Travis Stimeling, musician and book person

A short remembrance

Musicology professor Travis Stimeling died this week at age 48. It was a loss felt in their many professional networks, and perhaps nowhere more than at West Virginia University, where they taught.

Travis’s extraordinary efforts at their home state’s flagship included close work with WVU Press, where I served as director for nine years. They were likely more involved with the press’s functioning than any other faculty member at the university—as author, coauthor, or editor of three books from the press; a member of the press’s editorial board; and editor of the press’s book series Sounding Appalachia, about the region’s music.

I think the opportunities that Travis created at and with WVU Press speak highly of the sorts of collaborations university presses enable more generally. There’s an old idea that university presses exist so that faculty can write the tenure books that university presses publish and then libraries can buy them—which doesn’t, in 2023, hold up at any level, if it ever did. A generous book person like Travis Stimeling showed how much more is possible. Travis helped bring in new books not just by teachers but by musicians, artists, and activists. They talked up not only their own books and those in the series they edited, but other WVU Press books and, indeed, the press overall. When there was good news (and for a while we had a lot of it), Travis was among the first to circulate it, helping raise WVU Press’s stature nationally and—the more challenging proposition, given the sometimes insular nature of universities—within the WVU community.

That notion of circulation extended to celebrating sightings of our books, often in far-flung places. Going to Book Culture in New York or Carmichael’s in Louisville or Skylight Books in Los Angeles often meant sending Travis a photo of one of their books on the shelves—and Travis in turn would share photos of WVU Press titles (not just their own) in the wild. I think we both responded to the ways publishing makes things public, pushing out ideas and writers and physical objects (Travis always had nice things to say about our design) so they bounce around the world.

Travis was also someone I could complain to—and the complaints became especially prominent in the run-up to the university’s “academic transformation,” which had all sorts of fallout for WVU Press (including my resignation from the press and Travis’s resignation, I’m told, from the press’s board). The press was hardly unique in this regard. Just this month Travis was quoted in a piece from Mountain State Spotlight about (among other topics) the loss of WVU’s Appalachian studies program, which they had taken the lead in founding.

My own memories of Travis will focus on happier times, and on the sorts of good citizenship Travis consistently displayed in interactions with authors, books, and publishers. Every press should have such an engaged and thoughtful ally.