If the mere words “forthcoming books” set your heart aflutter, you know we’re on the eve of a new publishing season. In the old days, that would have meant stacks of catalogues; how I loved looking through them. (And I saved many of them for years.) Now a lot of the catalogues are digital only, but some publishers still do print versions as well. One of these is University of Oklahoma Press, which I have long admired. Unlike many university presses, which have lost the distinctive identity that had characterized them, OU Press maintains continuity with its past, not in a stuffy curatorial manner but rather as a living tradition.
Among a number of titles that caught my eye in the Fall/Winter 2025 catalogue, three in particular stood out. The first was Between Loving and Leaving: Essays on the New Midwestern History, edited by Jon K. Lauck. If you have a longstanding interest in the Midwest, you’ll immediately recognize Lauck’s name. Editor in chief of the Middle West Review, president of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, author or editor of an entire shelf of books, Lauck has done more than anyone else to invigorate scholarship on the Middle West and to entice general readers to explore more deeply the many-sided history and character of this quintessentially American region. Among the subjects touched on in this volume are “the Midwestern landscape, family farming, and literature and art produced by Midwesterners,” as well as the “peculiarly Midwestern politics” that have emerged “in a region that has produced so many activists and movements.” I can’t wait to get into this collection.
The other two books that I’m particularly looking forward to from this list are related to each other; both continue OU Press’s longstanding attention to Native American subjects. A History of the Cherokee Nation, by the Cherokee historian Rachel Caroline Eaton, was written (the catalogue tells us) “shortly before [Eaton’s] death in 1938” but hasn’t been published until now. The catalogue copy adds that at one time the book was “deemed ‘too pro-Cherokee’ for publication”; perhaps the front matter will explain more fully why publication was delayed for so long. (David Berry, Martha Berry, and Patricia Dawson are credited as editors of the volume; Martha Berry is Eaton’s grandniece, and Dawson is Eaton’s great-great-great grandniece.) The book includes an introduction and “copious notes by the editors.”
The New Voice of God: Language, Worldview, and the Cherokee Bible, by Margaret Bender and Thomas N. Belt, sets out to show how, while “the introduction of Christianity shaped Cherokee communicative practices and culture, the Cherokee language also reshaped the Bible to reflect a definitive Native worldview.” The book focuses on the books of Genesis, John, and Matthew, contrasting these texts in English translation with their rendering in Cherokee. As I was reading the description of this book, I thought of several close friends who share many years of experience with Wycliffe Bible Translators, as well as another dear friend who spent decades working on Bible translation under a different umbrella. The last paragraph of the catalogue copy suggests that translation of the Bible into Cherokee “exposed deep philosophical differences, challenging Western cultural norms and reshaping spiritual discourse.” You must forgive me; I am terminally weary of this sort of rhetoric. But I am very much looking forward to reading this book and (I hope) writing about it and the other two I’ve mentioned here.
I should add that these are by no means the only books of interest (to me in particular) in the catalogue but rather the ones that stood out above all the others. (See for example the very first title in the catalogue, which gets a two-page spread: The California Camera Club: Collective Visions in the Making of the American West, by Carolin Görgen.) I would encourage you to check out the entire list yourself. Long may university presses thrive: large, medium, small, the whole caboodle! Buy a university press book this week.
