THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION (February 7, 2025): As part of my freelance work with Kent State University Press, I’m spending some of this winter drumming up awareness of Ghosts of an Old Forest, by Deborah Fleming, a retired professor of English at Ashland University. It’s a task made considerably easier by the success of Fleming’s previous book, also with Kent State. Resurrection of the Wild won the 2020 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, judged that year by Jelani Cobb, Daniel Menaker, and Judith Thurman.
Those are marquee names, and my Kent State colleagues got to celebrate at a ceremony emceed by Seth Meyers — not the kind of thing most readers typically associate with university-press publishing. But Kent State is not alone in its success, even among its small cohort of university presses in Ohio. Last fall the tiny University of Akron Press had the winner of the National Book Award for poetry with Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s Something About Living. (That ceremony was overseen by Kate McKinnon.) Ohio State University Press had a National Book Award finalist in the highly competitive nonfiction category back in 2020 with How to Make a Slave and Other Essays, by Emerson College’s Jerald Walter. Just in one state, the list of nationally recognized books from university presses is impressive. Expand out and you get much more, including Percival Everett’s Erasure, the inspiration for the Oscar-nominated movie American Fiction. It was originally published by the University Press of New England. Imagine the world without these books.