University of Akron Press Publications

Follow

• 

  Artists on Creative Administration

  Tonya Lockyer

  Brilliant artists share stories on artistic life and business, full of lessons we can all learn about living a creative life. Featuring the voices of thirty artists and arts workers, Artists on Creative Administration: A Workbook from the National Center for Choreography provides first-hand accounts of creative administration in action. The book pairs big topics with actionable tactics, addressing themes like equity, activism, design thinking, leadership, collaboration, family, ethics, and care. Provocative, candid essays and interviews expand our view of what creativity and leadership can be, as each chapter closes with experiments for the reader to try and adapt to their own thinking, work, and life.

  Artists on Creative Administration emerged from the National Center for Choreography-Akron’s acclaimed Creative Administration Research program. As editor, Tonya Lockyer shares: “This book is for anyone looking for paths forward; for anyone who believes we are in an exceptional moment of change—change is happening and needs to happen.”

• 

  Native Americans of the Cuyahoga Valley: From Early Peoples to Contemporary Issues

  Peg Bobel and Linda G. Whitman

  Native Americans of the Cuyahoga Valley presents an accessible distillation of the complex history of Native peoples of the region, from precontact times to today. Essential to anyone seeking a fuller understanding of the history of the Cuyahoga Valley and Northeast Ohio, the book includes essays on archaeology, history, and contemporary issues in today’s Native American communities.

• 

  Akron Poetry Catalog and Reader September 2019

  University of Akron Press

  In our mobile-sized poetry catalog and reader, you can read poems from new books by Oliver de la Paz, Joshua Harmon, Brittany Cavallaro, Krystal Languell, Tyler Mills, Caryl Pagel, Emily Rosko, Emilia Phillips, Aimée Baker, Anne Barngrover, Matthew Guenette, Leslie Harrison, Sandra Simonds, Philip Metres, and Jennifer Moore.

• 

  From Farm to Fork

  Sarah Morath

  Interest in the food we eat and how it is produced, distributed, and consumed has grown tremendously in the last few years. Consumers are exchanging highly processed, genetically engineered, chemical-laden, and pesticide-contaminated food often associated with big agribusinesses for fresh produce grown using organic methods. The growth of farmers markets from 1,755 in 1994 to more than 8,200 in 2014, in both urban and rural areas, is just one indication that consumers are interested in knowing who produced their food and how the food was produced.

  This book addresses the importance of creating food systems that are sustainable by bringing together a number of experts in the fields of law, economics, nutrition, and social sciences, as well as farmers and advocates. These experts share their perspectives on some of the pressing issues related to sustainable food systems and offer solutions for achieving healthy, sustainable, and equitable food systems in the future.

• 

  Ohio State Football

  Robert J. Roman

  “THE Ohio State University.” That’s how Buckeyes in the NFL introduce themselves on nationally broadcast football games. And this incredible history of the team will only increase that pride in Buckeye football for players, coaches, students, alumni, and fans who love the team.

  Author Robert J. Roman draws on extensive archival research to tell the untold story of the early days of football at Ohio's flagship public university. The game was different. Fields were rarely level and often rocky. Eleven men played both sides of the ball, quarterbacks were often the smallest men on the team, and coaches were not allowed to communicate with the players during a game. The travel was different. The faculty of rival Ohio Wesleyan forbid their team from traveling to Columbus, where the vulgar, “godless” public university students might corrupt their young men. After Ohio State's first game outside the state—a victory in Kentucky—the team had to run for its life, chased by an angry mob of stone-throwing locals. But the students were the same. Eager to establish their school as the equal of older, wealthier, and more strictly religious colleges, Ohio State students saw intercollegiate athletics as their path to respectability. “Do you not believe that our athletic clubs have generally represented the University with great credit to themselves and the University?,” asked a student in the campus paper. “Do you not believe they have spread abroad our good name and won friends for us all through the State? I tell you, in this day athletics are becoming just as much a part of a great University as Greek or mathematics.”

  Ohio State Football: The Forgotten Dawn will not only fascinate readers interested in the school’s sports history, but also those interested in the early history of athletics at American public universities. Familiar debates over the construction of facilities, hiring of coaches, academic eligibility, and the authority of the faculty and the administration are all part of the story here. But above all, college football fans will see themselves, with pride, in this history of one of the sport’s most famed programs.

