Cherie Dimaline made several appearances at Calgary’s ever-brilliant WordFest this year, including one titled Group Therapy, starring Alexandra Auder, Cherie Dimaline, Susin Nielsen, and Mary L. Trump. So, we thought it appropriate to excerpt a short passage from the beginning of her 2023 book, An Anthology of Monsters: How Story Saves Us from Our Anxiety, where she describes her “lifelong dance with anxiety and how story can help reshape the ways in which we think, the ways we cope, and the very choreography of that dance.” Excerpt “The gift the Kreisel Lecture gives us is the opportunity to ..read more

The theme of University Press Week 2023 is #SpeakUP.  We decided to take this literally and celebrate a number of oral history titles that we have published. There are so many voices that are unheard, silenced, or marginalized. This is an area where publishers across our global industry are striving to do more and do better.  There are several ways of narrating the past. Historiography, for example, often tells us more about the motives of the historian than what actually happened. History from below attempts to liberate history from the limitations and biases of the historian by all ..read more

In September, the publishing industry came together to celebrate another year of wonderful writing and books. There were so many remarkable books shortlisted! A highlight of the evening was remarks from Minister Tanya Fir (Arts, Culture, and Status of Women) and the presence of numerous officials from the government of Alberta and the City of Edmonton. We were pleased to have the University of Alberta’s Chief Librarian, Dale Askey, in attendance. Our amazing host was, once again, the vivacious Judy Piercey. George Melnyk received the Lifetime Achievement Award and the press he helped establish ..read more

A guest post by Anindita Mukherjee  Hello, I am Anindita Mukherjee, a PhD intern, the fifth to join the cohort of doctoral students who have worked at University of Alberta Press. I completed my Master of Arts in English from Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi) and Bachelor of Arts degree from Presidency University (Kolkata) before coming to Edmonton for my PhD.  I began the PhD program in the Department of English and Film Studies in Fall 2022. I work on the interface between literature and philosophy. The broad strokes of my research touch Literature, Philosophy, Thought, and A ..read more

Kasia Van Schaik is one of twelve authors longlisted for the prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize for her debut collection of short stories, We Have Never Lived On Earth. “This is the first time that one of our authors has been longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. We knew that Kasia’s book was spectacular, and we are proud to have published her work, We Have Never Lived On Earth, in our Robert Kroetsch Series,” said UAlberta Press Director Douglas Hildebrand. As Kasia Van Schaik writes in her coming-of-age climate-anxious collection, “In the world we’re cre ..read more

University of Alberta Press is accepting poetry manuscripts between September 1 and 30. At the end of the submission period, the Press will select up to three manuscripts for publication in 2025 in the Robert Kroetsch Series of Canadian creative writing. We welcome submissions by poets from diverse and marginalized backgrounds, and are interested in seeing work from a broad range of experiences and aesthetics. Note: All submissions must be from poets who are Canadian citizens or permanent residents. To see our poetry books click through to our website. The three collections we are publish ..read more

Seasonal catalogues! Many publishers, for many years, organized their “lists” of books into seasons, usually Spring and Fall. Sales reps, including our wonderful Ampersand Inc. folk, would take the printed catalogues to bookstore buyers and they would sit together and mark them up to make their orders. The catalogues included frontlist titles (new books, coming out soon), mid-list (books that were recently published), and bestselling backlist. There might be a publisher’s note or a list of new awards that had been garnered. Over time, the tradition of printed catalogues has been slowly moving ..read more

University presses have the capacity to bring new voices to a conversation or raise up voices that are not widely heard. University of Alberta Press has been privileged to publish several authors who share their experiences and ideas around Palestine. Here are some of the recent publications. Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine (Jeremy Wildeman and M. Muhannad Ayyash) explores Canada-Palestine relations through a settler colonial lens. The contributors argue that there are direct parallels between Canada’s settler colonial project and its support for the Israeli settler col ..read more

A guest post by Dr Sandeep Agrawal, Professor and Inaugural Director of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Alberta, excerpted from Chapter 3 of his edited collection, Rights and the City: Problems, Progress, and Practice. This chapter presents a broad inquiry into the changes that occurred on the rights front between 1867 and 1982, and the implications these changes have had on cities and planning at the local level. Discrimination was embedded in Canadian society, with racism, sexism, ableism, and xenophobic views often seen as the norm. These discriminatory idea ..read more

Our in-house designer, Alan Brownoff, does almost all of our covers, but every now and again we ask one of our terrific freelance book designers to create a cover. We thought it would be fun to share some of the behind-the-scenes conversations that led to our selecting this cover, produced by Natalie Olsen of Kisscut Design. Natalie: “There are some specific lines in the design brief, listed below, that inspired these mock-ups. I was most drawn to the scenes with wind.” “Of how the wind took your notes, no matter how hard you blew, the wind took your notes and did with them what it wanted, pl ..read more