West Virginia University Press is pleased to announce In Place, a new book series.

In Place emerges from a desire to uncover more books about the complexity and richness of place. This series will publish literary nonfiction in various forms—narrative nonfiction, memoir, essay collections, cultural mediation, and others—focusing on books firmly rooted in place. In Place creates a space to explore lives, history, and landscapes.

The series will seek manuscripts that are both artful and accessible by emerging and established authors, and it will value work that explores the world in all of its detail and subtlety in order to uncover the universal within the particular.

Series editors are especially interested in places that are sometimes overlooked, in particular complex regions loaded with stories that seem somewhat voiceless in the current literary landscape. This series will embody Eudora Welty’s idea that “One place understood helps us understand all places better.”

Series Editors:
Jeremy Jones (M.F.A., University of Iowa) is the author of Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland, which won the gold IPPY in memoir and was named the 2014 Appalachian Book of the Year in nonfiction. His essays appear in Oxford American, Brevity, and The Iowa Review, among others, and have been named Notable in Best American Essays. He is an assistant professor of English at Western Carolina University.

Elena Passarello (M.F.A., University of Iowa) is the author of Let Me Clear My Throatand the forthcoming Animals Strike Curious Poses, both from Sarabande Books. Her essays have been published in Oxford American, Creative Nonfiction, Slate and the Iowa Review, among other journals, as well as the anthologies After Montaigne and Cat is Art Spelled Wrong. Elena received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Hambidge Center, the Oregon Literary Arts Foundation, and she recently won the 2015 Whiting Award in Nonfiction. She is an assistant professor of English at Oregon State University. 

Advisory Board:

Sarah Einstein (Ph.D., Ohio University) is the author of Mot: A Memoir (Georgia, 2015), Remnants of Passion(Shebooks, 2014), and numerous essays and short stories. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Best of the Net, Notable Essay status in Best American Essays, and the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She is also the prose editor for Stirring: A Literary Collective and the special projects editor for Brevity Magazine.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest (M.F.A, University of Iowa) is the author of the award-winning memoirs Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana and Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines, as well as the guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go. She is Assistant Professor and Margaret R. Shuping Fellow of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She has won a Hodder Fellowship to Princeton, a Viebranz Professorship to St. Lawrence University, the Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting, and a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Gold Prize.

Silas House (M.F.A., Spalding University) is the author of five novels, three plays, and is the co-author of a creative nonfiction book about social protest. He serves as the NEH Chair of Appalachian Literature at Berea College and on the fiction faculty at Spalding University. House is a frequent contributor to several publications including The New York Times, Oxford American, The Southeast Review, and Newsweek. He is the winner of numerous awards, including the E.B. White, Appalachian Book of the Year, Chaffin Prize for Literature, and Audie awards; he is a two-time finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Prize, a two-time winner of the Kentucky Novel of the Year and recipient of the Lee Smith Award, the Hobson Medal for Literature, and the Award for Special Achievement from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. For his environmental activism House received the Helen Lewis Community Service Award in 2008 from the Appalachian Studies(link is external) Association.  

Bret Lott (M.F.A., University of Massachusetts-Amherst) is the author of fourteen books, most recently the essay collection, Letters and Life: On Being a Writer, On Being a Christian (Crossway, 2013) and the novel Dead Low Tide (Random House, 2012). He is the nonfiction editor of Crazy Horse and a professor of English at the College of Charleston.

Peggy Shumaker is the author of seven books of poetery, most rectenly Toucan Nest (Red Hen Press, 2014) and the memoir Just Breathe Normally (Nebraska, 20). Professor emerita from University of Alaska Fairbanks, Shumaker teaches in the Rainer Writing Workshop. She is founding editor of Boreal Books, publisher of fine art and literature from Alaska, and edits the Alaska Literary series at University of Alaska Press. She was the Alaska State Writer Laureate for 2010-2012.

Ryan Van Meter (M.A., DePaul and M.F.A. University of Iowa) is an assistant professor in University of San Francisco’s MFA program. He is the author of the essay collection If You Knew Then What I Know Now (Sarabande, 2011). His work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, andFourth Genre, among others. A recent finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, which celebrates the best LGBTQ books of the year, he has also been awarded residences by The MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Centre for the Creative Arts.

Wendy S. Walters (M.F.A./Ph.D., Cornell) is the author of Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal (Sarabande Books, 2015), Troy Michigan (Futurepoem Books, 2014), and Longer I Wait, More You Love Me (Palm Press, 2009). Walters was a 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, and her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Bookforum, FENCE, Harper’s, and elsewhere. She is Co-Chair and Associate Professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College of The New School University.

For more information: 
Authors interested in submitting proposals for consideration should contact WVU Press Editor at Large Andrew Berzanskis at aberzanskis@wvupressonline.com.