Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, the West Virginia University Press has announced the release of its Spring 2025 season catalog, featuring eight diverse publications from the creative to the scholarly.
The eight new publications include the following:
“Blue Futures, Break Open” — This debut novel from Ghanaian author Zoë Gadegbeku asks the question, “When the souls of enslaved Black people flew away to freedom, where did they go?”
“Dispatch from the Mountain State” — This is the latest work of Marc Harshman, West Virginia poet laureate, who finds unexpected beauty while grappling with current issues such as addiction, environmental devastation and illness in Appalachia.
“north by north/west (an attention to frequency)” — This genre-bending memoir by writer and multimedia artist Chris Campanioni explores his experience growing up in the 1990s as the child of immigrants from Poland and Cuba.
“The Doom of the Great City; Being the Narrative of a Survivor” — This critical edition of William Delisle Hay’s 1880 novella “The Doom of the Great City; Being the Narrative of a Survivor, Written A.D. 1942,” is commonly acknowledged as the first work of speculative fiction portending urban apocalypse and environmental devastation.
“Power Shift: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy” — This keywords-style reference collects over 100 contemporary terms on energy and environmental justice connecting historical injustices with current environmental crises from Indigenous activism to neoextractivism.
“The New American Small Town” — Geographer Jennifer Mapes offers a critical examination of American small-town narratives as contrasted with lived experiences, including a map with 100 examples of small towns in television and film.
“Enraptured Space: Gender, Class, and Ecology in the Work of Paula Meehan” — Scholar and poet Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick delivers the first extensive study devoted to a leading contemporary Irish poet.
“Weaving a Fabric of Unity: Conversations on Education and Development” — WVU faculty member Bradley Wilson collaborates with two Colombian scholars to reflect on 50 years of lessons from a Latin American NGO emphasizing scientific education and rural community development.