WWU's Trueblood to discuss publishing options for authors Nov. 19

Kathryn Trueblood, associate professor of English at Western Washington University, will give a lecture titled “How Can Publishing Suit Your Purpose?” at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 19 in the Bellingham City Council Chambers at 210 Lottie St. in Bellingham.

The free, public talk is an installment of the WWU College of Humanities and Social Sciences Dean’s Lecture Series, and is co-sponsored by the City of Bellingham.

Trueblood’s presentation invites you to ask how publishing can suit your purpose. With so many kinds of publishing available – corporate, independent, print on demand, electronic – it’s hard to know which might be best for your book project. Although Trueblood has worked in editorial roles for both mainstream and small press publishers from the adult trade division at Random House to the West Coast's first feminist press, Shameless Hussy, she admits it is hard to keep up with the rate of innovation in publishing.

The time when traditional New York publishers were influential as the primary arbiters of taste has passed, and authors now have other gateways through which to see their work into print. It is possible now for an author to gain a groundswell of readers through blogs, online book clubs, and other forms of social media.

Trueblood came out of the small press movement of the 1970s in Berkeley, where she worked for a distributor of 50 independent presses and saw first-hand how these Mom and Pop operations, often using old church presses, redefined what was considered mainstream literature. Many of these small houses flourished by publishing the prestigious work of the new wave of multicultural and feminist writers, and corporate publishers still look to these presses to discover trendsetters and talented outliers. Between corporate media conglomerates and independent presses, there now exists a vibrant community of print-on-demand services, e-book sales, and co-op publishing. Trueblood will guide her audience on a tour of publishing options that will shake up your idea of what it means to be a successful author.

Trueblood's most recent book is “The Baby Lottery,” a Book Sense Pick in 2007. She was awarded the 2013 Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, judged by Jane Smiley and sponsored by the Bellevue Literary Review. In 2011, she won the Red Hen Press Short Story Award and was selected for a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the oldest feminist funding agency in the U.S. Her stories and articles have been published in Poets & Writers Magazine, the Bellevue Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, Glimmer Train, The Seattle Review, Zyzzyva, and others.

Audience questions for Trueblood’s Nov. 19 talk will be welcomed. The lecture will be recorded and shown on Bellingham TV Channel 10.

For more information on this lecture, please contact the WWU College of Humanities & Social Sciences at 360-650-3763.

The College of Humanities and Social Services, the university’s largest college, includes the 13 departments of : Anthropology; Communication Sciences and Disorders; Physical Education, Health and Recreation; Political Science; Psychology; Sociology; Communication Studies; English; History; Journalism; Liberal Studies; Modern and Classical Languages, and Philosophy as well as three interdisciplinary programs: East Asian Studies, Linguistics, and Women Studies.