There’s a common misconception that university presses only publish academic work–monographs or detailed studies of a single specialized subject or other discipline-specific scholarly books. However, university presses, while housed in universities, also publish a broad range of award-winning books for general audiences, including memoirs, essay collections, novels, short story collections, poetry collections, and hybrid, mixed-genre works.
Even so, this category of creative work published by university presses is huge; I should start out by saying that. I have so many books by university presses that I just love on my bookshelves—both by friends and by strangers. So, this is a wildly incomplete list. To narrow the wide category that is university press books, I decided to choose books that were already on my bookshelves—books I had already read and loved, which I wanted to recommend to others. I also chose books that in some way connected to themes in my story collection, How to Make Your Mother Cry: fictions, which is being published by West Virginia University Press. Though my book is a story collection, I also think of it as genre queer: How to Make Your Mother Cry also contains poems, letters, photographs, drawings, and other ephemera. In my reading list, I looked at books across genre (story collections, poetry collections, essay collections, memoirs, and memoir-in-essays) that grapple with identity, that consider the relationships and journeys of women and girls, and books that explore how we live with loss as well as come to terms with what and who is home.
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies: Stories by Deesha Philyaw
Deesha Philyaw’s blockbuster 2020 story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and demonstrates that university presses are publishing some of the most exciting and innovative work out there. This West Virginia University Press title delves into the lives of Black women and girls and crackles with wit and energy. The nine stories in Philyaw’s collection feature characters who are figuring out who they want to be in the world, caught between the church’s strictures and their own desires. Two favorite stories of mine are the opening story, “Eula,” about a close and complicated friendship between two women and the poignant epistolary story, “Dear Sister.”
Meet Behind Mars: Stories by Renee Simms
Meet Behind Mars is an eclectic mix of realist, fabulist, and satirical storytelling illustrating a surprising wit and generous sensibility. In these eleven stories published by Wayne State University Press in 2018, Renee Simms writes a range of characters and highlights character quirks, the relationships between parents and children, the specificity of places, and the kinds of things people say to writers, all with a deft hand. The opening story, “High Country,” sets the tone and many moments of understated humor such as when the protagonist “makes a fuzzy mental note: Tom’s Natural Deodorant does not work in the desert.” Later in the same story, literary characters come to life in a magical realist twist that stands out against some of the title story’s protagonist’s more mundane moves and travel.
Feeding the Ghosts: Poems by Rahul Mehta
There is an appealing plainspokenness and humility in Rahul Mehta’s 2024 poetry collection, Feeding the Ghosts—what seems to me to be a desire to communicate more than obfuscate or keep a distance from the reader, which some contemporary poetry does. Mehta’s first two books are prose and his voice in these poems blends a sensitivity to language’s music as well as a novelist’s fluency with narrative. The combination of these gifts creates a series of gorgeous still lifes that also tell moving stories. In these poems, I sense a camaraderie with some of my stories in that the narrators of both are Gujarati, sometimes in places at some distance from major metropolitan areas. Published by the University Press of Kentucky, these soulful poems are full of flowers and trees, love and fear, moments of quiet resilience and aching heartbreak, and I left them feeling open-hearted and tender toward my own ghosts and those of others.
The Clearing: Poems by Philip White
The spare, beautiful poems that make up The Clearing are a sustained and quiet meditation on love, loss, and memory. White has written about the deaths of his parents and his first wife and about how one goes on with life after such pain. Published by Texas Tech University Press in 2007, the poems in The Clearing read as timeless in their questioning, urgent in their address. Certainly, there is the quality of elegy and mourning in The Clearing. However, The Clearing explores not only loss, but how we keep living and even find joy in the living that remains.
Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place by Neema Avashia
Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place (2022) is a loving exploration of how a place shapes a person. Neema Avashia examines her identity as a West Virginian Appalachian through essays about food, religion, sports, family, neighbors, social media, gun culture, and more. This collection, published by West Virginia University Press, contains more traditional narrative essays as well as artfully crafted lyric essays. The titles of these essays give a hint of the author’s sensibility with “The Hindu Hillbilly Spice Company: Indolachian Flavors Blend,” “City Mouse/Country Mouse,” and “Nine Forms of the Goddesses.” The acknowledgments in this wonderful book are titled, “Thanks, Y’all.” Avashia mixes nostalgia and humor, sweetness and poignancy, personal reflection and universal questions about home.
I Would Meet You Anywhere: A Memoir by Susan Kiyo Ito
Susan Kiyo Ito’s 2023 memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, is a wise, poignant, journey about home, self, and identity stemming from Ito’s search for her birth parents. However, Ito’s book becomes more than just a search: it is a moving memoir about the meaning of family and the desire to own and tell one’s story. Published by The Ohio State University Press, I Would Meet You Anywhere evokes the magnetic pull of a mystery and once you start reading, contains an appealing page turner quality along with being beautifully written, the combination of which was very satisfying to this reader.
The Sum of Trifles by Julia Ridley Smith
What do we do with the things we inherit? Julia Ridley Smith’s 2021 memoir-in-essays, The Sum of Trifles, grapples with this question as the narrator approaches and must deal with her antique dealer parents’ belongings after their deaths. Published by the University of Georgia Press, Smith’s book is a thoughtful, elegiac look at material culture, love, and grief—at how we live in and with the objects that can deliver to us both the heaviness of the past and the solace of lives well-lived. Smith’s book is a moving inquiry about what we decide to keep and what we let go.
