October 25, 2002

Event spotlights campus authors

By Ellen Chrismer

The works of faculty authors from disciplines as diverse as Chicano studies and sociology to veterinary medicine and wildlife biology will be on display Wednesday during the annual faculty authors celebration at Shields Library.

Books from 130 campus writers and researchers will be featured at the free event and available for purchase later at the UC Davis Bookstore. Fourteen authors will be on hand 4-6 p.m. to discuss writings they published over the past year.

The program and reception, held since 1993, offers campus colleagues and the public the chance to see what interesting scholarship is coming out of UC Davis, say library administrators.

The event also gives some faculty authors the chance to discuss writings that are true labors of love for them. Dale Lott, emeritus professor of wildlife, conversation and fisheries, and the author of American Bison: A Natural History, spent his childhood on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Bison Range in western Montana. Eight years ago he decided to write the book, geared for a general audience, as a retirement gift to himself.

Though he studied bison for years, "writing a book of this sort is spinning your wheels a bit when you are an active faculty member," said Lott, because of its nonacademic tone.

The book, published last month by the University of California Press, discusses the bison’s eminent place in the grassland communities of the Great Plains hundreds of years ago, the subsequent decline of the animal and recent conservation efforts. Lott also calls for the creation of a 3 million-acre preserve for bison on the Great Plains.

He illustrates the book with 40 photographs he took himself and a photo of his grandfather, former superintendent of the National Bison Range.

New Professor of Chicano/a Studies Adela de la Torre’s book Moving from the Margins: A Chicana’s Voice on Public Policy also tells a personal tale.

The work, published by the University of Arizona Press, is a collection of columns on public-policy issues affecting Latinos that de la Torre, then a professor at Cal State Long Beach, wrote for the Los Angeles Times from 1992 to 1996. She reflects on the progress, or often times lack thereof, on issues such as immigration reform and the health care and education of Latinos.

In the book, de la Torre includes critical letters she received about her columns, many of which call the objectivity of her writings into question. "I illustrate that even as a writer you can’t escape your ethnic background," she said.

She’s happy to talk at the library event. "I think it’s important to talk about work that places women of color outside the literary framework," she said. Many of those who have gained widespread recognition – such as Maya Angelo and Ana Castillo – come from a humanities background. "That’s good," said de la Torre, who most recently taught at the University of Arizona, "but we also have voices in public policy."

Other authors set to participate Wednesday include: Kathryn Olmsted, Charles Bamforth, Karl Zender, Laura Grindstaff, Clarence Walker, Andre Lauchli, Barbara Sellers-Young, Barbara Metcalf, Richard Spencer, Victor Montejo, Bradford Smith and Ben Rich. Librarian Marilyn Sharrow and Provost Virginia Hinshaw also will speak.

For more details, call 752-3444 or 752-9075.