Academics were among the winners of Pulitzer Prizes in History, Letters, and Music announced this afternoon.

In History, Fredrik Logevall won for Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (Random House), cited as “a balanced, deeply researched history of how, as French colonial rule faltered, a succession of American leaders moved step by step down a road to full-blown war.” Logevall is a professor of international studies and of history at Cornell University, where he also directs the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

In Fiction, Adam Johnson, who teaches creative writing at Stanford University, was lauded for his “exquisitely crafted” novel The Orphan Master’s Son (Random House) set in totalitarian North Korea.

The Pulitzer in Poetry went to Sharon Olds for Stag’s Leap (Alfred A. Knopf), a collection of “unflinching poems” on the…

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A generous new writers’ award has made its debut. Today, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University announced the inaugural winners of the Windham Campbell Prizes, a global award for writers endowed by a gift from the late novelist Donald Windham and his partner, Sandy M. Campbell. Windham, who died in 2010, left his papers to the Beinecke.

Nine writers, ages 33 to 87, none of whom knew they were nominated, won $150,000 prizes for outstanding achievement in fiction, nonfiction, and drama. The only condition? Participate in a multi-day literary festival at Yale in September where the awards will be given.

Academics among the winners were:

Adina Hoffman, who has taught at Wesleyan, Middlebury, and New York Universities, and been a fellow at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center. Her books include My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the…

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Marianne Boruch

Claremont Graduate University has announced that Marianne Boruch has won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for 2013. The prize, $100,000, is given annually to a mid-career poet and is one of the largest monetary awards for poetry in the United States. Boruch, who teaches at Purdue University and Warren Wilson College, won for The Book of Hours (Copper Canyon Press).

In addition, the poet Heidy Steidlmayer will receive $10,000 as winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for her collection Fowling Piece (Tri-Quarterly).

Visit CGU for additional information and a list of finalists for both awards.

Peter Brown’s Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD (Princeton University Press) took the highest honor, the R.R. Hawkins Award, at the PROSE awards handed out yesterday at the annual conference of the Association of American Publishers’ Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division.

Among other winners, a second Princeton book, The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy, by Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry E. Brady, won for excellence in the social sciences.

The University of California Press won for excellence in the physical sciences and mathematics with its Atlas of Yellowstone, by W. Andrew Marcus, James E. Meacham, Ann W. Rodman, and Alethea Y. Steingisser.

Harvard University Press won for excellence in the biological and life sciences with…

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Peter Kracht has been named the new director of the University of Pittsburgh Press, effective February 1.

Kracht, currently UPP’s editorial director and director of electronic publishing, succeeds Cynthia Miller, who last year announced plans to retire this winter after leading the press since 1995.

Reached by e-mail, he says he doesn’t anticipate any major changes given that he’s been working closely with Miller since he left Praeger to join UPP  in 2005. He says the press will continue expanding its lists in the history of science, urban history, history of architecture and the built environment, and Central Asian studies as key new editorial programs.

Major changes are afoot with the National Book Awards, but did that require a jab at university publishing?

As detailed in an AP story, the National Book Foundation will alter the rules for the awards to include a “long list” of 10 nominees for each of the four competitive categories (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young people’s literature). This extended list will be released on September 12, before narrowing to a “short list” of five finalists in each slot on October 15, with the awards announced on November 20. In addition, “the pool of judges will be expanded beyond writers to include critics, booksellers and librarians.”

Morgan Entrekin, a foundation board vice president and the CEO of Grove/Atlantic was pleased. Among other things, he said he had found recent fiction lists “very eccentric” and that expanding the pool of judges might make the list “a little more mainstream”…

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Academics were the winners in two National Book Awards categories, poetry and young adult literature, at last night’s ceremony in New York.

David Ferry won for Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press). The poet is a professor emeritus of English at Wellesley College who also teaches at Suffolk University. Two of Ferry’s poems are available at Poetry Daily.

Also, William Alexander won for Goblin Secrets (Margaret K. McElderry). Alexander is an adjunct faculty member in the liberal arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Sorry, but we would like to quibble. Today the dictionary division of Oxford University Press announced two words for the year 2012, one from the U.S. branch of the press, and one from the British, and let’s face it, America has been slighted.

GIF? Are you serious? GIF? Let’s put aside for a moment that it isn’t a word per se and instead an acronym for graphics interchange format. We refuse to be mollified by OUP’s celebrating it as a new verb, “to gif,” not a decades’ old noun: “The recent development of verbal GIF is an example of a linguistic process called conversion, or zero-formation,” urges the press. “He GIFed the highlights of the debate,” it suggests.

No sale.

We should note that one of the runners-up in the U.S. shortlist was MOOC (a term of no small familiarity to any Chronicle reader). If you are going to settle for an acronym, at least make it bovinely memorable.
…

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David Perry, editor-in-chief at the University of North Carolina Press since 1995, will retire in March 2013. Perry has been at the press for 34 years since he joined as an editorial assistant in 1979. In acquisitions, his focus has been history and Southern studies, with a special emphasis on Civil War and military history. A search is underway for his successor.

He is optimistic about what’s ahead for university-press publishing. “I have been very impressed with the energy and skill set of the next generation of university-press folks,” he writes via e-mail. “We’ve been innovative since before innovation was cool, and that stands us in good stead in changing times.”

Those same press folks may have to proceed without him, however, even as a consultant. He has other ideas for retirement.

“I don’t plan to do anything that smacks of work, but that does not mean I won’t be busy,”…

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This morning’s announcement of National Book Award finalists included academics in three categories, with a cluster of poets published by university presses. However academics have gone missing, oddly enough, in nonfiction. This was a departure from last year, for example, where three academics were among the five nominees in that category.

As for the other categories, finalists with academic affiliations are:

FICTION

Junot Diaz, a professor of creative writing at MIT, for This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead). Diaz must have had to restock his champagne. He was just awarded a MacArthur “genius grant” on October 1.

POETRY

David Ferry, a professor emeritus of English at Wellesley College, who also teaches at Suffolk University. Ferry is nominated for Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press).

Cynthia Huntington, a professor of English at…

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