the ideas in the book stem from his childhood in Beverly Hills. In the book’s preface, he recounts an evening riding his bike home as a 13-year-old when he was stopped by police. He was told he was out after curfew, but later discovered from friends that there was, in fact, no curfew in the neighborhood.

Higginbotham published his first and only other book in 2010. The textbook, Race Law: Cases, Commentary, and Questions explores race in the legal process from 1787 to the present.

“The difference in writing this one was I was able to put more of my own opinions into Ghosts,” Higginbotham said. “[Ghosts] was more of a reflection of what I believe from a personal standpoint, whereas a textbook must be a reflection of others.”

In the first part of the book, Higginbotham maps out these ideas, supported with historical and recent examples.

“I thought we had dealt with this,” Higginbotham said. “People need to clearly understand that there are separations that still exist in society that reflect what we think [happened] in the Jim Crow days,” Higginbotham said.

Once he decided to write the book, what followed was extensive research: reading cases, legislation and historic documents, Higginbotham said.

The writing, he said, he tried to make clear and concise, steering away from complicated legal prose. Higginbotham said he wrote mostly during winter and summer breaks and on weekends during the school year.

“I tried to break cases and legislation down so that anyone interested in race relations today and racial inadequacies, whether it’s junior high students, high school students or simply people who personally enjoy reading, that this would be something they could enjoy,” Higginbotham said.

Higginbotham went through several drafts, which he had colleagues read and edit, then sent it to publishers in early 2008 — about eight months before the presidential election. A publisher who was interested told Higginbotham the company liked the book, but told him he needed to factor in then-presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

Higginbotham spent the next several years weaving the effects of Obama’s presidency on race relations into his book, which was published by NYU Press and released on March 18.

The last part of the book focuses on Higginbotham’s ideas on how to shepherd in a new era of racial relations. Higginbotham suggests that people need to recognize there is a problem, empower the black community and equally integrate society.

“I’m not suggesting I have all the answers,” Higginbotham said. “I am saying the solutions I put forward would help eliminate the racial paradigm.”

Two covers for Two Presidents?

Posted on April 1, 2013 by nyupressblog

NYU Press takes a different path to publishing a book on the political gridlock in Washington DC

When NYU Press decided to publish a provocative new book, Two Presidents Are Better Than One: The Case for a Bipartisan Executive Branch, by David Orentlicher, arguing in favor of two Presidents, rather than one, it had a number of major challenges, according to Steve Maikowski, Director of NYU Press. “First, we had to ensure that the final manuscript made a very convincing and well-grounded case for such a controversial idea, and the author, a Professor of Law at Indiana University, did indeed ground his argument forcefully in both law and American history. Otherwise, we feared the book would be dismissed out of hand as implausible by pundits and the review media.”

The Press saw the book, which advances this idea of a bipartisan executive branch, as a way to break the political gridlock between the Republicans and Democrats—and especially timely and worthy of serious review attention, given the endless budget impasses and the ongoing fiscal cliff negotiations in Washington.

A far-fetched argument? Not according to the author, or to the early reviewers of the book, including Sanford Levinson, an acknowledged expert on constitutional law and professor of government at the University of Texas School of Law. Levinson wrote, “Can Orentlicher be serious in calling for a plural executive? The answer is yes, and he presents thoughtful and challenging arguments responding to likely criticisms. Any readers who are other than completely complacent about the current state of American politics will have to admire Orentlicher’s distinctive audacity and to respond themselves to his well-argued points.”

The Press was further encouraged by the very favorable pre-publication buzz the book (or rather, the idea behind the book) received from the Washington Post and Boston Globe. What seemed to be an implausible argument of a plural executive branch was called by the Globe, “a fresh lens on a problem we all complain about—and may offer useful guidance for how we should go about trying to reform our government.” Orentlichter went on to appear on ‘Fox and Friends,’ where he was met with just a twinge of cynicism, but also a whole lot of encouragement.

The book also received several excellent pre-publication reviews, including the following praise from Publishers Weekly: “As unlikely as the thought may sound, Orentlicher makes a surprisingly persuasive case for this radical change. Orentlicher delivers a compelling explanation of how such a system would better align with the framers’ original conception of the executive branch… the author has an incisive eye for the problems of contemporary government.”

