EIGHTEEN SIU PRESS BOOKS GARNER PRESTIGIOUS AWARDS
Over approximately the past year, eighteen Southern Illinois University Press books have been recognized for excellence in a variety of fields. Showing the great range and diversity of the Press, these award-winning books include rhetoric and composition, legal studies, women’s studies, theatre, true crime, performance studies, baseball, medical history, and Illinois history.
For
years, SIU Press has ranked as
one of the leading publishers in the field of rhetoric and composition.
The top honor in that area is the CCCC
Outstanding Book Award, won in 2000 by Barbara Couture for Toward
a Phenomenological Rhetoric: Writing, Profession, and Altruism and
in 2001 by Kay
Halasek for A Pedagogy of Possibility: Bakhtinian Perspectives on
Composition Studies.
Covering a wide range of subjects—women writing about war, rhetoric and literature, Beat poetry, and contemporary American theatre—three SIU Press books received the Outstanding Academic Titles Award from the American Library Association’s Choice Magazine: The World Wars Through the Female Gaze by Jean Gallagher, Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric by Carol Mattingly, “A Clown in a Grave”: Complexities and Tensions in the Works of Gregory Corso by Michael Skau, and Creating the Self in the Contemporary American Theatre by Robert J. Andreach. Criteria for selection include excellence in scholarship and presentation, significance with regard to other literature in the field, and recognition as an important, often the first, treatment of a specific subject in print or electronic format.
Milton
H. Jamail is the foremost authority on Cuban Baseball. His Full
Count:
Inside Cuban Baseball was
a finalist for the important
Dave Moore Award, sponsored
by Elysian Fields Quarterly: The Baseball Review.
This is a singular honor for a
book that has consistently received great reviews. Jamail is also a
finalist for the Seymour Medal of the Society of Baseball Research.
Jim
Fisher was one of six authors nominated for what is often called the Oscar
of mystery writers: The Edgar, sponsored by the Mystery Writers of
America. Fisher’s The Ghosts of Hopewell: Setting the Record
Straight in the Lindberg Case was nominated in the Best True Crime
Book category. Fisher also wrote the powerful true story, Fall Guys:
False Confessions and the Politics of Murder.
Confounded Expectations: The Law’s Struggle with Personal Responsibility by George W. Jarecke and Nancy K. Plant has been nominated for the nonfiction Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association. Sixty-two books were submitted for the award, and Confounded Expectations was one of four to receive a nomination.
Owning A Piece of the Minors by Jerry Klinkowitz is the fascinating story by and about a man who lived his dream and acquired a baseball team—the Waterloo Diamonds. Not only did Klinkowitz get to be a baseball owner and receive a hearty endorsement by Kurt Vonnegut, his book was also named one of The Best of the Best from University Presses by the American Library Association
In the Name of the Father: The Rhetoric of the New Southern Baptist Convention by Carl L. Kell and L. Raymond Camp was named the Religious Communication Association’s Book of the Year for 2000. Kell and Camp explain why moderate forces at the 1979 Southern Baptist Convention fell before the powerful oratory of the ultra-conservative faction, which has remained in power ever since.
The
National Speech Communication Association presented Ronald J. Pelias its 2000
Lilla A. Heston Award
for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies for
his Writing Performance: Poeticizing the Researcher's Body.
Pelias seeks to write performatively, to offer poetic or aesthetic
renderings of performance events in order to capture some sense of their
nature.
For
Lighting the Shakespearean
Stage, 1562-1642,
R. B. Graves won two coveted awards: the Sohmer-Hall Prize for
Best Work on the Original Staging of Shakespeare
and Honorable Mention for the Bernard Hewitt Award for
Outstanding Research in Theatre History and Cognate Theatre Studies.
Michael A. Flannery won the 2001 Edward Kremers Award presented by the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy for John Uri Lloyd: The Great American Eclectic. One nominator called the book a “superb biography of the eminent American pharmacist,” concluding the Flannery had produced an “outstanding, original, and definitive work, meticulously documented.”
The
Young Composers: Composition’s Beginnings in Nineteenth Century Schools by Lucille Schultz received the 2000 Nancy Dasher Award for
Best Book on Professional & Pedagogical Issues. Schultz has
provided the first full-length history
of school-based writing instruction. She demonstrates that writing
instruction in nineteenth-century American schools is much more
important—and innovative—than we have previously assumed in the
overall history of writing instruction.
The most recent of the awards came from the Illinois State Historical Society, which singled out three SIU Press publications for special recognition: Carol Pirtle’s Escape Betwixt Two Suns: A True Tale of the Underground Railroad in Illinois received an award of superior and Beth Conway Shervey’s The Little Theatre on the Square: Four Decades of a Small-Town Equity Theatre received an award of excellence in the “scholarly publications category.” Shirley Motley Portwood’s Tell Us a Story: An African American Family in the Heartland received an award of excellence in the “other publications” category.