New & Noteworthy

The University of Iowa Press is proud to announce that Stagestruck Filmmaker: D.W. Griffith and the American Theatre by David Mayer has been chosen as a finalist for the 2010 Richard Wall Memorial Award. Formerly known as the Theatre Library Association Award, the prize was renamed in 2010 to honor the memory of the late Richard Wall, longtime TLA member and Book Awards Chair.

An actor, a vaudevillian, and a dramatist before he became a filmmaker, D. W. Griffith used the resources of theatre to great purpose and to great ends. In pioneering the quintessentially modern medium of film from the 1890s to the 1930s, he drew from older, more broadly appealing stage forms of melodrama, comedy, vaudeville, and variety. In Stagestruck Filmmaker, David Mayer brings Griffith’s process vividly to life, offering detailed and valuable insights into the racial, ethnic, class, and gender issues of these transitional decades.

Combining the raw materials of theatre, circus, minstrelsy, and dance with the newer visual codes of motion pictures, Griffith became the first acknowledged artist of American film. Birth of a Nation in particular demonstrates the degree to which he was influenced by the racist justifications and distorting interpretations of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. Moving through the major phases of Griffith’s career in chapters organized around key films or groups of films, Mayer provides a mesmerizing account of the American stage and cinema in the final years of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century.

Griffith’s relationship to the theatre was intricate, complex, and enduring. Long recognized as the dominant creative figure of American motion pictures, throughout twenty-six years of making more than five hundred films he pillaged, adapted, reshaped, revitalized, preserved, and extolled. By historicizing his representations of race, ethnicity, and otherness, Mayer places Griffith within an overall template of American life in the years when film rivaled and then surpassed the theatre in popularity.

David Mayer is emeritus professor in the Department of Drama, University of Manchester. He is the author and editor or coeditor of numerous publications in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American popular entertainment. His books include Harlequin in His Element: English Pantomime, 1806–1836 and Playing Out the Empire: “Ben-Hur” and Other Toga-plays and Films.

Now in its 40th year, the New Writers Award seeks to recognize promising young writers and provide undergraduate students an opportunity to meet with writers in early stages of their careers. Judges are professors of literature and writers in residence at the Great Lakes Colleges. The winners of the 2009 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for both fiction and creative nonfiction were published by the University of Iowa Press.

The creative nonfiction winner is Family Bible by Melissa Delbridge. The following excerpt is from the judges’ comments: “Some of the best memoirs do more than describe an individual life; they capture a time and place along with the particular psychological and cultural texture of a self. Family Bible shows that the real work of honesty lies in discovering a language capable of shaping the truth into reality on the page. There is dry wit and southern sass, yet Delbridge offers substance as well as style, asking hard questions about the ways in which we internalize trauma. Delbridge resists the self-pity we might otherwise expect from a childhood like hers. In a sense, the narrative perspective can be understood in the context of the ironic title. What the reader gets is not an un-self-examined application of simple scriptural lessons but a hard-edged reminder never to cast the first stone.”

The winner in the fiction category is Desert Gothic by Don Waters. The following excerpt is from the judges’ comments: “These are the stories of unrepentant outsiders . . . told on behalf of those who cannot tell. The textures are rich, the lexicon hard and fast and eidetic. The dramas are found in the seams of life and they are real and fleet. The consequences are unanticipated and just right. Many of these characters want to believe in something, but they can’t stop being imperfect. Although you wouldn’t expect figures such as Mormons on motorcycles, egotistical long distance runners, and writers obsessed with Mark Twain in one volume, Waters weaves these lives together through their connection with the Southwestern landscape, and ultimately through their fear of death. The language is economical and precise, gritty and engaging.”

Melissa Delbridge has published essays and short stories in the Antioch Review, Southern Humanities Review, Third Coast, and other journals. She is an archivist in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University. Delbridge lives with her family in Orange County, North Carolina, where she spends her leisure time letting the dogs in and out, making pickles, plotting vengeance, substantiating rumors, and working on a novel.

Don Waters was born and raised in Reno, Nevada, and now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He’s received numerous honors for his writing, including fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Jentel Foundation, as well as the McGinnis-Ritchie Award from the Southwest Review. His stories have been published in such venues as Epoch, StoryQuarterly, the Kenyon Review, the Southwest Review, the Santa Monica Review, ZYZZYVA, the Cimarron Review, and Grain.

The University of Iowa Press is proud to announce that as of May 15, 2009, it is offering a select group of its titles as e-books, available directly from the publisher's website. In conjunction with its distribution partner, the Chicago Distribution Center, and BiblioVault, a digital content repository hosted by the University of Chicago Press, the press is acting as a beta client for CDC in its initial forays into direct to consumer e-book fulfillment.