With the very positive buzz circulating the book, the next challenge was how best to package and market the book to draw attention to the author’s controversial proposal. The NYU Press design and marketing team met the challenge head on, and immediately found a way to encapsulate the author’s argument in an innovative and exciting design.

In a launch meeting for the book, the discussion turned to how best to evoke visually such a two-headed being. Adam Bohannon, a designer at the Press, and Mary Beth Jarrad, marketing and sales director, decided to publish the book with two different covers—one to appeal to Democrats, and another to appeal to fans of the GOP. The Press then commissioned an illustration that would show the pairing of the Democratic donkey and Republican elephant. The result: two covers that look very much the same, but each features one of the iconic partisan images, the donkey or the elephant.

The book was released to the trade in February, with an equal number of copies of each edition in each carton shipped to wholesalers and retailers. The Press decided it would be too burdensome to track sale of each book, which would have required separate ISBNs and increased management of two titles rather than one. “We’ll probably never know which of the two editions sells the best, and as long as we sell them all, we probably will not care to know,” said Jarrad. “The next big question is, when we publish the paperback in 2014, which of the two covers should we use then.”

Meet our new intern, Connor!

Posted on February 22, 2013 by nyupressblog

Name and role at the Press: Connor Spencer, Social Media Marketing Intern

Major/minor/year at NYU: English and American Literature Major, minors in French and Gender and Sexuality Studies, Class of 2014

Any previous internships you’d like to note?: Prior to coming to NYU Press, I worked in the non-profit arena at The Door, a comprehensive youth development agency in downtown Manhattan. I worked in their college advising office, and mostly conducted tutoring and student outreach. I would venture to say that it was something of a formative experience for me, and I continue to work with NYU organizations in the fields of service and social advocacy. Civic engagement is really important to me—I want to feel as much a part of the city as I am a student within it!

Why did you decide to intern with NYU Press?: Once of the major draws of NYU for me was that its location would give me easy access to the publishing industry, justifying my questionable choice to pursue a humanities degree (kidding!). Research in my classes has led me to thumb through a number of university press texts, and some of my professors even utilized books that were published by NYU Press itself, so I guess you could say that academic publishing was always on my mind. I felt like this internship would be a great way to not only get my feet wet in publishing, but to also have the opportunity to work with a lot of tremendously cool books along the way. It’s basically a nerd’s paradise over here.

Subject area NYU Press publishes in that most interests you: This is a tricky one—everything looks so good! Whenever I edit the website or otherwise work with any of our books, I often find myself making a note to myself to check them out at a later date. Overall, though, I’d say I’m probably most interested in works in Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, and History, fields which, coincidentally, happen to frequently intersect with each other.

Any NYU Press books you’re looking forward to getting your hands on?: I’m sort of obsessed with the Cold War and the history of higher education, so I think that Marjorie Heins’s Priests of Our Democracy looks particularly fascinating. Given that the book is something of an intersection between these two subjects, I’m looking forward to giving it a read sometime! In terms of older releases, I’ve also wanted to read José Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia for a while now. The book caused some big waves in the queer studies community when it was published, and I see Muñoz’s name constantly appear in anything I read that was released since its publication. Coincidentally, Muñoz is also a professor at NYU, so it feels like he’s sort of an icon within the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis—everyone wants to talk about his work! It’s definitely on my “To Read” list for whenever I get a chance.

What’s your most preferred way of reading these days? Good ol’ book or fancy schmancy e-reader?: I’m old-fashioned and prefer physical books for the most part. My (somewhat alarming) tendencies as a hoarder aside, I like to write in my books and make notes in them and generally subject them to all kinds of abuse, which is an experience that I haven’t been able to replicate with e-books so far. Plus, paper smells good. Like, really good.

What are some of your hobbies?: Uh, this might be embarrassing, but I like to make zines. I’ve always appreciated the DIY aspects of punk culture, and I think that zines are pretty interesting as multimedia literary objects. Although I wouldn’t say that I’m part of any “scene,” there are definitely a few serial zines that I like and continue to support. I’m also a fan of video games, even if I usually don’t have time to play them. I mostly enjoy the retro stuff, but I’ve been hungrily eyeing Dark Souls since it was released. Hard games have a special place in my heart.

