Ask me about these books
I have, as I mentioned last week, recently moved from full-time work directing a small university press to working with multiple publishers mostly on individual titles. (The exception is the University of Oklahoma Press, where I now have an ongoing role acquiring books about teaching and learning.) The shift to independent consulting is a real transition, since the element of list-building, so central to my publishing career to this point, no longer applies. When I sign on to help a publisher build awareness of a specific book, in other words, I’m not thinking about how it fits with a broader portfolio I’m charged with curating as an in-house professional.
Still, I’ve been interested in how my new gig(s) can draw out authors about their publishing experiences—by, for instance, using interviews about their books to help talk about how they landed with the publishers they did. I think there’s community-oriented work about publishing that can still happen in my independent marketing and communications role. Put slightly differently, I hope my new work can create opportunities for transparency while telling stories about books, authors, and publishers.
In that spirit, here’s the initial cohort of titles I’ve signed on to help with. (I’m also working directly with some authors, and providing occasional support to the great folks at Vesto PR, but I’ll put that aside for now.) If there are books here you’d like to know more about, drop me a line at dkrissoff at gmail dot com. I’m happy to try to provide review copies, access to authors, etc.
—The team at Oregon State University Press approached me this summer, just after I left my role at West Virginia, about working on the book First Meal. It brings together art by Julie Green, who died in 2021, with text by Kirk Johnson, for many years a correspondent at the New York Times. (Among other accomplishments, Kirk participated in the award-winning series “How Race Is Lived in America.”) It’s a reckoning with exonerees’ experiences through stories of their first meals after being released from prison. Excerpts from the book appeared this summer and fall, and I got to interview Kirk for Oregon State University’s “Life at OSU” feature. If it’s a title you might be interested in writing about, drop me a line. And if you’re in Portland, don’t miss Kirk at Powell’s as part of University Press Week.
—This title’s further out, but I’ve just signed on to help Kent State University Press with their book Behind the White House Curtain, by
. Steve is chief national correspondent for Voice of America, and the title will be published in early summer, just in time for the national political conventions and presidential election. Let me know if you’d like to get on the list for an ARC.—Finally, Utah State University has me pitching in with their free online resource Habits of Mind, a collection of essays about teaching and learning at the college level drawn from innovative approaches across the USU campus. I had a chance to talk with the collection’s editors, Julia Gossard and Chris Babits—watch for that interview soon.
I’ll wrap up with links to essays on publishing, books, and labor that have recently been on my radar. Have a look at Maris Kreizman in conversation with Molly McGhee in Lit Hub. (“And in these acknowledgments, I have listed out all of the credits. It’s by name, every single person who has worked on the book, what they did on the book.”) LARB has a long piece on Dan Sinykin’s new study of publishing, Big Fiction. And I loved the diary of reading and eating from book critic Dwight Garner in New York Magazine’s “Grub Street.” Seek out Dwight’s new book The Upstairs Delicatessen.