The fulfillment service uses Adobe's Digital Editions software, which is available free of charge for personal computers, Macs, and a varied and growing list of mobile platforms. Digital Editions offers an excellent user interface, similar in look and feel to Adobe Reader, as well as bookmarking and text-searching capabilities. The fulfillment system allows the University of Iowa Press not only to sell e-books directly through its website, but to distribute complimentary review copies, desk copies, and examination copies to media and scholarly partners. This aspect of the service reduces the number of printed copies that are distributed for free, reducing the press's carbon footprint and allowing it to raise awareness as a committed member of the Green Press Initiative.

University of Chicago Press director Garrett Kiely says, "Being able to present e-books via Digital Editions is a wonderful opportunity for the Chicago Distribution Center's client presses to move directly into the growing digital market with a minimum of stress. We are pleased that a publisher as respected as the University of Iowa Press has agreed to act as a beta press for this project."

Holly Carver, director of the University of Iowa Press, adds, "Not only are we taking advantage of a brand-new avenue for our titles, but we are saving paper and postage by offering e-books in place of traditional paper review and examination copies. We hope to continually add a vibrant mix of older and newer titles to this program and look forward to working with all our partners to increase the availability and visibility of our books. There are a myriad of e-distribution options beginning to appear and we are pleased that our relationship with the Chicago Distribution Center, the premier fulfillment operation in academic publishing, has allowed us to explore this opportunity."

For more information on the University of Iowa Press e-book initiative, please contact Jim McCoy, Marketing Manager, 319-335-2008, james-mccoy@uiowa.edu, or visit us online at www.uiowapress.org.

The University of Iowa Press is pleased to announce the winners of the 2010 Iowa Short Fiction Awards. Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell is the winner of the 2010 Iowa Short Fiction Award for her collection The Company of Heaven: Stories from Haiti. Barbara Hamby's Lester Higata's 20th Century is the winner of the 2010 John Simmons Short Fiction Award. The recipients were selected by Paul Harding, author of Tinkers.

Painter, poet, and short story writer Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell was born and grew up in Haiti. She has held fellowships at the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bunting Institute, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, and the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University and has received a grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts. In 1993, she won the Grolier prize for poetry. Her collection Crossroads and Unholy Water won the 1999 Crab Orchard Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Walt Whitman prize from the Academy of American Poets. Her poetry has appeared in such anthologies as Sisters of Caliban: Contemporary Women Poets of the Caribbean, The Beacon Best of 1999: Creative Writing by Women and Men of All Colors, and New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology and in such magazines as Callaloo, Ploughshares, and River Styx, and her short fiction has been published in Callaloo, the Crab Orchard Review, and the New Arcadia Review as well as The Best American Short Stories 2003.

Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell’s stories transport you to a lush, singular, lyrical, flamboyant, and spirit-filled Haiti where palm trees shine wet with moonlight and the sky paints a yellow screen over your head and the ocean sparkles with thousands of golden eyes—and keep you there forever. Her characters may dream of escape, whether from themselves, from family, from Vodou, from financial and cultural difficulties and the politicians that create or maintain them, or from the country itself, but Haiti will forever remain part of their souls and part of the thoughts of her readers.

Barbara Hamby was raised in Hawai'i and is writer-in-residence in the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University in Tallahassee. She is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Babel and All-Night Lingo Tango. She is also coeditor of the poetry anthology Seriously Funny. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Mississippi Review, Southwest Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2001, and she was recently awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.

“Lester Higata knew his life was about to end when he walked out on the patio behind his house in Makiki and saw his long-dead father sitting in a lawn chair near the little greenhouse where Lester kept his orchids.” Thus begins Barbara Hamby’s magical narrative of the life of a Japanese American man in Honolulu. Starting in 1999 with his conversation with his father, continuing throughout his life with Katherine and their children in Hawai’i, and ending with his days in the hospital in 1949, as he heals from a wartime wound and meets the woman he will marry, Hamby moves backward in time to recreate not one world but any number of worlds that have shaped Lester. The world of his mother, as stubbornly faithful to Japan and Buddhism as Katherine’s mother is to Ohio and conservative Christianity; the world of his children, whose childhoods and adulthoods are vastly different from his; the world after Pearl Harbor and Vietnam; the world of a professional engineer and family man: the worlds of Lester Higata’s 20th Century are ordinary worlds filled with ordinary people living extraordinary lives, moving from farms to classrooms and offices, from racism to acceptance and even love, all in a setting so paradisal it could be heaven on earth.

The short fiction awards are given to a first collection of fiction in English and are administered through the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The honors are national in scope and have been given since 1969. The John Simmons Short Fiction Award (named for the first director of the University of Iowa Press) was created in 1988 to complement the existing Iowa Short Fiction Award.