After more than 50 years of publishing and some 2,000 books, the University of Missouri Press is slated to close. Tim Wolfe, president of the UM system, made the announcement this morning, according to a report in the Columbia Daily Tribune. This comes after major layoffs at the press in 2009.

Tom Lutz is a professor in the department of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside and the founder and editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?

A. If I had been asked these questions three years ago, all my answers would have been different, and not because the media landscape has changed so dramatically. I am now running a daily publication, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the majority of my reading consists of manuscripts in various stages of production.  So before getting out of bed, I read through the newly posted pieces, triple-checking the prose, the links, the layout. The first stop after LARB is always the email accounts, sometimes to actually get to work, sometimes just to see if any fires need putting out.  Then I begin the rest of what is a very brief daily tour:  Talking Points Memo a…

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The May issue of American Ethnologist includes essays that the journal’s editor says are among the first detailed ethnographic analyses to be published on the Occupy movements. And in the spirit of the 99%, AE  has made its two Occupy articles and a related commentary piece free to non-subscribers for the duration of 2012.

“The politically emergent—how to interpret and write about it—is an explicit theme of the Occupy articles,” writes editor Angelique Haugerud. “A participant-observer who writes about Occupy plunges into disciplinary dilemmas of ethnographic voice, engagement, and collaborative knowledge production.”

First to take that plunge are Maple Razsa and Andrej Kurnik, authors of “The Occupy Movement in Zizek’s Hometown: Direct Democracy and a Politics of Becoming.” They offer a firsthand look at the movement in Ljubljana, home city of the philosopher Slavoj Zizek. …

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Lisa Bayer has been named the new director of the University of Georgia Press, effective July 1. Bayer is currently the marketing director and regional trade editor at the University of Illinois Press. Before joining Illinois in 2006, she held marketing and sales positions at Southern Illinois University Press, Penn State University Press, Minnesota Historical Society Press, and the Redleaf Press.

She succeeds Nicole Mitchell, who left Georgia in late 2011 to become director of the University of Washington Press.

Helen Sword is a professor in the Centre for Academic Development at the University of Auckland.  Her new book, Stylish Academic Writing, is just out from Harvard University Press.

Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?

A. On weekdays I get up at 6 am, put the kettle on for a cup of tea, and settle myself in front of my computer to write for an hour before breakfast. If I’m being good, the first thing I read before I start writing is the last paragraph that I wrote the day before. If I’m not being good, I take a sneak peek at my email first.

Q: What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to or read regularly? What do you read in print vs. online vs. mobile?

My family subscribes to the New Zealand Herald and The New York Times online, plus a few glossy magazines such as National Geographic, the Princeton Alumni Weekly, and Rugby World (a publication of…

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Read The Chronicle’s Jennifer Howard on the new book series from Yale University Press based on Open Yale Courses.

Penny Kaiserlian will retire as director of the University of Virginia Press at the end of June. “I’ve very much enjoyed working with a great group of colleagues,” she writes in an e-mail, “but I think it is time for a new leader to take the press into its next stage.”

Kaiserlian has been director at Virginia since 2001, a position that capped off a career of more than 40 years in scholarly publishing. Before going to Charlottesville, she was at the University of Chicago Press, where she became editorial director and associate director in 1983.

When asked about her most gratifying projects at Virginia, Kaiserlian mentions Rotunda, the press’s electronic imprint. When she arrived, money was available from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the university’s president’s office to create a digital imprint for “peer-reviewed, born-digital scholarship.”  Rotunda, she says, “has now…

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Suzanne E. Guiod has been appointed to be the first editor in chief at Syracuse University Press, effective June 16. She is currently editorial director at the University of Rochester Press, where she’s been since 2004.

David Yaffe and Ruth Franklin are co-winners of an award dedicated to the “support and encouragement of emerging critics” and established in honor of the critic and academic Roger Shattuck (1923-2005), a leading scholar of Proust.

Yaffe is a professor of English at Syracuse University, a music critic for The Nation, and a contributor to The Chronicle Review, among other publications. His most recent book is Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown (Yale University Press), and he is at work on Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ruth Franklin is a literary critic and senior editor at The New Republic and has written for many other publications. She is author of A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2010) and is currently at work on a biography of the American writer Shirley Jackson.

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Several academics were among the winners of Pulitzer Prizes in Letters, Drama, and Music announced today.

In History, the late Manning Marable was lauded for his Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking). The author was a professor of African-American studies, history, and public affairs at Columbia University. The book, moved from the category of Biography by the Pulitzer board, was cited as “an exploration of the legendary life and provocative views of one of the most significant African-Americans in U.S. history, a work that separates fact from fiction and blends the heroic and tragic.”

In Biography, John Lewis Gaddis, a professor of history at Yale University, won for George F. Kennan: An American Life (Penguin), an “engaging portrait of a globetrotting diplomat whose complicated life was interwoven with the Cold War and America’s emergence as the world’s dominant power.”
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