University Press Week is next week. It will run this year from Monday, November 9, through Sunday, November 15. Their website can be found here. You’ll find a link to a listing of events there.

This year’s theme is Raise UP, which they say was chosen to indicate the role university presses play in “elevating authors, subjects and whole disciplines that bring new perspectives, ideas and voices to readers around the globe”. Not an inappropriate choice in a year in which two university press books centered around race have been selected as National Book Award finalists. An interview with one of the nominated authors, Jerald Walker, at Fresh Air, an NPR program, may be found here.

As Shelf Awareness of 4 November tells us: “Members of the AUPresses have put together a Raise UP gallery and Raise UP reading lists; selected books from those lists are available on Bookshop.org. The university press community will host online celebrations of this year’s theme via a blog tour, and there will be webinar on November 10 concerning antiracism in scholarly publishing.”*

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* If you’re wondering, a blog tour is defined as “a set amount of time, usually a week or two, in which your book will be promoted across various websites and blogs.” Penguin Random House has a pretty thorough account of this new phenomenon.