  Includes forty rare photos from the Ohio State archives.

• 

  Public Space, Public Policy, and Public Understanding of Race and Ethnicity in America: An Interdisciplinary Approach

  Teresa A. Booker

  This interdisciplinary anthology contains a collection of materials, including personal accounts, analyses of historical and/or current events, and legal rulings told through the lens of various racial or ethnic groups living in the United States. Included are discussions of housing and neighborhoods, recreation and work, crime, education, and politics.

• 

  The Akron Roundtable: Bringing the World to Akron for Forty Years

  David Lieberth

  For 170 years, Akron has been linked to the wider world—ever since John Brown, the famous abolitionist and Akron’s most consequential resident, traveled on behalf of Colonel Simon Perkins to the European capitals in 1846 to market the wool that became Akron’s first international export. In the late nineteenth century, Akron industrialist Lewis Miller captured international accolades for the farm machinery manufactured at his Buckeye Mower Works, located where E. J. Thomas Hall stands today. In 1912, Goodyear Superintendent Paul Litchfield established a beachhead for the company in Europe, and through the twentieth century, all Akron tire makers delivered rubber products to the rest of the world. Akron was an international city, and its correspondents delivered the city’s message of progress and prosperity to the world.

  “Bringing the World to Akron,” a statement of identity embraced by the Akron Roundtable in its twentieth anniversary year, are five words that belie a complex local network—a spider’s web of community leaders—who have presented major speeches to Akron audiences for forty years. Since its inception in 1976, important people with newsworthy messages have used the Roundtable podium to deliver thoughtful presentations on business, science, civic and social movements, arts, and culture to the thought leaders of Greater Akron. Roundtable audiences are composed of business and civic leaders, government officials, academics, heads of nonprofit agencies, students, and citizens.

  This is the history of the Akron Roundtable's first forty years (1976-2016).

• 

  The Indomitable Don Plusquellic

  Steve Love

  Until his resignation in May 2015, Don Plusquellic had been the mayor of Akron, Ohio, for twenty-eight years. When he took office in 1987, Ronald Reagan was in the White House, the average price for a car was a little over $10,000, and later that year the US stock market would drop over 22 percent in one day—at the time the sharpest market downturn in the United States since the Great Depression. This was a harbinger of things to come in Akron as the Rubber Capital of the World hemorrhaged jobs. In the 1980s, over 26,000 people were employed in the plastics and rubber product manufacturing industries in greater Akron. By 2007, the number had slipped to only 7,220. The loss of jobs coincided with greater suburbanization—a blow to the city's housing market. Plusquellic was challenged with rebuilding a transforming city.

  Using news sources and extensive interviews, Love has crafted a superb political biography of the person some have called Akron's Mayor for Life. Plusquellic reinvented his job, erasing the line between public and private efforts to provide employment in a reimagined downtown and innovative Joint Economic Development Districts beyond the city. He championed education for future workers.

  Don Plusquellic won fast friends and eager enemies with his silk-and-sandpaper personality. He became one of the longer-serving and most-honored mayors in America. His story is one of both place and person, the son of a rubber worker who restored Akron's spirit and belief in itself after the city lost its title of Rubber Capital of the World.

• 

  A Transformation in American National Politics: The 2012 Presidential Election

  Douglas Brattebo, Tom Lansford, and Jack Covarrubias

  The presidential election of 2012, one of the most important in American history, was the product of complex and fast-moving changes—demographic, technological, and economic—surfacing in American society. Particularly prominent in the scholarly analyses in this volume (a companion volume to Culture, Rhetoric, and Voting: The Presidential Election of 2012) are: the status of the two main political parties and their core constituencies; demographic forces and geographic trends; the strategies and tactics of the two campaigns; and the decisive impact of economic, domestic, and foreign policies.

• 

  Cleveland's Bitter Pill: A Diagnosis of Injured Title Dreams and Die-Hard Fans

  Joseph Congeni and Thomas Bacher

  This collection of stories examines Cleveland's athletic teams and injuries that have hindered their quests for championships. From rotator cuffs to knee ligaments, from sprained ankles to sprained backs, and from broken legs to broken arms, Cleveland's misery has taken some of its best athletes and immobilized them at inopportune times. Shaq gave fans his inside dominance and his ailing thumb in 2010. Herb Score was a blazing lefthander until he took a line drive to the face in 1957. When the Las Vegas oddsmakers picked the Browns to win the Super Bowl in 1988, Bernie Kosar's arm injury derailed championship aspirations. Written by the Director of Sports Medicine at Akron Children's Hospital, Joseph Congeni, Cleveland's Bitter Pill not only recaps the sports events, but explains the injuries in terms that fans can understand.

