University of Alabama Press

 

The University of Alabama Press, founded in 1945, is one of the fastest-growing university presses in the south today. Output has increased from fifty titles per year in 1995 to nearly seventy this year. During this time Thomson-Shore has been a valuable partner. “They are my printer of choice,” says University of Alabama Press Production Manager Rick Cook.
 
Recently, the press published An Alabama Songbook, a work more than fifty years in the making. Featuring the text and musical transcriptions of folk songs collected by University of Alabama music professor Byron Arnold in trips throughout the state in the 1940s, designing and printing the book on budget proved to be a challenge. Thomson-Shore was able to help the press conserve costs and produced a stunningly beautiful volume.
 
Books about the state, including the best-selling Alabama in the Twentieth Century, are only one part of the University of Alabama Press’s broad and active publishing program. Through its Deep South Books series, the press features new and exciting fiction, such as George Garrett’s novel Double Vision. Memoir and military history converge in Jim Brown’s Impact Zone and James P. Coan’s Con Thien, both about the authors’ experiences fighting in the DMZ in Vietnam.
 
At a time when other academic presses have shied away from launching new directions for their list, the University of Alabama Press has had much success with books in its Modern and Contemporary Poetics series, edited by Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer. The newest MCP title is Differentials, by incoming Modern Language Association President Marjorie Perloff. A former MLA president, Mary Ann Caws, recently published To the Boathouse: A Memoir with the press, to great acclaim.
 
Frye Gaillard’s Cradle of Freedom reveals how Alabama was transformed from the Cradle of the Confederacy to a place where hundreds of devoted individuals helped the civil rights movement succeed. And the Press’s extensive list in archaeology and anthropology illuminates the lives and cultures of the Native Americans who lived throughout the southeast and Caribbean before the arrival of white settlers.
 
Through the years, UA Press books have won numerous prizes, including the Lillian Smith Book Award, the Jefferson Davis Award, the Southern Political Science Association’s V. O. Key Award, and the Organization of American Historians’ inaugural Liberty Legacy Foundation Award. A driving force in twenty-first century academic publishing, The University of Alabama Press is pleased to work with Thomson-Shore to bring its publications to a broad range of readers, with a variety of needs and expectations.
 
For more information about the press, please visit their website at  www.uapress.ua.edu.