New-model publishing at MLA

Posted on February 6, 2013 by nyupressblog

—Monica McCormick

In January, I went to the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA) for the first time. It was an illuminating and energizing few days. In my job as head of NYU’s digital publishing office, a joint effort of NYU Libraries and NYU Press, I help to develop and implement strategies for engaging with scholars who produce new-model publications. For the Press, these strategies are central to our shift, now well underway, from being solely a print-book publisher to becoming a publisher of scholarship in a variety of forms and media.

So I have paid attention to the growing emphasis at MLA (as well as at academic conferences across the disciplines) in the digital humanities (DH). Notoriously tricky to define in brief, DH is a wide-ranging field that includes scholars who employ computational methods to study traditional evidence like literary texts, historical data, and cultural artifacts, and those who use humanistic methods to understand digital media and culture. This work results not only in print and digital books or journals, but also in databases, digital archives, online maps, complex visualizations, and more.

via @robincamille

Some of the highest-profile events at MLA were focused on DH, including a presidential forum, Avenues of Access: Digital Humanities and the Future of Scholarly Communication, immediately preceded by a panel on The Dark Side of Digital Humanities that engendered considerable debate on Twitter even as it occurred. These two could be read as the ends of the continuum of arguments about DH – its potential and its risks.

During my time at the DH and scholarly communication sessions, I focused on how publishers might find new ways of engaging with such work. The takeaways: We see not only tremendous variety in publishing modes and formats (text, audio, video, games, and combinations of those) but also shared concerns about how to assess, share, cite and preserve these new publication types for future scholars. Whatever we at NYU Press build and however we distribute it, we’ll have to grapple with these issues.

The panel I was on, “Beyond the PDF: Experiments in Open Access Scholarly Publishing,” presented five different publishing projects that rely on technology as diverse as listservs, blogging platforms, and purpose-built software to publish scholarship. I discussed MediaCommons, the NYU-supported digital scholarly network, and our focus not only on providing access to the content but also on tools for collaboration and engagement with it. Though each panelist’s projects had different emphases, we are all working on how to peer review new-model publications and how to demonstrate the quality and impact of this work so that it can be evaluated for tenure and promotion.

Another key theme was the relationship between work that appears online, then in print, and perhaps back to online, addressed in the panel Rewards and Challenges of Serial Scholarship. A generative example is Debates in Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew Gold of CUNY and published by Douglas Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press. The two of them first met via Twitter, where they were part of the same loose network of folks discussing DH. At MLA 2011, they hatched the idea for this book, which assembles a series of essays, many of which originated as blog posts. The print book was published only a year later, in time for MLA 2012, following a peer-review process where the contributors read and commented on each other’s work and the Press solicited its usual reviews. Then, at this year’s MLA, they released an interactive open-access online edition. Readers’ engagement with the material online is expected to lead to a new print edition in due course. Everything about this project, from its genesis online, through its editorial development and review, to the mix of publication types, strikes me as helpful for thinking through what new-model publishing requires.

As NYU Press moves forward with new-model publishing, we will look for projects that help us to learn new skills and engage with scholars and their audiences in innovative ways, as we maintain our emphasis on quality, cutting-edge scholarship. What I saw at MLA underlines my conviction that the future of scholarly publishing will not force us into binary choices (print vs. digital, paid vs. free, “traditional” vs. “experimental”) but will, rather, require us to balance many possibilities.

Monica McCormick is the Program Officer for Digital Scholarly Publishing at New York University. Read an interview with Monica, from The Chronicle of Higher Education, here. You can also find her on Twitter @moncia.

NYU Press award-winning book designs!

Posted on January 14, 2013 by nyupressblog

We are so excited to announce that the NYU Press has won three design awards in the 2013 New York Book Show!

Sponsored by the Bookbinders’ Guild of New York, the New York Book Show celebrates excellence in book design and production. The event is a North American competition, with only five awards given per entry category. Thus, we have some prestigious company, including Alfred A. Knopf, McGraw Hill, Oxford University Press, Penguin, Princeton University Press, Random House, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Congratulations to our design team! Here are the winning book designs:

Winner in Scholarly/Professional Book Design
Designer: (our very own) Adam Bohannon

Winner in Scholarly/Professional Cover Design
Designer: Charles B. Hames (also from NYU Press)

Winner in Scholarly/Professional Book Set Design
Designer: Kathleen Szawiola

5 NYU Press books named Choice Outstanding Academic Titles for 2012

Posted on January 10, 2013 by nyupressblog

We are *thrilled* to announce five (yep, count ‘em—FIVE) NYU Press books have been named Choice Outstanding Academic Titles for 2012.

