Two weeks ago, I blogged here about National Women’s History Month, making the first in a series of posts about new and recent books available from UNC Press focusing on the lives of women. That entry featured books that looked at the lives of American women in the Civil War and women returning from tours [...]

Today we welcome a guest post from Lee Bernstein, author of America Is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s (forthcoming June 2010). In his book, Bernstein explores the forces that sparked a dramatic “prison art renaissance” in the 1970s, when incarcerated people produced powerful works of writing, performance, and visual art. [...]

Hearty congratulations to multiple UNC Press authors who have recently been honored by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources for their outstanding work in North Carolina history and culture.
Anna Hayes was awarded the Ragan Old North State Award for Nonfiction for Without Precedent: The Life of Susie Marshall Sharp. The award is given yearly [...]

First, let’s set the scene:

A little closer…

Last Sunday, UNC Press held a book party at the historic Grove Park Inn in Asheville, NC.  The event celebrated three of our fall 2009 titles:
Foy Allen Edelman, author of SWEET CAROLINA, spent six years traveling every inch of North Carolina to collect the best in local dessert recipes; [...]

Last week best-selling fiction writer E. Lynn Harris died at the age of 54. Harris’s closeted and openly gay black characters paved the way for a new and vibrant genre of popular literature with widespread appeal. Personally, Harris was a kind and generous man who sought to encourage and support other gay black writers, including [...]

UNC Press author Bland Simpson has made his name on a myriad of talents, one of which is his superb ability to write about North Carolina’s coastline. Since 1993, UNC Press has published five of Simpson’s books about the area, with the most recent work–The Inner Islands–scheduled for paperback publication in the spring of 2010.
I [...]

Located on the Virginia-North Carolina border, directly above Forsyth County, is Stokes County, the next stop on our Tar Heel Trek. Historically, Stokes is best known for tobacco production and stringband music. More recently, it is getting attention for being the home of baseball standout Dustin Ackley. However, as a Stokes County native, I feel [...]

“On the boat, I don’t have a TV,” he said. “We just read.”
So it has been for hundreds of years.
A recent New York Times article about the Fisher Poets Weekend (which was held this past weekend in Astoria, Oregon) introduces several of the seafaring poets who gather once a year to share verse inspired by [...]

It’s an old idea that now has a very modern twist, like a newspaper serial for the 21st century. . . .
Want to read a book but don’t have large blocks of time for settling in and curling up? We’ve found a solution for you with DailyLit — the first e-book vendor to send [...]

On WUNC’s (91.5 FM Chapel Hill) The State of Things today at noon, Frank Stasio and a panel of guests will be discussing the legal and religious meanings of marriage in light of the passage of Prop 8 in California and similar amendments in other states.
Guests will include UNC Press author E. Patrick Johnson, professor [...]

Three UNCP authors deserve special cheers for winning awards recently:
Rob Christensen, author of The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics, has been awarded the 2008 Ragan Old North State Award for Nonfiction by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. The successor to the organization’s Mayflower Cup, the Ragan Old North State Award honors Sam Ragan: [...]

I took some sign language classes about twenty years ago and had some interaction with the deaf community at the time, but when the classes ended, I didn’t keep it up. I remember little more than the American Sign Language (ASL) alphabet, plus a few things like “more,” “thank you,” and “finished,” which I learned [...]

Don’t worry, just because I had another post this morning doesn’t mean I forgot that this is Thursday, the highly anticipated day of the weekend roadtrip post! Fear not, dear Tar Heel roadtrippers, we’ve got a special “oke”-alicious lineup for this last segment of our Beach Book Grab Bag series. We’re featuring two Outer Banks [...]

With the real-life dramas unfolding on Wall Street these days, it’s only a matter of time before we witness a bumper crop of novels and thrillers set in the high-stakes financial world. David Zimmerman has written about the connections between novels and markets in an earlier period of American history

Fatemeh Keshavarz, author of Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran, has an article on Counterpunch in which she finds lessons on the ethics of torture in the writings of thirteenth-century Iranian poet Sa’di.