WVU Press is pleased to announce the release of its Fall 2024 seasonal catalog, featuring eight new books, and the addition of two new staff members to the team.
Fall 2024 opens with Matthew Ferrence’s memoir "I Hate It Here, Please Vote for Me: Essays on Rural Political Decay," recounting the author’s experience as a progressive candidate for Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives in a rural district.
Fiction offerings include Megan Howell’s “Softie: Stories,” a beautifully melancholic group of short stories exploring women’s and girls’ lives and relationships with their bodies and each other, and Douglas W. Milliken’s “Enclosure Architect: A Novel,” an inventive work about a collection of artists, bohemians and libertines in an American city engulfed in civil conflict.
The Press’s robust scholarly series are represented by Jason L. Newton’s “Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest,” histories of capitalism and the environment; Joanna Allan’s “Saharan Winds: Energy Systems and Aeolian Imaginaries in Western Sahara,” energy and society; and Salma Monani’s “Indigenous Ecocinema: Decolonizing Media Environments,” salvaging the anthropocene.
Closer to home, WVU Press author Amanda E. Hayes explores the evolution of gender roles in Appalachian higher education with “The Madison Women: Gender, Higher Education, and Literacy in Nineteenth-Century Appalachia.”
The season is rounded out by “This Book Is Free and Yours to Keep,” edited by Connie Banta, Kristin DeVault-Juelfs, Destinee Harper, Katy Ryan and Ellen Skirvin. Through essays, letters and artwork by people in prison, this collection provides insight into the Appalachian Prison Book Project, a Morgantown-based nonprofit that sends free books to people imprisoned in six Appalachian states, hosts book clubs inside prisons and is leading an effort to bring for-credit college courses into prisons.
Joining the Press are Kristen Bettcher as managing editor and Marguerite Avery as editorial director. Both will be featured in an upcoming MOUNTAINEER E-News piece.