University of Georgia Press
Encyclopedia
The University of Georgia Press or UGA Press is a publishing house and is a member of the Association of American University Presses
Association of American University Presses
The Association of American University Presses is an association of mostly, but not exclusively, North American university presses...

.

Founded in 1938, the UGA Press is a division of the University of Georgia
University of Georgia
The University of Georgia is a public research university located in Athens, Georgia, United States. Founded in 1785, it is the oldest and largest of the state's institutions of higher learning and is one of multiple schools to claim the title of the oldest public university in the United States...

 and is located on the campus in Athens
Athens, Georgia
Athens-Clarke County is a consolidated city–county in U.S. state of Georgia, in the northeastern part of the state, comprising the former City of Athens proper and Clarke County. The University of Georgia is located in this college town and is responsible for the initial growth of the city...

, Georgia
Georgia (U.S. state)
Georgia is a state located in the southeastern United States. It was established in 1732, the last of the original Thirteen Colonies. The state is named after King George II of Great Britain. Georgia was the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution, on January 2, 1788...

, USA. It is the oldest and largest publishing house in the state and one of the largest in the South.

Publications

The UGA Press publishes 70-80 titles each year of scholarly and academic, regional, and literary works with a focus on American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 and Southern studies. It is also a leading publisher of African-American studies, civil rights history and environmental studies.

The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction
Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction
The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction is an annual prize awarded by the University of Georgia Press named in honor of the American short story writer and novelist Flannery O'Connor....

 was established by Charles East, then the editor-in-chief of the UGA Press, in 1983 to recognize gifted young writers.

In conjunction with the Georgia Humanities Council and GALILEO, the UGA Press created the New Georgia Encyclopedia
New Georgia Encyclopedia
The New Georgia Encyclopedia is a web-based encyclopedia containing over 2,000 articles about the state of Georgia.The Georgia Humanities Council, the Office of the Governor of Georgia, the University of Georgia Press, and the University System of Georgia/GALILEO have collaborated in the funding...

, an on-line resource of Georgia history.

The UGA Press has successfully published original novels and works by writers such as Rick Bass
Rick Bass
Rick Bass is an American writer and an environmental activist.-Life:Bass was born in Fort Worth, Texas, U.S., the son of a geologist, and he studied petroleum geology at Utah State University. He grew up in Houston, and started writing short stories on his lunch breaks while working as a petroleum...

, Erskine Caldwell
Erskine Caldwell
Erskine Preston Caldwell was an American author. His writings about poverty, racism and social problems in his native South like the novels Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre won him critical acclaim, but they also made him controversial among fellow Southerners of the time who felt he was...

, Terry Kay
Terry Kay
Terry Kay, born 10 February 1938, in Royston, Georgia, is a novelist. Perhaps his most well-known book is To Dance with the White Dog, which was made into a Hallmark Hall of Fame television movie starring Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy....

, Jim Kilgo, Barry Lopez
Barry Lopez
Barry Holstun Lopez is an American author, essayist, and fiction writer whose work is known for its environmental and social concerns.-Biography:...

, Judith Ortiz Cofer
Judith Ortiz Cofer
Judith Ortiz Cofer is a Puerto Rican author. Her work spans a range of literary genres including poetry, short stories, autobiography, essays, and Young-adult fiction.-Early years:...

, Mary Hood
Mary Hood
Mary Hood is an award-winning fiction writer of predominantly Southern literature, who has authored two short story collections - How Far She Went and And Venus is Blue - and a novel, Familiar Heat...

, Harry Crews
Harry Crews
Harry Crews is an American novelist, playwright, short story writer and essayist. He was born in Bacon County, Georgia in 1935 and served in the Marines during the Korean War. He attended the University of Florida on the GI Bill, but dropped out to travel...

, Tom Wicker
Tom Wicker
Thomas Grey "Tom" Wicker was an American journalist. He was best known as a political reporter and columnist for The New York Times.-Background and education:...

, Calvin Trillin
Calvin Trillin
Calvin Marshall Trillin is an American journalist, humorist, food writer, poet, memoirist and novelist.-Biography:Trillin attended public schools in Kansas City and went on to Yale University, where he served as chairman of the Yale Daily News and was a member of Scroll and Key before graduating...

, Roy Blount, Jr.
Roy Blount, Jr.
Roy Alton Blount, Jr. is an American writer. Best known as a humorist, Blount is also a reporter, actor, and musician with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock band composed entirely of writers. He is also a former president of the Authors Guild....

, Eugene Genovese, Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit is a writer who lives in San Francisco. She has written on a variety of subjects including the environment, politics, place, and art....

, David Carkeet (of Campus Sexpot fame), and Catherine Clinton
Catherine Clinton
Catherine Clinton is Professor of History at Queen's University Belfast. She specializes in American History, with an emphasis on the history of the South....

.

Controversy

The Press has been the subject of several scandals. Documents uncovered by the website Foetry.com
Foetry.com
Foetry.com, sometimes referred to as just Foetry, was a website that attempted to identify fraudulent and unethical practices in poetry contests. It was active from April 1, 2004 until May 18, 2007.-Organization:...

 revealed that the 1999 University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry series prize to Peter M. Sacks
Peter M. Sacks
Peter M. Sacks is an expatriate South African painter/poet living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Normandy, France.- Books and Awards :...

 had been judged by Jorie Graham
Jorie Graham
Jorie Graham is an American poet. The U.S. Poetry Foundation suggests "She is perhaps the most celebrated poet of the American post-war generation". She replaced poet Seamus Heaney as Boylston Professor at Harvard, becoming the first woman to be appointed to this position...

, a colleague of Sacks at Harvard who subsequently married him. Throughout the course of the controversy, series editor Bin Ramke had insisted that judges of the contest be kept secret, and until Foetry.com obtained the names of judges via The Open Records Act, the conflict of interest had been undisclosed. As a result of the critical coverage from Foetry.com
Foetry.com
Foetry.com, sometimes referred to as just Foetry, was a website that attempted to identify fraudulent and unethical practices in poetry contests. It was active from April 1, 2004 until May 18, 2007.-Organization:...

 and elsewhere, Ramke resigned from the editorship of the series. The University of Georgia Press now discloses the names of its poetry judges, who "are instructed to avoid conflicts of interest of all kinds."

On October 27, 2005, the University of Georgia Press rescinded author Brad Vice
Brad Vice
Brad Vice is a fiction writer whose short story collection, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction from the University of Georgia Press...

's Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and recalled copies of his collection The Bear Bryant
Bear Bryant
Paul William "Bear" Bryant was an American college football player and coach. He was best known as the longtime head coach of the University of Alabama football team. During his 25-year tenure as Alabama's head coach, he amassed six national championships and thirteen conference championships...

 Funeral Train.
Vice was alleged to have plagiarized
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...

 sections of one story from Carl Carmer
Carl Carmer
Carl Lamson Carmer was an author of nonfiction books, memoirs, and novels, many of which focused on Americana such as myths, folklore, and tales. His most famous book, Stars Fell on Alabama, was an autobiographical story of the time he spent living in Alabama...

's book Stars Fell on Alabama (1934) (a charge that Vice and others dispute).

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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