University Press of Kentucky

University Press of Kentucky

University Press of Kentucky
Founded	1943
Country of origin	United States
Headquarters location	Lexington, Kentucky
Key people	Leila Salisbury, Director
Official website	www.kentuckypress.com

The University Press of Kentucky (UPK) The University Press of Kentucky (UPK) is the scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and was organized in 1969 as successor to the University of Kentucky Press.

Mission Statement

The University Press of Kentucky has a dual mission—the publication of academic books of high scholarly merit in a variety of fields and the publication of significant books about the history and culture of Kentucky, the Ohio Valley region, the Upper South, and Appalachia. The Press is the statewide nonprofit scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, operating under the University of Kentucky Libraries and serving all Kentucky state-sponsored institutions of higher learning as well as five private colleges and Kentucky's two major historical societies.

History & Organization

The University of Kentucky had sponsored scholarly publication since 1943. In 1949 the Press was established as a separate academic agency under the university president, and the following year Bruce F. Denbo, then of Louisiana State University Press, was appointed as the first full-time professional director. Denbo served as director of UPK until his retirement in 1978, building a small but distinguished list of scholarly books with emphasis on American history and literary criticism.

Offices for the administrative, editorial, production, and marketing departments are found at the University of Kentucky, which is responsible for the overhead cost of the publishing operation. Denbo was succeeded as director by Kenneth H. Cherry, who came to UPK from the University of Tennessee Press. During Cherry’s tenure, the size of the press more than quadrupled. Upon Cherry’s retirement in 2001, Stephen M. Wrinn, formerly of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, became director in 2002. In 2012, the Press began a reporting relationship to the UK Libraries and is proud to have made 1,128 of its titles available to the wider University of Kentucky community via the campus institutional repository, UKnowledge. In 2016, Leila W. Salisbury, who had come to the Press full-time in 1994 and later served as director at the University Press of Mississippi, rejoined UPK as director.

Since the 1969 reorganization, the Press has represented a consortium that now includes all of Kentucky's state universities, five of its private colleges, and two historical societies. Each constituent institution is represented on a statewide editorial board, which supervises the UPK imprint. 

Consortium Members

• Bellarmine University
• Berea College
• Centre College
• Eastern Kentucky University
• The Filson Historical Society
• Georgetown College
• Kentucky Historical Society
• Kentucky State University
• Morehead State University
• Murray State University
• Northern Kentucky University
• Transylvania University
• University of Kentucky
• University of Louisville
• Western Kentucky University

Current Operation & Areas of Focus

From its offices on the UK campus, the Press’s full-time staff of 17 publishes 50-55 titles per year in print and electronic formats. The Press has 1865 titles in print with annual sales of approximately $1.85 million. UPK books are available through all major retail and wholesale channels, libraries, and online platforms, both domestic and international.

UPK's editorial program focuses on the humanities and the social sciences. Its publications in film and military studies have earned the Press a national reputation in these fields, with reviews in such media as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times,Chicago Tribune, and NPR. Notable awards for UPK titles include: thirteen Frederick Jackson Turner Awards (history); four Weatherford Awards (Appalachian studies); three Lillian Smith Book Awards (African American studies); and the Lannan Literary Award.

Since the formation of the consortium, the press has meaningfully served readers, students, and scholars in Kentucky and Appalachia with publications of special regional interest. In the 1970s UPK produced the Kentucky Nature Series and the forty-seven-volume Kentucky Bicentennial Bookshelf. The Press republished classic novels by Kentucky authors including Harriet Simpson Arnow, Janice Holt Giles, John Fox, Jr., James Still, and Jesse Stuart. The 1992 Kentucky Encyclopedia received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and was one of the first state-focused encyclopedias. Later large-scale projects such as A New History of Kentucky (1997), Atlas of Kentucky (1998), Encyclopedia of Louisville (2000), and The Kentucky African American Encyclopedia (2015) continued the Press’s tradition of high-quality documentation and synthesis of the state and region’s history. In 2015, the Press partnered with Centre College for the University Press of Kentucky New Poetry & Prose Series.

Memberships & Partnerships

In 2007, the Press entered into a partnership with the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) to co-publish outstanding works in military history and to serve as the premiere exhibitor at the association’s annual conference. The Press also regularly exhibits titles and works to cultivate authors at the annual meetings of the Appalachian Studies Association, the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, the Southern Historical Association, the Society for Military History, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and others. Current book series of note include: Asia in the New Millennium; Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Twentieth Century; Culture of the Land: A Series in the New Agrarianism; Horses in History; Kentucky Remembered: An Oral History Series; New Directions in Southern History; Place Matters: New Directions in Appalachian Studies; Screen Classics; Topics in Kentucky History; and the AUSA American Warriors, Battles & Campaigns, and Foreign Military Studies series.

UPK is a longstanding member of the national professional group the Association of American University Presses (AAUP). Over the years UPK staff have served in a variety of capacities on AAUP committees and working groups. The Press has also collaborated on books and events with statewide and community partners such as the Kentucky Humanities Council (this collaboration produced the outstanding New Books for New Readers Series, titles designed to enhance adult literacy through Kentucky-based subjects); the Kentucky Arts Council; Kentucky State Parks; the Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives; the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife; the Kentucky State Nature Preserves Commission; the Bluegrass Trust; and the Frazier History Museum, among others.

External links

• Official site