• 

  Culture, Rhetoric, and Voting: The Presidential Election of 2012

  Douglas M. Brattebo, Tom Lansford, Jack Covarrubias, and Robert J. Pauly Jr.

  The presidential election of 2012, one of the most important in American history, was the product of complex and fast-moving changes—demographic, technological, and economic—surfacing in American society. Particularly prominent in the scholarly analyses in this volume (a companion volume to A Transformation in American National Politics: The Presidential Election of 2012) are: the psychology behind Barack Obama’s presidential leadership; the role of religious and cultural divisions in contemporary American politics; the rhetorical approaches of the two nominees; and trends in voting.

• 

  Girl-King

  Brittany Cavallaro

  The poems in Brittany Cavallaro's Girl-King are whispered from behind a series of masks, those of victim and aggressor, nineteenth-century madame and reluctant magician's girl, of truck-stop Persephone and frustrated Tudor scholar. This "expanse of girls, expanding still" chase each other through history, disappearing in an Illinois cornfield only to re-emerge on the dissection table of a Scottish artist-anatomist. But these poems are not just interested in historical narrative: they peer, too, at the past's marginalia, at its "blank pages" as well as its "scrawls and dashes." Always, they return to "the dark, indelicate question" of power and sexuality, of who can rule the "city where no one is from." These girls search for the connection between "alive and will stay that way," between each dying star and the emptiness that can collapse everything.

• 

  The Veronica Maneuver

  Jennifer Moore

  Jennifer Moore's debut collection takes its title from a bullfighting technique in which the matador draws the bull with his cape; in these poems, however, traditional moves are reconfigured and roles are subverted. In a broader sense, the word "veronica" (from the Latin vera, or "true" and the Greek eikon, or "image") functions as a frame for exploring the nature of visual experience, and underscores a central question: how do we articulate events or emotions that evade clear understanding? In order to do so, the figures here perform all manner of transformations: from vaudeville star to cartoonist's daughter, from patron saint to "Blue-Eyed Torera;" they are soothsayers, apothecaries, curators, often conjuring selves out of thin air. This dilating and "shape-shifting" of perspective becomes a function of identity: "the absorber and the absorbed become one." Indeed, both speaker and listener must be crafted-willed into being-by each other ("Be your own maestro"), and are apparitions until then. Through a flick of the wrist or a trick of the eye, these speakers understand that construction of a self comes only through performance of that self—which performances are often punctuated with a wink, an unswerving gaze, or both at once.

• 

  Bankruptcy in an Industrial Society: A History of the Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Ohio

  M. Susan Murnane

  Not a history of bankruptcy law, Murnane's work is a social and institutional history of the Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Ohio. The work explains the development of the court and the story of the people who worked there and of those who sought refuge in the bankruptcy court, within the context of northern Ohio's changing economy. The story of this particular bankruptcy court also illustrates the historical evolution of bankruptcy as an American institution.

• 

  Fat Jersey Blues

  John Repp

  "I know I'm holding a good book in my hand when I use the other to call my friends and read poems to them. How generous John Repp is! He zooms in on the moment, but he's always glancing at everything that surrounds it. His funny poems have dark hearts, just as the sad ones are clearly written by someone capable of belly-shaking laughter. They tell wonderful stories, yet they contain chewy little nuggets that are often indifferent and even hostile to story. I've said elsewhere that a poem either writes you a check or sends you a bill, and Fat Jersey Blues writes me checks faster than I can cash them. Oh, and these poems make me do something else that the good ones always do: when I hung up after reading ""Bob Johnson"" or ""The Maltese Falcon"" or ""Balcony"" to a friend, I sat down to write myself. -David Kirby, author of The Biscuit Joint

  Saturated with the particularity of place, Fat Jersey Blues dramatizes a world at once actual and mythic, joyful and desolate. As American as this book is, Proust comes to mind when reading it, time slowed to the tempo of a wide river sweeping all that is mortal toward its inevitable end. As Repp writes, “. . . how can those days & these & all the others I can’t fit/into whatever I’m saying here be lived by one person?” Lucky for us, he’s made all “those days and these” fit into this marvelous book. -Lynn Emanuel, author of Noose and Hook

