Roman Frydman and Michael D. Goldberg’s bookBeyond Mechanical Markets: Asset Price Swings, Risk, and the Role of the State is a finalist for the 2011 TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award. This award is named after Nobel Prize winner Paul A. Samuelson in honor of his achievements in the field of economics, as well as for his service as a CREF trustee from 1974-1985. The Samuelson Award is given annually in recognition of an outstanding research publication containing ideas that the public and private sectors can use to maintain and improve America’s lifelong financial well being.

The book was also a Financial Times (FT.com) non-fiction favourite of 2011, and was reviewed by the FT’s John Authers:

“The debate over how to re-regulate [markets and banks] to avoid another financial crisis is urgent and it cannot conclude without resolving the problem that economics’ most basic assumption is flawed. [Beyond Mechanical Markets is one] of the most interesting contributions [to] find a new way to model markets.”

Congratulations to Lawrence P. Jackson, whose book The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 has won the 2012 BCALA Literary Award in the Nonfiction Category. This award recognizes excellence in adult fiction and nonfiction by African American authors published in 2011. According to the BCALA press release:

“The Indignant Generation is a fascinating exploration of the development of African American literature after the Harlem Renaissance to the modern day Civil Rights Movement. Lawrence P. Jackson offers readers rare insights into the lives of key players who contributed to the breadth of writing that flourished between 1934 and 1960. From Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes to James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, Jackson highlights the unique challenges faced by the writers during the time of the Great Depression, Jim Crow, World War II and the Cold War. Dozens of illustrations and photographs enhance this stunning work that celebrates African American artistic and intellectual achievement in writing. Professor Jackson teaches English and African American Studies at Emory University.”

On Thursday, February 2nd, the 2012 PROSE Awards will be livestreamed from Washington D.C. Hopefully Princeton University Press will be bringing home some prizes! “The PROSE Awards annually recognize the very best in professional and scholarly publishing by bringing attention to distinguished books, journals, and electronic content in over 40 categories. Judged by peer publishers, librarians, and medical professionals since 1976, the PROSE Awards are extraordinary for their breadth and depth.”

Check out the broadcast from 12-1:30 EST here: http://www.proseawards.com/video.html

“Kathleen Graber, assistant professor of English in the creative writing department at Virginia Commonwealth University, won the 2011 Literary Award for Poetry for The Eternal City. Graber’s book suggests the miraculous in ordinary human experience, exploring the interplay among the personal, historical, and philosophical.”

With an epigraph from Freud comparing the mind to a landscape in which all that ever was still persists, The Eternal City offers eloquent testimony to the struggle to make sense of the present through conversation with the past. Questioning what it means to possess and to be possessed by objects and technologies, Kathleen Graber’s collection brings together the elevated and the quotidian to make neighbors of Marcus Aurelius, Klaus Kinski, Walter Benjamin, and Johnny Depp. Like Aeneas, who escapes Troy carrying his father on his back, the speaker of these intellectually and emotionally ambitious poems juggles the weight of private and public history as she is transformed from settled resident to pilgrim.

Some of Graber’s wonderful poems can be found online. The New Yorker published The Magic Kingdom in 2008 and The Drunkenness of Noah in 2010.

Congratulations to Margaret Cohen, whose book The Novel and the Sea has won the 2012 Barbara and George Perkins Prize from The International Society for the Study of Narrative. The prize is awarded to the book making the most significant contribution to the study of narrative in a given year.

“This book is bracing and exciting, an adventure in its own right. It skillfully makes its compelling case about the role played by maritime craft in the history of the adventure novel, and about the role played by adventure in the literary realm more generally. It will provoke thought, argument, and revision of some long-held truisms, especially about the importance of the novel of manners, and of psychological realism in prose forms of the modern West.”–John Plotz, Brandeis University

Margot Canaday’s brilliant book The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America has won the 2012 Order of the Coif Biennial Book Award.

“The Order of the Coif is an honorary scholastic society the purpose of which is to encourage excellence in legal education by fostering a spirit of careful study, recognizing those who as law students attained a high grade of scholarship, and honoring those who as lawyers, judges and teachers attained high distinction for their scholarly or professional accomplishments.”

This is Margot Canaday’s SEVENTH award for The Straight State. Some of the other accolades include the 2011 John Boswell Prize, the 2010 Cromwell Book Prize, the Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize, the Gladys M. Kammerer Award, and the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Studies.

In a press release posted online this week (http://www.arl.org/sparc/media/12-0117.shtml), SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), lauded Michael Nielsen’s work “for bringing Open Science into the mainstream,” and added him to a prestigious list of SPARC Innovators.

The timing for this announcement couldn’t be better as the ScienceOnline conference is set to get underway tomorrow and Michael was featured in a New York Times article by Thomas Lin yesterday.

SPARC cites Michael’s popularization of Open Science–in particular his hefty tour schedule of 2011 and his book Reinventing Discovery–in their announcement. They also have a wonderful profile with comments from SPARC Executive Director Heather Joseph, Melissa Hagemann from the Open Society Foundations, biochemist Cameron Neylon, and John Dupuis, the head of the Steacie Science and Engineering Library at York University (the blogger behind Confessions of a Science Librarian).

Princeton University Press is happy to join in with congratulations to Michael on this tremendous honor!

Congratulations to Lawrence P. Jackson, whose book The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960 is picking up accolades left and right. The book has won the 2011 William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association, which recognizes “an outstanding scholarly study of black American literature or culture.”

“In this magisterial narrative history of African American literature running from the end of the Harlem Renaissance to the beginning of the civil rights period, Lawrence P. Jackson expands the archive for assessing African American writing during a period that has often been reduced to protest writing. Jackson places writers into fresh contexts of cohorts (critics and editors included) and threads a clear narrative line through three heady decades jam-packed with African American authors publishing in a variety of genres and venues. Jackson is excellent on the important influence of the Communist Party, on mid-twentieth-century black literary culture, and on issues of publishing and reception. Beautifully written and rich in historical detail, The Indignant Generation should quickly become a standard work in twentieth-century African American studies and United States publishing history.”

Jackson’s work is also a finalist for the 2011 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction, from the Hurston/Wright Foundation.

“The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award™ is the first national award presented to published writers of African descent by the national community of Black writers. This award consists of prizes for the highest quality writing in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry.”

Emma Rothschild has won the 2011 Saltire Society Scottish History Book of the Year Award for her book The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History. This award recognizes an exceptional work of Scottish historical research:

“The Saltire Society Literary Awards bring together the very best of Scottish literature, from the writings of established and new authors through to the accomplishments of researchers and historians, and is a wonderful way of celebrating this important aspect of our rich cultural heritage.”

Elizabeth Popp Berman, author of Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine, has won the 2011 President’s Book Award from the Social Science History Association. This award recognizes “an especially meritorious first work by a beginning scholar.”

Daniel Carpenter, who wrote Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA, has won the SSHA’s 2011 Allan Sharlin Memorial Award for “an outstanding book in social science history published in the previous year.”

Congratulations to both authors on their fantastic achievements!

Congratulations to Edwidge Danticat, author of Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, who has been honored with the 2011 Langston Hughes Medal from City College of New York. The award recognizes the body of Danticat’s work.

“The Langston Hughes Medal is awarded to highly distinguished writers from throughout the African American diaspora for their distinguished contributions to the arts and letters. Among past recipients of this award are James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Ralph W. Ellison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, August Wilson, Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, and Octavia Butler, to name a few.”

Here is a video of a Q&A with the author at the 2011 Langston Hughes Festival: