Working on a wonderful journal

I was pleased to learn that the Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture journal at University of California Press received the New Journal Award for 2020 from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. The award was announced at the virtual 2021 Modern Language Association convention in January.

Latest review on Goodreads

Budding Prospects: A Pastoral by T. Coraghessan Boyle

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I am a fan of this author but would have to think hard to come up with who to recommend this one to. I found it a well-written page turner and yet kept thinking of my uncle Steve Chapple and his book Outlaws in Babylon: True Adventures on the Marijuana Frontier, which came out about the same time in the 1980s. Not likeable characters!



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Copyediting for UC Press

After my first book for the press, I have gone on to work on several more.

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• A History of Modern Tibet, vol. 4, In the Eye of the Storm, 1957–1959, by Melvyn C. Goldstein (October 2019)
• Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia, by David M. Lampton, Selina Ho, and Cheng-Chwee Kuik (October 2020)
• Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico, by Maurice Rafael Magaña (November 2020)
• Parallel Modernism: Koga Harue and Avant-Garde Art in Modern Japan, by Chinghsin Wu (November 2019)

Coming up later this summer is a book by Roger Garside, with the tentative title China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom. Each book from this university press has been interesting and challenging in different ways.

Mini book review

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Despite occasionally thinking I’m too old to read this childhood to coming-of-age book, I found it really compelling. Wonderful nature descriptions mixed with a page-turner plot.



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Flying the dream

Northbound over Lake Chelan, Washington, July 4, 2017

Being pilots and now owning our own airplane, my husband and I have had opportunities others may only dream of—hopping over to one of the San Juan Islands in Puget Sound just for a stroll and lunch; observing the total solar eclipse on August 21, 2017, from Midvale, Idaho; coming back across the mountains without the hassle of highway traffic.

Adult spelling bees

Contrary to what you may think, the adult spelling bee gets its name from the age restriction, not the type of words. For some reason, spelling bees are widely regarded as being for children. Not so, in my experience. Here are some I have had fun at.

An interesting bilingual project

Hermila Galindo, Mexican feminist

Soon after I started this blog last summer, the project editor at the Southern Illinois University Press found me and asked if I was interested in copyediting a book for them. Given its daunting name of Mestiza Rhetorics: An Anthology of Mexicana Activism in the Spanish-Language Press, 1887–1922, I had to decide whether I was interested enough and qualified to work with old-fashioned Spanish-language texts written in a period of Mexican history I was not extremely familiar with. I’m glad I said yes.

Montana events

Fred Inabnit (1866-1928), my great-grandfather.

In the fall every year, two events occur that are. of interest to me as publisher of well-researched titles on Greater Yellowstone (see the Yellowstone Treasures website). This year they are taking place simultaneously, and I chose one.

A publisher conference to look forward to

The annual PubWest conference, held February 7-9, 2019, at La Fonda on the Plaza in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

PubWest, a trade association formerly known as the Rocky Mountain Book Publishers Association, puts on fun and informative conferences. Today they released this attractive poster for the conference.

New client: University of California Press

The new SFMOMA, view from Yerba Buena Gardens

I got a chance to meet a couple of the senior editors on staff at UC Press last May during the Saturday lunch at my first National Museum Publishing Seminar. That’s a biennial conference that was held at the Parc 55 Hotel in San Francisco this year. A highlight of the weekend was the party at “the newly transformed and expanded San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) [, which] opened its doors to the public on May 14, 2016.”