Letter from the director

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Stay Informed

A Letter from Patrick W. Conner, Director of the West Virginia University Press

The West Virginia University Press is now around forty years old and has a list of nearly 50 titles in print, and we’re adding nearly a dozen new titles every year. Even so, until recently, most West Virginians haven’t known we are here, but we’re turning that around, too.

Robert Munn, Dean of WVU Libraries, began publishing books on West Virginia subjects in the mid-1960s, at first under the imprint of the West Virginia University Libraries, and later, during the early 1970s, he established the West Virginia University Press imprint. In 1999, the Press moved to the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences under the shelter of the Department of English. That relationship has worked well and we continue in our commitment to improve and develop the Press by the careful selection of new titles made available to us by authors and scholars and by the sophisticated design of our books, thus making them attractive to book dealers as well as book buyers. At the heart of any university press are the scholarly monographs and scientific studies that constitute our major mission to the academic community. Making new insights, new discoveries, and even new literature available to the larger community of scholars and writers in the U.S. is our first reason for existing. To focus as much of that as is practical on our own region and state is our next justification.

We are particularly proud of our West Virginia titles which now cover not only the coal industry, our founding editor’s major contribution, but our state's art, music, history and literature, as well. Like the Press itself, we think that these West Virginia titles ought to be better known.

In the years we have been working with the West Virginia University Press, we're particularly enthusiastic about some of our regional accomplishments. John A. Cuthbert's Early Art and Artists in West Virginia is the most ambitious project we had undertaken at the time, but now that has been followed by the technically more complex book, Blanche Lazzell: The Life and Work of an American Modernist, edited by Robert Bridges, Kristina Olson, and Janet Snyder, which presents the first scholarly study of an important early twentieth-century artist who, like the Press itself, deserves to be better known.

Such books would be major undertakings for any press; for us, they are an indication of our firm commitment to making the best of the state's traditions available to citizens and friends of West Virginia. The same can be said of the CD publication of the two volumes of Edden Hammons' fiddle music, or Work and Pray, the songs recorded by members of West Virginia’s African-American community for Dr. Cortez Reece in the fifties and which were preserved by our West Virginia Regional History collection in the WVU Libraries.

We are similarly proud of a number of other projects in the last few years. We developed and published a first-hand account of the settlement of Anmoore, West Virginia, by Spanish zinc smelters at the turn of the twentieth century in our dual-language (English and Spanish) book, Pinnick Kinnick Hill. We published an anthology of West Virginia writers called Backcountry, edited by Irene McKinney, the state’s poet laureate.

There are of course new things scheduled for the future of which we can be equally proud. Our list of regional fiction will grow, and Irene McKinney’s Vivid Companion will represent the first book of poetry the West Virginia University Press has published since 1972 when it published Paradox Hill by the state’s first poet laureate, Louise McNeill. West Virginia University composer, John Beall, will bring out his CD of original compositions called Wondrous Love: Appalachian Chamber Music. And there will be some surprises, too, that we’ll announce here from time to time.

So, stay tuned. And thanks so much for your interest and your support. We look forward to hearing from you soon.

Pat Conner, Director West Virginia University Press