[Music]
My name is Tyler Walters, I'm the dean of University Libraries.
Thank you for coming, you're very welcome to come here to Newman Library
for our 2018 VT Authors Reception. Those of you who've been coming to this
you'll of course know you're in a different location
this year, that we normally do this on our
first floor in our multi-purpose room. But luckily we're actually getting a lot
of restroom renovations down the first floor right now.
That's the good part. The bad part is there's a lot of jackhammering going on
right now and they couldn't guarantee they
wouldn't be doing that during this time slot.
So we thought you all would appreciate doing this in a quieter
location up here on the on the fourth floor.
We have four featured speakers a little bit later today after a few
remarks from our provost and our director for the center for the
humanities coming up. But as I usually do want to
kind of give you some of the the numbers, the data on publishing for
the year. So we did have a total of 96 books
from 83 Virginia Tech authors this year which is right in line with kind of what
we've been doing, we kind of hit the mid to upper 90s.
We've occasionally cracked 100 so that's very I think very very good.
Of course we know the front runner is the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences
with 53 publications from 43 authors,
including three musical works, so let's have a hand for CLAHS.
Other colleges have been quite active with the college of science had 14 books
and nine authors uh architecture urban studies had nine
books with ten authors and engineering had eight books with eight authors and
other colleges produced as as well so again lots of
lots of activity that we're recognizing today so maybe
we could just take a moment just to applaud and say thank you to
all the authors for your wonderful work this year
and of course you know the drum roll here please we've been wondering each year,
will Bob Denton continue to publish?
I don't see him at the moment, but yes Bob has for the 13th consecutive
year has a book published on the shelf and
you're supposed to smile and feel good about that Bob not
not cringe so a hand for Bob
that's awesome my hero I could never do that that's wonderful
and you should also know our open access subvention fund this is the fund from the
library that helps support researchers on campus publish through
open publishing journals typically we've had
89 articles published in the last year that's supported by this fund with 224
authors from VT so and it's up from 60 articles and 169 from last year so this
continues to grow as publishing models change and
become well different business models and become open
to readers at the end. With that I'd like to introduce our
provost, Cyril Clarke, who's going to say a few words.
Good evening and congratulations to all of the wonderful accomplishments
represented in authorship of these books here. I just recently
with our colleagues completed the experience of reviewing
all the promotion and tenure dossiers this year.
There were 95 of those this year which is somewhat higher than usual
and of course this is a this is a very serious and important process
because it recognizes, it evaluates and recognizes, the accomplishments of our faculty.
But as serving as interim provost
this year I had this experience of looking through or looking into the
window of the variety of incredible scholarship
produced by faculty. As many of you know I'm a veterinarian
and I've been in health sciences for most of my life
and so I'm familiar with particular type of scholarship that
that marks my disciplinary interest which is really in the form of the
peer-reviewed paper but i learned a whole lot more than that
i learned that it's important for someone in performing arts to be invited
to the right kind of venue i understood that for the visual arts
the particular exhibitions that happen all over the
world are noted in terms of their reputational
excellence and it matters what proportion of those submissions are
actually selected for review i learned that in engineering for
example that the conference proceedings are
evaluated differently than we would perhaps in the health sciences area
and i learned also that particularly in the liberal arts and the humanities
that you get something called a monograph track or a journal article
track the the point i'm making is that amidst
this incredible diversity of scholarship that goes to the core
of what we do as an institution as we do as an academic
institution is authorship and authorship of books which we are
celebrating this afternoon is that kind of scholarship
it is it is imbued with that kind of importance in terms of realizing our
mission and what incredible diversity too you
just look at the first shelf there you'll see a nuclear engineering
fundamentals i probably get through half a chapter on
that one before i retreat um the matrix of race
there's a fabulous title right on that first shelf they're called
confabulations i don't have to look that one up i'm not quite sure but i can tell
you it has to do with architecture and of course as i was looking through
those titles i was reflecting a little on on the personal stories the personal
meaning that arise out of those particular books and
thinking of myself and the experience that i've had over
the last five months in terms of having to reinvent myself and do so in a hurry
so that i can be of appropriate service to you
and so there were a couple of books that perhaps resonated with that too so for
example there's another title there called
reassembly required and this note this is not a comment
about virginia tech it's a personal one there's another thing there i made
canvas in the wrong order i think it's fiction
and non-fiction i'll leave that with you
congratulations i i i want you to know how much we collectively appreciate the
scholarship the effort that results in these works i
want you to know also that what we are celebrating this
afternoon goes to the very center of our academic endeavor as a background
institution thank you
next we're going to have some remarks from sylvester johnson our director for
the center for the humanities sylvester
good afternoon i'm delighted to be invited to speak with you a few moments
before we get to featured speakers and i'm very fortunate
to have my one of my books included here
this is a co-author a co-edited volume that i did with
stephen weisman entitled the fbi religion
and i want to say just a little bit about the making of that book in order
to make a point about what the significance of this
event is concerned with and that is the kind of work that
goes into making books and then the kind of work that folks actually
accomplish what they actually do so this of this book began as a collaboration
aspiration i should say to collaborate with a colleague of mine
whom i worked with when i was in indiana university and
i had done work on religion and colonialism
and race in the americas and eventually atlantic
the atlantic context atlantic world for a number of years
and the co-editor steve weitzman is a scholar he says he's a scholar of early
judaism if you read his word you'll see you'll see that he's earned his
credentials and some of the cultural history
of national security and american religion but
we just started out the conversation and it ended up being a collaboration
of 15 authors coming together to try to give an account of
some of the cultural history of a national security entity the
federal bureau of investigation and various communities
of american religions over a period of roughly a century
since the the early 1900s into around the early 2000s and one of the things
that i discovered for me this was a first
edited volume for steve he's he's done this many times
before and the kind of connections that we were
able to form us inviting people whom we had met and
had personal relationships with and others whom we
had read but we only communicated over an email
at first and we were able to collaborate so one of the things that i
appreciated about that experience is that we were able to form
a different kind of community with people again some of whom we never
saw in person and others we had known for many years and eventually we'd come
together at conferences around this book and and to do something
together that none of us could have done by
ourselves there are many kinds of teams and i've
been very fortunate uh to have people who are many different
places in the university to want to work with me from software
engineers to digital librarians to people in the
social sciences and i even was fortunate enough to lead
an ai project at one point at a very exciting juncture in my career
and those different kinds of collaborative experiences have always
reaffirmed for me the the nature and the joy of the work that
collaboration can do in order to produce a book
and then there's the work that books do and so as our
as our provost was just pointing to if you look at these volumes at the back
there if you just think about the time that you have experienced
some kind of reading whether it was a really exciting
article that was making accessible some really important insights in
whatever area of work you're you are concerned
with or if it were a literary novel and
you're curled up with it but you're getting to experience this
other person or those other persons if it was a collaborative work
through that product and if you think about the way people enjoy
music and the effect that it has on you it does something to you and we all know
our favorite thing that we like to have done to us because we have our
particular artists and books do a similar kind of work you know they're
very transformative and so that that labor whether it's
collaborative or whether it is an individual a single authored
enterprise is certainly a huge part of our humanity
it's a part of our human history of our society
and i think we're very fortunate to have print culture and to have its
iterations now in the digital age if you're like i am you probably have
put a book on your ipad or a phone or what
have you or you sit at your desktop and you were able to access something
but it really is something to celebrate and so i'm very grateful
for the organizers of this event to take the time
to bring together all of us to really in a thing in a ritual way in a
festive way to say that what books do that what
authorship does that what scholarship does in the most
broadly conceived way is so important for all of our lives and
if there's any place that should be celebrated certainly here at the
university uh but we also know these things are
impactful well beyond these walls so thank you again for including my
volume and i look forward to the events throughout this week
all right next we're going to have peter potter introduce our featured speakers
and peter is our director of publishing strategy here in the libraries
hello everyone
as tyler said i'm a director of publishing strategy here
and for those of you who know me i my background is in
scholarly publishing so an event like this
is um just something that i absolutely love
and the the fact that we can do this here i've been at
many universities now and virginia tech is the first
university that i think has an event like this where we get together and
celebrate the creative work of our faculty so
um i i just think this is a special event for us to be able to do
every year and it's a pleasure to be a part of um
so this year as tyler said we've got 96 books by 83 different
authors um this gives us a chance to to celebrate those authors um it gives
us a chance to celebrate the winner of the
albert lee sturm award for faculty excellence
that this year is stephanie hofer and we'll be able to hear from her shortly
we also have a chance to draw attention to what i think is one of the most
exciting things that's happened this past year and that is with carmen
jimenez smith coming to campus she is the publisher of noemi press
and for those of you who don't know noemi press is now based here it's an
independent publishing house based here in
blacksburg and it is a distinguished publisher of
literary works both fiction and non-fiction poetry
literature and the other thing about it i think is
is wonderful is that the books are beautifully designed and
so there's a sense of that continuing process of
keeping the book alive in its form and she as the publisher of noemi press
features authors both new and established
and she gives them an opportunity to be read in print affordably
and they share in the revenue that comes from the sale of those books so it's
nice to see that traditional type of publishing still
continuing um finally this particularly this year gives us a
chance to celebrate some of what the library in particular is doing to
support uh publishing efforts at the university
so we have
for the open access suspension fund that gail mcmillan our director of
scholarly communication we this year let me see we gave out this is for
journal articles that if you want to publish
a journal article in a open access journal
we provide submentions to make that possible and this year we gave out 89
of these grants for 89 articles published by 224
authors at virginia tech and it's not just faculty members it's
graduate undergraduate students as well so that's one of the things that we do
here to support faculty productivity
we also are are celebrating the first book that is being published
as part of this new initiative that virginia tech
is one of the founding members of it's called tome which is toward an open
access monograph ecosystem crazy name but
um that's what they came up with but it's an
initiative of the aau the association of american universities
the association of research libraries and the university press association
and we were virginia tech was one of 12 institutions
invited to be a part of this pilot program
and we're in with universities such as michigan duke emery
johns hopkins berkeley so we're in very distinguished company we're the
only one without a university press which i think is really interesting
and shows that the the breadth of this of this
particular program and dana agmon is our first recipient of
that from dana from the history department
and she will talk a bit about her experience
writing that book and what this grant program does is it
enables the that book to be
published in an open access format so a typical monograph as many of you know
is going to cost 65 75 85 and is
not very accessible to the to the rest of the world
with this program a book like dana's which is on the
uh the french french colonialism in india
there's a natural international audience for this
by making an open access book we can make that book much more readable
and accessible to the world and then there's the open educational
resource grant initiative that we do through the
library and we have steve ellingson professor of electrical engineering and
he has authored with a help of my colleague anita walls
an electromagnetic textbook that is open access so you can any student can
download it online for free the comparable book
in the on the market is well over a hundred dollars
so we're saving students money and it's something that we're really trying to
promote here is affordable learning initiatives
so that's all of the um kinds of programs that we are supporting
here in the library and um i think this is a great moment
to be able to acknowledge those in the context of
of um celebrating our authors here at virginia tech
so our first speaker will be steve ellingson and anita waltz
will introduce him
good afternoon my name is anita walls i'm the open education librarian here at
st university libraries it is my pleasure to introduce to you
dr steve ellingson from the department of
electrical and computer engineering dr ellingson's research
includes wireless communications radio science
radio frequency instrumentation he teaches courses
in electromagnetics radio frequency systems wireless communications
and and signal processing he's also the author of
radio systems engineering by cambridge published by cambridge university press
i'm i'm introducing him tonight because he has founded
a a project that i think has potential to
inspire faculty who faculty authors those who teach to teach and to
write in innovative ways he is the founder of the open electromagnetics
project in 2017 here at virginia tech he's also
the third grantee of the faculty open education initiative
grants these are grants and technical
assistance programs that support faculty led projects that that aim to adapt
create openly license and widely share original and adaptable teaching
resources also known as open educational resources
this is the beta version volume one of electromagnetics and it's
the first output of steve's project in the open electromagnetics project so
steve would you like to please come and talk with us
well thank you very much for the opportunity to talk about this project
