author interview

Interview with William Cheng, winner of the 2016 AMS Philip Brett Award

by Sam Killian November 11, 2016

We at University of Michigan Press are pleased to share that William Cheng’s new book, Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good, received this year’s Philip Brett Award from the American Musicological Society. Philip Brett (1937–2002) was a beloved professor and a pioneer of queer music scholarship. The book, an urgent treatise on the ethical stakes of contemporary musical scholarship and citizenship, was celebrated during the AMS annual meeting. During this meeting (which happened to take place this year in Cheng’s hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia), the Society praised Just Vibrations, calling it “a nuanced and intersectional work that meets concerns […]

New author video: Joseph Geha discusses ‘Lebanese Blonde’

by Phillip Witteveen January 29, 2013

Joseph Geha sat down with the Press to discuss Lebanese Blonde, his recently published novel about two Lebanese immigrant cousins who concoct a scheme to import a potent strain of hashish into the United States using the family’s mortuary business as a cover. Set in Toledo, Ohio’s “Little Syria” community in 1975-76, Lebanese Blonde tells the story of Aboodeh, a self-styled entrepreneur, and Samir, his young, reluctant accomplice. In the video, Geha, who immigrated to Toledo with his family when he was two years old in 1946, discusses the role that food plays in the immigrant experience, detaching from one’s native […]

Q&A with Paul Gross, author of Extreme Michigan Weather

by University of Michigan Press June 2, 2010

Don't like the weather in Michigan? Wait ten minutes. It's an old joke, but one that shows how temperamental the weather in the Great Lakes State can be—and how much the residents enjoy talking about it. Paul Gross, a popular Detroit television meteorologist, shows readers exactly how extreme the weather in Michigan can be, from heat waves to bitter snows, ice storms to tornadoes, floods to high winds. He delves into the mysteries of extreme weather, explaining how the state's harshest extremes and biggest storms come to be, helping readers to understand and truly appreciate what greets them when they […]

Q&A with Godfrey Hodgson, author of Martin Luther King

by University of Michigan Press February 1, 2010

Martin Luther King traces the iconic civil rights leader's career from his birth in Atlanta in 1929, through the campaigns that made possible the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to his assassination in Memphis in 1968. Hodgson sheds light on every aspect of an extraordinary life: the Black Baptist culture in which King grew up, his theology and political philosophy, his physical and moral courage, his insistence on the injustice of inequality, his campaigning energy, his repeated sexual infidelities. Godfrey Hodgson has worked in Britain and America as a newspaper and magazine journalist; […]