The last day of Winter Institute in Memphis focused on small and traditional presses, and featured a number of special events that paid homage to the musical heritage of this year’s host city.
The day began with the small and university presses breakfast. As booksellers feasted on scrambled eggs and grits, 15 representatives from small and university presses took turns at the podium, presenting their top spring 2018 releases.
Last year, at WI12, publishing books as an act of resistance was an underlying theme of the small and university reps’ presentations. This year the books touted spoke to a desire to counter “false news” and propaganda.
Harvard University’s assistant marketing manager Greg Kornbluh touted The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk (Feb.) and Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America by Kathleen Belew (March), while Haymarket Press representative Rory Fanning talked up Michael Bennett’s Things That Make White People Uncomfortable (April). University of Texas sales manager Gianna LaMorte, in her presentation on How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ (April), called the book "absolutely essential for today.”
A number of the spotlighted spring 2018 releases address climate change. Princeton University Press sales director Timothy Wilkins talked up Brave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North by Mark C. Serreze (April) and MIT Press sales manager David Goldberg presented Science Not Silence: Voices from the March for Science Movement by Stephanie Fine Sasse.
Even the University of Minnesota’s fiction offering, The Laurentian Divide by Sarah Stonich, addresses climate change. Sales manager Matt Smiley told booksellers that the northern Minnesota-set novel explores the ramifications of a showdown between mining workers and preservationists in a small town adjacent to a million-acre wilderness preserve.
Some of the offerings by children’s publishers also reflected the underlying theme that information is necessary to counter propaganda. Creston Books introduced its June release, a picture book called Irving Berlin, The Immigrant Boy Who Made America Sing, with publisher Marissa Moss noting that Berlin, considered one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century, immigrated to the U.S. from Russia at the age of five.
While the final day of WI13 began on a serious note with the rep picks, it ended with a celebration of music and community. The Thacker Mountain Radio Hour, a weekly radio show featuring author interviews and musical performances that airs on Mississippi Public Radio and is typically broadcast from Off the Square Books in Oxford, Miss., moved into Memphis’ Convention Center Thursday evening, where host Jim Dees interviewed YA debut novelist Elizabeth Acevedo (The Poet X, March), Charles Frazier (Varina, April) and folk singer-turned-memoirist Dar Williams (What I Found in a Thousand Towns, Sept. 2017), whose book examines the importance of local businesses to the survival of small towns in post-industrial America that she has visited while on tour.
"I'm an engaged citizen," Williams said to the crowd of booksellers, who had spent the last week discussing how to implement literary citizenship, both in their stores and communities.