which anita and i among others are very excited about first i have to
acknowledge anita is not just a member of the team
she's the managing editor very much uh has been shepherding this
project through in addition to other members of her team including
peter potter um karen guimont robert browder
and also of course we have external reviewers involved who have been very
enthusiastic about this project especially the open nature of it
um and uh students i'll a little more to say about that in just a moment
this team i think has succeeded or i should say it's succeeding because this
is a project in motion because we've caught an
understanding about what's really uh useful here and that's the open
aspect um now i realize uh most of you will
find the topic of uh electromagnetics to be
arcane and inscrutable uh as do most of my students uh we're trying to
fix that but this really isn't about electromagnetics
it's about this idea about engineering open textbooks
and um you know there's some very excellent textbooks available as
as peter mentioned and we like them a lot they cost too much they're they're
100 to 200 um there are also free textbooks available we like
those too but they have certain quirks and we would like to make them better
but they're not really licensed the way that lets us do that or they don't
provide the source files or things that would really make this easy to do to
make them as good as other books that we would normally use
so we kind of built this idea into what we were doing that
not only do we want a book that's free but it's open
in such a way that people don't see those barriers that they if you don't
like the way the book is written but you
think you can reuse pieces of it knock yourself out reuse pieces of it
we'll be flattered and furthermore we're working very hard to enable that we're
providing source files we're um uh we're making and we've
licensed this in a way that really accommodates that
uh simply buy attribution attribution required
and share a like reissue under the same license that you received at under
um that one more thing is when you do this you can put your own name on it so
we're actually looking forward to the day when electromagnetics by some other
guy at some other university uh appears because that will mean we've
succeeded somebody else has take taken what we've done the seed we've planted
and made it better maybe they've been they've
made things um they've taken what we've done that's good and used it that's
great they've improved the things that we
didn't do as well that's also excellent we'll import that back and
then they've added their name to it we think again that's great
just as long as they're willing to give some credit and return
and release it under the same license and in that way the project should grow
and we think that could have potentially a lot of impact
for this book in many engineering books i would say the big barrier to getting
this done as an author is figures in engineering textbooks
figures are a total nightmare they take forever to do and they're a
really high barrier to getting a job done the writing is fun and easy
even the engineers like equations even the equations are fun and easy
the figures are hard and uh the folks at vt libraries have really come through
for us here with this oer grant it's a modest amount
but it's great for student recruitment so what we've done is we've used that
money to recruit students and they have actually generated the
overwhelming number of figures in this book
and we hope to continue that in fact we're now recruiting students to be
reviewers as well as editors of figures and the
students really enjoy this because they see the benefit themselves they see this
as themselves doing something which
benefits uh future students and uh that that's a that's a great feeling
for them um one other comment anita mentioned
that this is a beta this idea may be forward to many of you
especially even publishing folks uh what's the difference between a
beta and a first edition well i guess in commercial publishing this would be a
first edition we i kind of view this as software open
software you know open software beta is something that's complete it's
been peer reviewed but you know you want a limited release
you want to get issues uh feedback on usability uh you might get
the eek out the last few errors that you can
find and we're in the process of doing that
now once again anita and her team is coming through
by helping us do that beta the beta consists of using this book in a class
this semester at the end of the semester we'll take into account all that
input and release the first edition so that beta will disappear from the cover
page and um uh that will be the official uh first
edition um so we're looking forward to the
release of the true official first edition of this book
over the summer we're looking forward to following up with an additional book
this is the first semester of a two semester
sequence and with additional instructor resources and things like
that that a traditional textbook would have
um and before i step away just one more comment
and that's that uh for those of you who are in a position to do so
uh and are inclined to do this i strongly recommend
giving oer open textbook authoring a shot
in particular for undergraduate courses and in particular for courses that
students are required to take to get their major i mean the the more
we can reduce the financial burden on these students
the better it just makes good sense but moreover
by doing it in an open way you're also helping the community of academics
improve their resources and i think the idea of a community textbook as opposed
