Rich in history and tradition, the University of Texas Press, established in 1950, is a storied book and journal publisher based in Austin where “the life experiences, insights, and specialized knowledge of writers converge,” the press says. When the University of Texas at Austin launched the press, it embraced several important values: “books matter; books educate; and publishing good books is a public responsibility and a valuable component of higher education.” Over the decades, UT Press has published more than 4,000 books, including its top-selling titles of all time, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin and Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema by Andrey Tarkovsky, which have sustained the press over the past three-quarters of a century. Next year marks its 75th anniversary, a milestone it plans to celebrate throughout 2025.
Under the guidance of director Robert Devens, the press produces approximately 100 new books and 13 journals every year, and throughout the decades it has become a publisher of international scope whose strongest subjects include American studies, anthropology, archaeology, architecture, Latin American studies, Latinx studies, Middle Eastern studies, music, and pop culture. Led by a team of expert editors, the award-winning press also publishes books of general interest for a wider audience on a variety of topics, including history, current affairs, and the visual arts. Additionally, as part of its mission to serve the people of Texas, the press produces books on the history, culture, arts, and natural history of the Lone Star State.
Always evolving and growing, the press recently welcomed Hanif Abdurraqib, who joins as a series editor for the American Music Series, on which he will work closely with existing series editors Jessica Hopper and Charles Hughes, along with UT Press editor-in-chief Casey Kittrell. Abdurraqib’s second book of nonfiction, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, was published as part of the American Music Series in 2019 and became an instant New York Times bestseller, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.
Among the press’s all-time, most successful books are Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan by Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay, a book that Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield dubbed “one of the sharpest, funniest, and best books ever about any rock artist,” and The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks by Toni Tipton-Martin, winner of the James Beard Foundation Book Award, 2016. There’s also El llano en llamas by Juan Rulfo—translated by George D. Schade as The Burning Plain (1967), by Ilan Stavans and Harold Augenbraum as The Plain in Flames (2012), and most recently by Douglas J. Weatherford as The Burning Plain (2024)—as well as One Hundred Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda, translated by Stephen Tapscott; Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas by Stephen Harrigan; and Oaxaca al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy by Diana Kennedy, which continues the author’s legacy of introducing the world to the authentic, flavorful cuisines of Mexico.
Looking ahead to 2025, the press is excited for its many big releases, which include Why Alanis Morissette Matters by Megan Volpert, part of the Music Matters Series, out in March; Niko Stratis’s The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman, a memoir-in-essays “on transness, dad rock, and the music that saves us,” out in May; and Culinary Mestizaje: Racial Mixing, Migration, and Foodways across the U.S. edited by Felipe Hinojosa and Rudy P. Guevarra Jr., out in July.
