Illinois Press Book Blog

Lorna Rivera’s recent book, Laboring to Learn: Women’s Literacy and Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era, has received the Cyril O. Houle Award for Outstanding Literature in Adult Education. It is awarded annually by the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education for a book published in the previous year that reflects universal concerns of adult educators. The award presentation was made on Thursday, November 5th at the annual conference for AAACE.

Billie Jean Isbell’s book, Finding Cholita, will receive the honorable mention award for this year’s Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. The committee was very impressed by the melding of genres and portrayal of long-term psychological reality of chronic violence.

Isbell has been invited to read from her work during the SHA session at the annual AAA meeting on Friday, December 4th.

Working Girl Blues: The Life and Music of Hazel Dickens by Hazel Dickens and Bill Malone, has been named winner of a Certificate of Merit for the 2009 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research.

Winners will be recognized during an awards banquet to be held in New Orleans on Saturday May 22, 2010.

David Wagoner’s book, A Map of the Night, has been named winner of the 2009 Washington State Book Award in Poetry.

Sponsored by the Washington Center for the Book at the Seattle Public Library, the award recognizes books that exemplify the best writing in the state during a given year.

Congratulations, David.

Margaret Washington’s new book, Sojourner Truth’s America, was one of two 2009 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award winners.  Awarded annually by the Association of Black Women Historians, the competition honors the best book and article written about African American women’s history. 

Congratulations, Margaret!

The International Alliance for Women in Music recently recognized Susan Thomas, author of Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana’s Lyric Stage, with the Pauline Alderman Award for Outstanding Scholarship on Women in Music.

From IAWM’s press release:

“In this model study, Thomas examines…a popular music theatre genre in Havana in the 1920s and 1930s as the response of composers, librettists, and impresarios to increasingly female audiences and to such general forces as urbanization and nationalism. Zarzuela conventions that develop during the early twentieth century continue at least until the 1959 revolution and reveal enduring class, racial, and sexual stereotypes, conflicts, and efforts toward resolution. The book is a strong contribution to music theatre scholarship, gender studies and Cuban history.”

The University of Illinois Press was recognized with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the recent International Country Music Conference in Nashville for our series Music in American Life. Pats on the back for my colleagues Judy McCulloh (retired) and Laurie Matheson for their fine work on the series.

Congratulations, John Hallwas. The Society Of Midland Authors has named Dime Novel Desperadoes: The Notorious Maxwell Brothers winner of its 2009 prize in the Biography category.

On February 12th, Cheryl L. Keyes won an NAACP Image Award in the category of “Outstanding World Music Album” for her debut CD, Let Me Take You There (Keycan Records 2008). Keyes is a composer-arranger, pianist-flutist-vocalist, and associate professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. The University of Illinois Press published Keyes’s Rap Music and Street Consciousness, which received a Choice award for outstanding academic books in 2004. Keyes has also contributed articles to several UIP journals, including Black Music Research Journal and Ethnomusicology.

Congratulations on your award, Professor Keyes!

Last night Mark Doty won the National Book Award for his Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems. Doty has a long history with the University of Illinois Press. In 1993 we published his multiple-award-winning *My Alexandria, and in 1995 his Turtle, Swan and Bethlehem in Broad Daylight. He has also been a friend to us in our publishing of other volumes in the National Poetry Series.

 *Still available in an old-school cassette, yo!