to just a celebrity textbook really has a lot of
merit and we're really interested in that idea
and trying to make it happen we're excited to do that experiment
so i'm happy to share what i've learned i'm sure anita and her team will be
delighted to talk to you as well but whatever we can do to help that
along i'm sure either one of us would say we're happy to do thank you very
much
thanks steve um and i'd like to just mention that
um this is part of what we're doing here at virginia tech in the libraries with
our bt publishing program we feel
that there is an opportunity here to do publishing within a university setting
where we support authors at different levels
and with somebody like steve who's able to he
he wrote the book uh in latex and we were able to then take that latex
files and put those up online and get them
printed in print form and we have the expertise to be able to
work with authors at different levels of support that they need so that's i
think what we're looking at is university publishing of the future
so um our next speaker is uh dana agman from the history department
and as i mentioned anna uh dana's book um
which you can see over there a colonial affair was
published last year by cornell university press
it's called colonial affair commerce conversion and scandal in french
india and so cornell published the book last year in a hardcover edition that's
65 75 i think um with this grant that was supported by
the library the provost's office and the college of
liberal arts and human sciences we are enabling the publisher
cornell to release an open access edition
so that book will now be available to anyone in the world
for free download so uh welcome to dana
thank you peter for the invitation to speak today and for everything that you
do to make books become a reality here so i'm here to speak about the fact that
my book an investigation into the contours of french india
in the 18th century is about to become open access next month
and why it is that this fact makes me very happy
at parties doctor offices family gatherings
people will ask me what i do or what my book is about
and i answer in shorthand french colonialism in india
in the 18th century in response almost every time this is what i hear
first my investigators say really the french were in india
i don't fault them for not knowing given that i myself once did not know that
this fact which has consumed the last 12 years of
my life and was not once known to me either
the first question is almost inevitably followed
by this next question however did you get interested in this
the implication being why would anyone devote so much time and energy
to the study of a topic so obscure
over the last few years i've heard these two questions so many times that they
have lodged a quiet but persistent hum in the back of my mind and they have
resisted my attempts to write them off as irrelevant what these questions have
done is encourage me to think about the challenges and opportunities
that come with working on a topic that is relatively marginalized
and what the meaning is of the opportunity that i now have
to share this work as widely as one can in other words removing the barriers to
the dissemination of my work is also a chance to answer the question
why should we care about this forgotten past let's start
with the first question i often encounter
the mild surprise that the french had an imperial project
in india it speaks implicitly to the comparative framework
and specifically gestures towards the british experience in india
which is what people always have in mind when this comment is made
it is precisely the imaginative pull that the british raj
has over what we have come to understand as the meaning of colonial india
which makes it so necessary for us to consider other experiences
in other imperial formations to give a brief example from my book
the french project in india with its interpreted
interpenetration of christian missionary workers
the divine authority of the french king and the ambivalent yet sustained
commitment on the part of the french east india company
to transform french holdings in india into a catholic space
not only has no equivalent in the british context
but allows us a privileged view into the fraught relationship between religion
and the state in the colonial world more generally this query really the
french were in india is related to a set of questions that
are of interest to anyone curious about the relationship between power and
history namely what makes certain histories
obscure how does this obscurity structure how we write histories of the
supposedly obscure and how can we write a history that is
not inherently defensive trying to make a claim for its own
significance the response i give to these questions
in the book has been both methodological and conceptual
with the tight focus on a scandal and this is the scandal in the title of the
book involving the tragic downfall of one
tamil man a commercial broker named nanyaka who lived in french india
early in the 18th century and this affair serves many roles in the book
but in the context of my comments today i want to make the point that my
analysis of it stems from a conviction that an interpretation of large-scale
historical processes things we think we know like empires
transnational commerce global projects of religious conversion
must still make room for the much more human-sized
experiences of vengeance remorse pain loyalty and
love and in doing so we can bring about a
paradigmatic shift in how we understand colonial history in
particular sites now the second question i get asked how
did i get interested in this project also speaks to issues of narrative
