What are some upcoming trends for the next year?

I’ve been excited to see an uptick in books by and about Latinx folks. Earlier this year we published Renato Rosaldo’s beautiful prose poetry collection, The Chasers, which gives readers a snapshot of Chicano life in Tucson in the ’50s. Part club, part friend group, the Chasers were 12 Mexican American high schoolers whose stories paint a rich picture of teen life near the border. Another book we published this year on Latinx communities is Beth C. Caldwell’s Deported Americans. It’s a powerful book that traces the impact of deportation on both sides of the border. We have quite a few timely books in the works on immigration, xenophobia, and racism. 

What book/genre/topic would you like to see cross your transom?

I’d love to see more proposals for serious nonfiction books that help us understand inequalities and social movements, whether related to racism, sexism, heteronormativity and queerphobia, ableism, environmental justice, or economic justice. Our press specializes in publishing cutting-edge books that take bottom-up perspectives and center approaches, views, and voices that have been historically marginalized. Our books are designed to move multiple fields or areas of inquiry forward at once. We’d love to publish a wider range of trade books to complement our scholarly books.

What do you want to change about publishing?

The We Need Diverse Books movement and Lee and Low’s 2015 Diversity Baseline Survey reenergized important conversations in our industry related to equity and inclusion. At Duke University Press, I co-founded an Equity and Inclusion Group that has met monthly for the past three years, hosting trainings, book studies, and discussions. Thanks to the support of our director, we are now launching a task force to implement initiatives that will hopefully lead to lasting change. Our work has been inspired by other organizations across our industry and beyond. If you’d like to learn more about our work on equity in publishing, here’s a video from a recent presentation featuring Duke University Press author Melanie S. Morrison, author of Murder on Shades Mountain.  

What’s unique about your corner of the publishing industry?

University presses differ from other presses in that we have a rigorous peer review process for all of our books. This means that everything we publish has been vetted for validity and scholarly soundness. Readers know that the work we publish is serious, fact based, and new, and that means that our books influence not just individual readers, but often pedagogies, policies, and social movements. Undergoing peer review often means that the books have been pushed to achieve their full potential in terms of their content and visibility by change-makers across the world. Quite a few of our most widely read books have been written by authors outside of academia, so I hope more people will consider publishing their serious nonfiction titles with university presses.

Anything else you’d like to add?

#ReadUP (a hashtag to encourage folks to read university press books) 

Gisela Fosado is an editor at Duke University Press. She acquires both trade and scholarly titles and is particularly interested in books that foreground marginalized perspectives and contribute to our understanding of social movements and inequality. Gisela holds an B.A. from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology and a Certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan.