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November 19, 2008, 04:03 PM ET
Schooling the NBA
It’s NBA night in New York — and thank goodness this has nothing to do with the Knicks. Tonight the National Book Foundation award winners are announced in four categories — fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young people’s literature — drawn from a pool of 1,258 books submitted by 200-plus contributing publishers. In recent years university-press titles have fared about as well at the NBAs as Ivy League basketball teams in the NCAA tournament — which is to say, not very.
One university press does turn up with a finalist this year — LSU Press has been named one of the five finalists in poetry, for Reginald Gibbons’s Creatures of a Day. It is the second year in a row that LSU Press has been represented with a finalist in the category. And if university presses are underrepresented tonight, the same can’t be said for high-profile university administrators. Drew Gilpin Faust, whom you may know better as president of Harvard University, is a finalist in the nonfiction category for her remarkable This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, published by Knopf. If she wins, don’t count on seeing her next title appearing for a while. Faust has already said that her commitments at Harvard likely preclude her taking on another book for some time.
In the meantime, good luck to the Tigers and the Crimson!
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