methodology and frameworks now there are obvious ways that my
personal history as an israeli as an immigrant inclined
me to be drawn to questions of empire colonial power and its abuses
cross-cultural exchanges and cultural mobility then there are the
ways in which my encounter with the archival collections
with which i worked have shaped this project
that is i knew the details of this particular affair before i arrived in
france and in india and thought that it would figure in this
book and but i was not prepared for the incredible documentary richness that i
found in the colonial archives i don't want to fetishize either
biography or the archive but to point out that historical
narratives are created by particular people in
particular places and inversely and more to the point some
narratives are not created and it behooves us to
ask why in the case of french india the neglect
of this historical experience was to a large extent driven
in both anglophone and francophone scholarship
by certain assumptions about what empire is supposed to look like
an empire's seemingly inevitable progression
towards greater and greater hegemony and control
the french experience in india with all of its fits and starts
failures and weaknesses doesn't quite fit in
and it is precisely and this is what i argue in the book
why it is valuable for us to consider a for scholars with an interest in
europe south asia and the colonial world and that is why
i'm so excited and proud that now i get to share this work as
broadly and as openly as open access allows us to do
thank you
thank you dana um and our next speaker is uh stephanie hofer who is the
winner of the 2017 albert lee sturm award
and tom ewing um is going to introduce her on behalf of 580 kappa
thank you i'm delighted um to be here today
um first in my capacity as associate dean for research in the college of
liberal arts and human sciences uh we are the college
that writes 55 of the books featured today are from
the college um i'm also here as current president of
the phi beta kappa chapter virginia tech and the opportunity to introduce dr
stephanie golfer winner of the 2017 stern prize for
research excellence um but i'm also here as an author and
as i thought about this this day i realized that that
being an author only matters if what you write
is read authors require readers and writing is a conversation with
readers a challenge to think evaluate and learn so as much as we are
celebrating authors today i encourage you also to be readers as
you leave today browse the stacks look for a good book
take it with you read it
but thinking about authors and readers is actually the perfect way to introduce
uh dr stephanie hoffer who is an assistant professor
in the department of modern and classical languages and literatures
um who won this prize in 2016 which is 2017 which is offered by the phi beta
kappa chapter for research excellence um i encountered
dr huffer's work um as a reader i was on the review
committee that read her dossier for the storm prize
it was emotionally powerful it made me reconsider
perceptions that i thought were true and it gave me a framework for thinking
about future events it's a stunning scholarly achievement
it was a moment as a reader where i truly
appreciated the power of engaged scholarship to change attitudes
memories and perspectives in other words dr huffer is a scholar whose writing
will transform who you are and who you want to be
please welcome dr stephanie hoffer
thank you tom will read a fragment from of from the centerpiece of my article
series on post-traumatic healing lockout spacing trauma and recovery in
the aftermath of the virginia tech shootings
bound to the traumatized mind through fragmented
recollections this article goes back to the day of
april 16 2007 when i lost my husband jaime bishop
it also reflects on the long and painful process
of recovery that might never be fully completed
i thereby exemplify how losing a loved one under such
violent and public circumstances and trauma in general has an immense
impact on memory and the process of mourning and healing
i will read a very personal part from this article
if anybody feels like leaving the room i would not be offended
months after the shootings the police approached me about jaime's clothing
they offered to either dispose of it or bring it to me personally i opted for
the second choice sergeant robert brown who had been
compassionate and sensitive during our interaction in
the past and one of his female colleagues arrived
at my house susan my friend was there too
i felt sorry for all three of them they wanted to be respectful of my
wishes but at the same time protect me from
being further traumatized
it was obvious to me that a female officer
was at the end of her emotional strength she sat hunched over on my couch
and i was afraid she would start crying when sergeant brown
offered to wash jamie's clothing for me he emphasized that looking at shaming's
clothing would be horrifying for me as it was stained with
blood moldy and stinky i declined this very
genuine offer i had struggled with the thought that i
had let jimmy down because i had not been there for him
when he had to face his murderer that i had not lived up to my promise
made at our wedding to be with him in good
and in bad times after being told of jaime's horrific death
i had only one immediate wish i wanted to see him the way he was found
in norris hall unrestored this wish was not granted to
me receiving his clothing unwashed
would be the closest i could get i took the box with his clothing
and despite all the advice from the people who cared about me
i felt a strong desire to look at jaime's clothing alone