Honoring “the best of the best” in scholarly publishing, Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles list contains just over 9 percent of some 7,000 works reviewed in Choice during the past year (and less than 3 percent of more than 25,000 titles submitted during this same period). You can find the entire list in the January 2013 issue of Choice.

In celebration, NYU Press is offering 20 percent off each title. Enter promo code CHOICE13 at check out to save on all five award-winners, including The Tender Cut; Planned Obsolescence; Highway under the Hudson; A Troubled Marriage; and The Bully Society. Offer expires February 15, 2013.

Congratulations to our authors, editors, and to everyone who worked on these books!

Meet the staff: Alicia Nadkarni

Posted on December 18, 2012 by nyupressblog

Over the past few months, our editorial team has undergone major transformations, welcoming *three* new members! You’ve already met Clara and Caelyn—now let us introduce you to our rockstar (literally) Assistant Editor Alicia Nadkarni…

Can you tell me a little about your role at NYU Press? What subjects do you work on?
I work with Eric Zinner on our American Studies, Culture Studies, Literature, and Media Studies lists.

Where did you work before coming to NYU Press?
Before coming to NYU, I worked at Rutgers University Press in acquisitions and later became a production editor there. My transition between the two departments was a really amazing experience—for some projects, I ended up working on the entire life of a book, from proposal to real-life bound book. By the time the books came out, I had very close relationships with those authors—we’d been through everything together! Before joining NYUP, I went to graduate school and got a Master’s degree in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

What’s the most exciting part of your job?
I love talking to scholars about their work and their ideas for their next book. It’s so interesting to hear the subjects that people have chosen to explore and I love being a part of sharing that scholarship.

Why did you go into (academic) publishing?
I am one of those people who loves learning about new things and nearly any subject fascinates me. The first editor I worked with, Leslie Mitchner, used to always say that academic publishing is an extension of one’s education, and I honestly feel that to be true.

What’s the most obscure subject/project you’ve ever worked on?
I once worked on a book about bats, which was actually incredibly fun and interesting.

What are you reading these days? Got a favorite NYU Press book?
I tend to read multiple books at once—I hate to finish a good book and suddenly have nothing left to read! I usually read at least one fiction book and one theory or academic book at the same time. I just finished Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, but I am also in the middle of Gaga Feminism by J. Jack Halberstam. I just started reading The Assignment by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, but it’s driving me nuts since each chapter is one long sentence. As an editor, it’s hard not to want to break out the red pencil. From NYU, I loved In a Queer Time and Place by J. Halberstam and Cruising Utopia by José Muñoz. I can’t wait to read Habitats by Constance Rosenblum and Spreadable Media by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green when they release in the spring.

Most preferred way of reading? Good ol’ book or fancy schmancy e-reader?
Usually, I’d say good ol’ book, but I just got a fancy schmancy smart phone and it’s been really great for reading on the go.

What are some of your hobbies?
When I’m not freelance editing or writing, I am a musician. I play several instruments, but I am primarily a bass player in several rock bands.

Meet the staff: Clara Platter

Posted on December 13, 2012 by nyupressblog

Over the past few months, our editorial team has undergone major transformations, welcoming *three* new members! We thought it was high time to introduce you to them and their work—next up in the hot seat is Editor Clara Platter…

Can you tell us a little about your role at NYU Press? What subjects do you work on?
I acquire in History with a special focus on race, gender, and sexuality in the United States and with a new emphasis on early American history. I also acquire in Law where my focus is constitutional, criminal and immigration law as well as law and society and legal history. I evaluate submissions in a variety of disciplines and commission projects directly from scholars.

Where did you work before coming to NYU Press?
Before coming to NYU I spent a year with the Perseus Books Group at the imprint PublicAffairs, and before that Princeton University Press acquiring in history for both. For Princeton I edited a series called Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America and at PublicAffairs I looked for general interest history titles with special relevance to current events. I began my career at the University of Georgia Press while in college at UGA, where I worked as an intern for the publicist and then as a marketing assistant entering UGA books for awards. It’s been a long straight shot in a way, with only one year away from academic publishing. I’m so delighted to be at NYU Press now. I’m never leaving.