  How rich the trove of personal, musical, and literary knowledge John Repp brings to this return to the New Jersey of his early years. The warm, adult gaze behind even the angers and disappointments in these poems is what I love in them. -Eric Torgersen, author of Heart.Wood

  John Repp’s poems bear the weight of years as they strip away pretensions of all sorts. Who else could write a fully realized poem that so hilariously praises and corrects another poet, “My Wife’s Ass (or ‘You Annoy Me, Matthew Dickman!’)”? Whether sorrowing or comical, Fat Jersey Blues is never predictable. -Lee Upton, author of The Tao of Humiliation

  These are poems of elegance and intimacy, informed with earned wisdom and great heart. When ""Blueberry (or 'Another Summer-of-1975 Poem')""—one of the best narrative poems anywhere—urges you to ""Gather with me in the kitchen where the floorboards/ sag & squeak. . ."" accept the invitation. You will return to Fat Jersey Blues often, grateful to be reminded how rare and essential poets of John Repp's caliber are. -Linda Lee Harper, author of Kiss, Kiss

• 

  From Séance to Science: A History of the Profession of Psychology in America

  Ludy T. Benjamin, Jr. and David B. Baker

  This book is intended to round out the picture of American psychology's past, adding the history of psychological practice to the story of psychological science. Written by two well-recognized authorities in the field, this book covers the profession and practice of psychology in America from the late 19th century to the present. FROM SÉANCE TO SCIENCE tells the story of psychologists who sought and seek to apply the knowledge of their science to the practical problems of the world, whether those problems lay in businesses, schools, families, or in the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors of individuals. Engagingly written and full of interesting examples, this book includes figures and photos from the Archives of the History of American Psychology. This is the story of individuals, trained in psychology, who function as school psychologists, counseling psychologists, clinical psychologists, and industrial psychologists. These are psychology's practitioners, meaning that they take the knowledge base of psychology and use it for practical purposes outside of the classroom and outside of the laboratory.

• 

  Going Places: Slovenian Women's Stories on Migration

  Mirjam Milharcic Hkadnik and Jernej Mlekuž

  Going Places is a narrative of a century of Slovenian women's immigration stories. The book traces the migration of these Central European women to several destinations including Argentina, Egypt, Italy, and the United States. The research has been carefully culled from the subjects' letters, personal diaries, and oral interviews. What results is a story that covers the span of three to four generations.
  
  The book highlights in biography the story of identity under construction. Each woman's identity surpasses ethnic, national identity or belonging, but at the same time, contains different elements of identity transformation at different stages of the narrator's life. As one narrator said, "While their [the women's] suitcases may be light with personal belongings, their stamina, strength and determination and emotional commitment would sink a battleship.”

• 

  Post Subject: A Fable

  Oliver de la Paz

  Ecstatic and obsessive, the prose poems that make up Oliver de la Paz's Post Subject: A Fable reveal the monuments of a lost country. Through a series of epistles addressed to "Empire" a catalog emerges, where what can be tallied is noted in a ledger, what can be claimed is demarcated, and what has been reaped is elided. The task of deposing the late century is taken up. What's salvaged from the remains is humanity.

• 

  The Lake View Cemetery: Photographs from Cleveland's Historic Landmark

  Barney Taxel and Laura Taxel

  The Lake View Cemetery, founded in 1869, was modeled after the great garden cemeteries of Victorian England and France. Over 107,000 individuals are interred on the sprawling 285 acre expanse that is located four and one-half miles from Cleveland's Public Square. According to a Plain Dealer report in 1870, the cemetery was designed to combine all the attractive features that "nature and true art can produce" to harmonize nature's alphabet-"stone, earth, wood and water." The landscape was laid out with broad avenues and shady walks "near the fountains in view of many a rustic pile [edifice] and quiet grave and stately monument." The cemetery became the burial place for many of Cleveland's prominent citizens including James A. Garfield, John D. Rockefeller, and J.H. Wade.

  Cleveland photographer Barney Taxel has spent over a decade, during all seasons, exploring the stunning landmark. The culmination of the personal project is this collection of over two hundred of his creations that reveal the spirit and essence of the Lake View Cemetery. Not only are famous images of the Garfield monument and the Wade Chapel captured, but so are the artistic splendors of the landscape, stonework, and memorials. To provide context, the book also includes a history of the Lake View Cemetery based on archival research.

• 

  Time is a Toy: The Selected Poems of Michael Benedikt

  John Gallaher and Laura Boss

  Time is a Toy fills in the mystery of what happened to the work of Michael Benedikt, one of America's acknowledged major contemporary poets of the 1960s and 1970s, who disappeared from the stage of American poetry. The editors John Gallaher and Laura Boss solve that mystery while discovering new unpublished poems, as well as Benedikt's classic published work.

• 

  Under the Rust Belt Revealing Innovation in Northeast Ohio

  Thomas Bacher

  Many areas of the Midwest faced economic challenges after large manufacturing industries, that once operated with three shifts, cut back or went out of business completely. Northeast Ohio was not immune to this downturn and experienced major declines in its population base and tax revenue streams. How could the area recover? This work looks at the post-manufacturing business climate in Northeast Ohio whose major cities, Cleveland, Akron, and Youngstown, were faced with re-inventing themselves and their industrial bases. Using an interview format, the book details how entrepreneurs saw opportunities to develop services and products in the area. Their stories illuminate the process of innovation.

• 

  A Poet Drives a Truck: Poems by and about Lowell A. Levant

  Lowell A. Levant

  Lowell A. Levant had the twin vocations of poet and truck driver. He rose to prominence in Berkeley in the sixties as a member of the Artists, Musicians, Poets, and Sympathizers Local of the I.W.W., whose work was collected in Poems Read in the Spirit of Peace and Gladness. Readers will notice four main qualities of his poems. First, as observed by his mentor, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gary Snyder, there is “… the complex depth of his writing about work, machinery, trucks, equipment, repair, maintenance -- all in a deceptively slightly befuddled voice that masks the surprising competence of what's being actually done.” Second, there is attunement with nature, characteristic of “Deep Ecology” poetry. Third, there is music, which he also created when he played a Jew’s harp, sang, or strummed his guitar. Finally, Lowell’s poetry often took the form of the unfiltered, unfettered, free-associative declarations of the Beat Poets of his time, particularly those of Allen Ginsberg, whom Lowell admiried.

• 

  From Coca-Cola to Chewing Gum The Applied Psychology of Harry Hollingworth, Volume 2

  Harry Hollingworth, Ludy T. Benjamin, and Lizette Royer-Barton

  Harry Levi Hollingworth was one of the pioneers in the field known today as industrial-organizational psychology. He was the author of more than 20 books and 100 scientific and theoretical articles. His honors were many, including serving as President of the American Psychological Association in 1927. In 1940, at the age of 60 and partly initiated by the sudden death of his wife, Hollingworth took stock of his life in an autobiography that focused on his origins and development in rural Nebraska and his subsequent career as a psychologist at Columbia University. For the first time, this autobiography is now available.

• 

  Rave Reviews The History of Akron's Tuesday Musical

  Thomas Bacher, Cynthia Harrison, and Sharon Cebula

  The Tuesday Musical Club was founded in 1887 by thirteen young Akron women who had an overwhelming desire to share their love of music. With further support of Gertrude Penfield Seiberling, the wife of industrialist Frank Seiberling, the organization grew like many other musical organizations across the country. Unlike similar clubs, the Akron-based entity continued to expand and is one of a very few that have survived. Among the artists who have appeared as a part of the rich history of Akron's Tuesday Musical Organization are Vladimir Horowitz, Artur Rubinstein, Yehudi Menuhin, Yascha Heifetz, Glenn Gould, Van Cliburn, Isaac Stern, Luciano Pavarotti, Itzhak Perlman, Cecilia Bartoli and Yo-Yo Ma. This volume, enhanced with photographs and other memorabilia, traces the history of the unique organization from its founding to the present day. The story reflects the changing history of an urban area and the drive of an organization to provide entertainment and education to generations of Akronites.

• 

  Signaletics

  Emilia Phillips

  Signaletics pits the measured against the immeasurable, the body against identity, and the political against the personal. With a defunct 19th-century body measurement system of criminal identification as a foundation, the poems move in and out of history, only to arrive at the immediate voice of a speaker, distraught about the death of a child brother, the remove of a father, and the estrangement of the personal with the politics of her country.