on april 16 and in the aftermath of the tragedy
including jaime's memorial service at our home in blacksburg
and a funeral in his hometown in georgia i was always surrounded by people
i felt like i had to fulfill others expectations
protocols and timelines it seemed to me that i finally had a
chance to get a glimpse of jaime's suffering
and could be with him during this last split seconds
of his life in my deepest sorrow i could let go of my emotions
i spread jaime's t-shirt dress shirt pants underwear socks and belt on the
plastic tarp in the basement there were four bullet holes in both his
t-shirt and the dress shirt he wore on top
one at the front and back of the left chest
and one at the front and back of the left sleeve
i was surprised how small they were how much harm a little piece of metal
can do to a human body i thought another bullet had hit jimmy's head
nevertheless there was less blood on his clothing than i had expected
tears were running down my cheeks in my attempt to preserve items with an
emotional connection to jamie i took pictures of his clothing
overwhelmed by my feelings i had to stop at times because i was not able to hold
the camera in my hand still jamie's camera that he valued so much
while weeping and whaling i loaded sheamus clothing in the washing machine
if i recall correctly i used three washing cycles
when the last one was over i made sure that no blood stains were left
and put the wet clothes in the laundry basket
as i had done so often in the past i hung them on the clothing rack
in the backyard where the sun was shining
i knew it would be the last time in my life
when jamie's garments were dry i folded them
and store them together with his shoes and belt
in one of the boxes i dedicated to his personal belongings
i was not crying anymore although i was still sad
i felt close to jaime i paid my last respects to him
by treating his belongings with dignity love and compassion thank you
thank you stuffy all right so our our final speaker um
and i mentioned her at the beginning uh carmen jimenez
smith is the publisher of noemi press and i encourage you while you're here
there's a table of noemi press books in the back and just take a look at them
and appreciate the care with which they've been
produced and published
hi um one of the reasons i i've been a
publisher i started knowing press about 16 years ago
and i'm also a writer and one of the reasons that i think i came to
publishing was i was always interested in all
aspects of art of the offstage what's happening behind
how something is made how a play is made how uh
how how people rehearse for music how people rehearse for dance
and so the the sense of what a book was in many ways for us is experienced
through what it looks like when we have it in our hands but there's all this
there's all of these other parts of its life a much longer
life on this end and a much longer life on this end
that is the reason those are the reasons that i'm a publisher because i get to
see this kind of work being a publisher is
thankless in many ways sometimes you get an author zilla
which is like a nightmarish person who knows everything about publishing
um but for the most part uh the the rewarding aspect of doing this work
is that it's a collaboration with another artist
and that every instance of engagement with that artist's work with their
vision sharing that vision trying to amplify
and help them clarify their vision not only in the text
itself but in how the book gets received in the way that people talk about that
book is an incredibly rewarding experience um
and it offsets the author zillas and the and the thanklessness sometimes and i
guess the other piece of it for me uh that's useful is
um when you're teaching writing and you offer students books
they see it and it paralyzes them they think oh it has to be this way it has to
look this way it has to be this polished this refined
and when i was in graduate school one of the things i did when i was
feeling particularly badly about a workshop
is i would go to the um to the thesis floor of the
of the english of the library and look at
theses by famous writers and i would feel so much better because i would see
these texts that were still in process um and even accepted manuscripts and i
and i tell that to my students and i often show them
manuscripts that we've accepted to show them that there's still
an enormous amount of labor that goes into refining a book into making it into
the book um that hasn't that doesn't that doesn't even happen in the
manuscript that sometimes even happens at the copy editing stage
and in that regard i feel like noami price has been a really important
pedagogical tool introducing students to what makes the
life of a book how to approach a book as an editor as a
reader as a designer as someone who's engaging with a book as a conceptual
artifact and that's why i keep doing it even
though you know i shouldn't be because i have many other
obligations and i have a family and i can't do yoga
but again another big aspect of why i do that is as a woman of color
uh i recognize that there was a dearth of of publishing of work
by people of color unless it was by really marginalized or
narrowly and scripted spaces for writers and so noemi press i think has done a
really good job in the past 15 16 years of being a press that
publishes a lot of queer and queer writers and writers of color
without being limited by that by also just having a
really expansive sensibility that's more connected to
aesthetics um and that's been an enormously
gratifying uh part of the work that i do so i i
i'm not gonna take up much more time as the last person but i would really