What’s the most exciting part of your job?
I think just the sheer exposure to so many smart people. I love that my job lets me talk to the most interesting scholars about their work, and that as a non-specialist I can ask as many questions as I want. It’s good for the brain, having so many little pools of knowledge to dive into.

What’s the most obscure subject/project you’ve ever worked on?
As an assistant at Princeton I worked for a wonderful editor called Robert Kirk who acquires in ornithological field guides (among other things). They were the most beautiful books, and working on them meant handling these extraordinary handmade drawings of birds.

What are you reading these days? Got a favorite NYU Press book?
Too many at once! I’m finally reading Douglas Blackmon’s important book Slavery by Another Name, and Peter Brown’s beautiful new Through the Eye of a Needle. I just read the page proofs for Jill Norgren’s amazing book Rebels at the Bar which is forthcoming from NYU this spring. I work next door to the Strand bookstore and the other day I picked up the most wonderful thing, it’s Stephen King’s On Writing and I have to say it’s about the best book about writing I’ve read in a long time. My favorite in the genre is probably Annie Dillard’s Living by Fiction, although it’s a very different book in many ways. I like books about writing, and about publishing–I can’t wait to read our own Spreadable Media (forthcoming January 2013) for example, and I have Planned Obsolescence in my stack as well.

Any insider tips to tackling the great city of New York?
I have only lived in New York for two years so I don’t have any great advice yet, except that you really should leave your good shoes under your desk and not wear them in the street, and that Korean food by Penn Station is absolutely delicious.

What’s your most preferred way of reading these days? Good ol’ book or fancy schmancy e-reader?
Good ol’ book. Although I read the New Yorker on my iPad.

Have you ever received any great advice about your jobs from a colleague or a mentor?
The advice I always give to people who want to become an editor is to try to work for the best editor you can, and basically study them. How they write, how they evaluate projects, how they talk to authors, how they build a list. Don’t worry about how quickly you can acquire and just learn as much as you can and try to work on as many books as possible, taking on more and more responsibility. It’s a great way to become incredibly well trained, and the editor you work for will likely be grateful and help you in your career for years to come. For me that person was Brigitta van Rheinberg at Princeton. She’s an extraordinary editor who has fun with her work, a great combination in my opinion. She is at once highly demanding and always laughing. I try to be that way too!

Meet the staff: Caelyn Cobb

Posted on December 11, 2012 by nyupressblog

Over the past few months, our editorial team has undergone some major transformations, welcoming *three* new smart & lovely editors on board! We thought it was high time to introduce you to them and their work, so get ready—first up is Assistant Editor Caelyn Cobb…

Can you tell us a little about your role at NYU Press? What subjects do you work on?
I support Ilene Kalish, Executive Editor, on the Sociology, Criminology, Politics, and Women’s Studies lists. I’m the point person for authors on a variety of things, from contracts, to submitting final manuscripts, to blurbs. I also manage some of our peer reviews and prepare new projects for review by our internal board.

Where did you work before coming to NYU Press?
I previously worked at Oxford University Press for a number of editors in Politics, Music, and Dance. I’ve also had internships at the Poetry Foundation, the University of Chicago Press, and the University of Rochester Press.

What’s the most exciting part of your job?
It’s always the most fun when a book has just published, and you can tell that the author and the field are getting really psyched about it. In the social sciences, particularly, I’ve had the opportunity to work on books that release just in time to really impact the public debate on a given issue, from nuclear energy to political unrest in Egypt. It’s the best kind of payoff for all of the hard work that we do!

Why did you go into (academic) publishing?
I originally wanted to be a journalist, but I found that I liked working behind the scenes on the writing more than doing the reporting. So, I tried out a few internships to see if I’d like it, and it just so happened that my hometown (Rochester, NY) and my college town (Chicago) both had a lot of academic publishing. I fell into the field in that way, and I’ve really enjoyed it.

What’s the most obscure subject/project you’ve ever worked on?
Well, I do have to say, one thing I like about academic publishing is that no matter how small or ‘obscure’ the field you’re publishing in, you are always going to encounter someone who’s really interested in the work going on there. However, the music theory books I worked on at my last job were always totally over my head. Writing cover copy for them was so tough—tritones and quarter tones are just not my thing.

