Oct 24, 2017 University of Utah Press News: It’s Award Season!

Award season is upon us and we’ve been thrilled to see the honors received by Press publications. We are especially pleased to announce that Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History by Gregory A. Prince was awarded the Evans Biography Award from the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies at Utah State University. This $10,000 prize is given to “the best biography of a person who lived a significant portion of his or her life in the Interior West.”

Fittingly, Arrington himself received the very first Evans Award in 1983 for Brigham Young: American Moses, and Prince’s magisterial examination of the life of the Mormon Church’s foremost twentieth-century historian is a timely companion. Congratulations to Greg Prince for this recognition of Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History, which also recently received the John Whitmer Historical Association’s Brim Biography Book Award.

The Francis Armstrong Madsen Best Book Award from the Utah Division of State History was awarded to Matthew Garrett for Making Lamanites: Mormons, Native Americans, and the Indian Student Placement Program, 1947-2000. This title also won the Press’s own Juanita Brooks Prize in Mormon Studies; author Matt Garrett discussed this topic as a recent guest on KUER’s RadioWest with Doug Fabrizio.

Other Press titles have also received outstanding recognition this year:

The Mormon History Association Best Personal History/Memoir Award went to Kerry William Bate for The Women: A Family Story; the Clarence Dixon Taylor Historical Research Award from the Charles Redd Center (BYU) went to Jerry Spangler and Donna Spangler for Last Chance Byway: The History of Nine Mile Canyon and Nine Mile Canyon: The Archaeological History of an American Treasure; and the 15 Bytes Book Award for Creative Nonfiction was awarded to Immortal for Quite Some Time by Scott Abbott. We congratulate all of these Press authors on their award-winning work.

New Titles

The Press’s publication list in archaeology and anthropology remains strong with the release of a number of excellent new titles, including Plainview: The Enigmatic Paleoindian Artifact Style of the Great Plains edited by Vance T. Holliday, Eileen Johnson, and Ruthann Knudson. This volume presents new data gleaned from the reinvestigation of past excavations, notes, maps, and other materials from the original Plainview site as well as reports from other Plainview Paleoindian sites across the Great Plains, northern Mexico, and the southwestern U.S. The Last House at Bridge River: The Archaeology of an Aboriginal Household in British Columbia during the Fur Trade Period edited by Anna Marie Prentiss is a comprehensive archaeological study of a single-house floor and roof deposit, Housepit 54 at the Bridge River Site, dated to approximately 1835-1858 CE. This volume demonstrates an integrated multidisciplinary approach to Fur Trade period aboriginal society and illustrates the value of collaboration between archaeologists and First Nations. Prehistoric Games of North American Indians: Subarctic to Mesoamerica, edited by Barbara Voorhies, presents the most comprehensive archaeological exploration of games among indigenous peoples of North America, while Michael Brian Schiffer’s Archaeology’s Footprints in the Modern World is a fascinating and lively discussion of archaeology’s diverse scientific and humanistic contributions to modern society.

Two recent publications highlight art found in the landscapes of the West. Talking Stone: Rock Art of the Cosos by Paul Goldsmith is a full-color exploration of one of North America’s largest concentrations of rock art, hidden away in the canyons of a highly restricted military base on the edge of the Mojave Desert. With 160 stunning color photos, this book gives readers a personal engagement with this enigmatic rock art.

Hikmet Sidney Loe’s The Spiral Jetty Encyclo: Exploring Robert Smithson’s Earthwork through Time and Place has been many years in the making and was recently released at well-attended events at the Art Barn and at the Utah Museum of Fine Art.

The Spiral Jetty (1970) is an icon of the Land Art movement and the book contains some 220 images, most of them in color, which it uses to help explore the construction, connections, history, natural history, and significance of Smithson’s 1,500-foot-long curl into the Great Salt Lake.

Other recent Press titles grapple with social or environmental issues. Philip Garrison’s What That Pig Said to Jesus: On the Uneasy Permanence of Immigrant Life is a mix of slangy memoir and anthropological field notes that portrays two waves of immigration to the Columbia Plateau and the ambiguous relationships that have resulted. Holly Cusack-McVeigh’s Stories Find You, Places Know: Yup’ik Narratives of a Sentient World explores one Yup’ik community’s use of stories to explain the interactions of people and places, making it a unique contribution to the literature of place. Gary Meehan’s Thank You Fossil Fuels and Good Night: The Twenty-first Century’s Energy Transition eschews politics in favor of a comprehensive discussion of the economic, environmental, and security concerns of various energy sources, illuminating their possibilities and limitations. Saving Wyoming’s Hoback: The Grassroots Movement that Stopped Natural Gas Development, by Florence R. Shepard and Susan L. Marsh, tells the story of the citizens from many walks of life who worked together to protect the Hoback Basin from potentially devastating development. It is an inspiring example of how determined citizens can make a difference. According to photographer and author Stephen Trimble, “as Shepard and Marsh follow these people bound by their love of Hoback Basin, they lay out a bipartisan path toward environmental redemption and justice.” Such an approach is needed now more than ever. Saving Wyoming’s Hoback won the Press’s Wallace Stegner Prize in 2016.

This quick tour highlights only a few recent publications. Please visit the Press’s website (www.UofUpress.com) to see more titles.

Press Publication Prizes

We are pleased to announce the recent winners of two Press publication prizes:

Heather June Gibbons is the winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry for her manuscript “Her Mouth as a Souvenir.” The judge for the award, poet Jericho Brown, has this to say about Gibbons’s winning volume: “Progression in this book, like progression in life, moves us forward in time but not in wisdom. We still don’t know why . . . , but we understand loss as a result of gain. And the poems remain strong and wide-eyed to the end as they turn from exclamation in the first section to prayer in the second to the elegiac mode of the third section. Elegy itself has no bounds as the speaker commemorates all she once felt badgered by—love, work, the city, unending breath. I am trying to say that I love this book and the way it cries out in well-crafted poems that aren’t under the impression that craft has anything to do with boredom. ‘Her Mouth as Souvenir’ is a declarative wonder, a testament to our need to go and go on.” The book will be available in June 2018.

D. Shane Miller won the Don D. and Catherine S. Fowler Prize for his manuscript “From Colonization to Domestication: Population, Environment, and the Origins of Agriculture in Eastern North America.” Eastern North America is one of only a handful of places in the world where people first discovered how to domesticate plants. In this book, anthropologist Shane Miller uses two common, although unconventional, sources of archaeological data—stone tools and the distribution of archaeological sites—to trace subsistence decisions from the initial colonization of the American Southeast at the end of the last Ice Age to the appearance of indigenous domesticated plants roughly 5,000 years ago. This work is an important contribution to the field; it will be available in May 2018.