Why do you think academic publishing is important?
I think helping scholars reach a wider audience beyond their institution, or their specific field, or even outside their profession as educators is an important endeavor. That’s a big part of the work academic presses do and it’s valuable work.

What are you reading these days? Got a favorite NYU Press book?
I tend to go back and forth between nonfiction and fiction. I just finished up Intern Nation by Ross Perlin, an exposé about unpaid internships in the US, and I’m now working through a great novel by Victor Lavelle called Big Machine, which has been called “Invisible Man meets X-Files” (take that as you will). As for NYU Press books, I’m looking forward to reading Pray the Gay Away and Planned Obsolescence.

Any insider tips to breaking into the publishing industry?
Be flexible! If you start out thinking that you want to, say, work in editorial on poetry books only, you’re going to have a really rough time finding a job. Yet, if you’re open minded about the type of books you work on, or the role you take on in the industry (marketing, production, etc.), you’ll have a better chance of actually getting into publishing and being able to make your way toward a career that’s a good fit for you. You also might just find that you like what you end up working on more than you thought.

What’s your most preferred way of reading these days? Good ol’ book or fancy schmancy e-reader?
It depends. If the book is more than 300 pages, I will probably want that as an ebook. I carry around enough as it is!

If you weren’t in editorial, which team would you be on?
Marketing! My first few publishing internships were in marketing. You secretly run the show in that department. It’s great.

What are some of your hobbies?
Yoga and cooking are the big ones for me. I also am a huge internet nerd and can spend entire afternoons on blogs in pretty much any subject. (Not on workdays, of course…)

Have you ever received any great advice about your jobs from a colleague or a mentor?
The best advice I ever got was to “put in your time.” It’s easy to come out of college and expect to accomplish a lot right away, but I eventually realized that you can learn a lot by sitting back and seeing how those who have accomplished a lot (actually) do what they do.

Celebrate University Press Week!

Posted on November 16, 2012 by nyupressblog

With University Press Week coming to a close, we’d like to applaud our fellow UPs on a range of amazing blog posts this week, all celebrating the value of the university press. Bloggers have included authors, editors, university press staff (from directors to interns!), librarians, and the superheroes of the academic publishing world: Bruce Miller and Ned Stuckey-French, who led a successful social media campaign to save the University of Missouri Press. (See the full schedule here, and for more on #UPWeek, visit http://universitypressweek.org.)

Today, we are thrilled to be kicking off the final run of the University Press Week blog tour with a post from author and NYT writer, Constance Rosenblum!

After reading piece, head uptown “from the square” to the Columbia University Press blog, where today’s tour continues.

Celebrating the regional pride of University Presses
—Constance Rosenblum

For academics, one of the great benefits of university presses is that they have the ability and the desire to bring cutting-edge research to broad audiences. For a journalist like me, who has written and edited books about New York City, one of the wonderful things about NYU Press and many other university presses is that they have an appetite for books about their home turf. I suspect that’s one reason they published my most recent book, Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope Along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. At first glance, the subject might have seemed intensely local. But to my mind, the story of one of the most iconic, and most battered, urban areas in the nation was of profound importance, and I’m immensely grateful that NYU Press made it possible for that story to reach a broad audience.

The Press also published two collections of essays about the texture of urban life that had previously appeared in the City section of The New York Times, of which I was the long-time editor. And in April the Press will publish a collection of columns about the lives and homes of New Yorkers that I wrote for the paper’s Real Estate section. All three collections provide windows onto moving, evocative and resilient urban lives. In a city that was traumatized just over a decade ago by the attacks of September 11 and was battered anew just weeks ago by one of the worst storms in the nation’s history, it’s important to be reminded of what it means to be a New Yorker and to make a life in this city. Thanks to NYU Press, these three collections allowed some of those stories to be told.

Constance Rosenblum, most recently the author of the Habitats column published in the Real Estate section of The New York Times, is the longtime editor of the paper’s City section and a former editor of the Times’ Arts and Leisure section.

Slideshow: Brooklyn Book Festival 2012

Posted on September 24, 2012 by nyupressblog

Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth yesterday at the Brooklyn Book Festival!

We had a blast sharing our excitement for forthcoming fall books and convincing our fans/visitors/friends to get “tatted” up in celebration of our murder-mystery history book, The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle (out on Halloween 2012). Check out the slideshow below for pics from the fest, including the freshly-inked!