Paul Vallas’s route from shy childhood to Chicago politics

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A Conversation on Writing, Craft, and Poetry

December 18, 2025

Read on below for a conversation between CavanKerry Press authors Dorsía Smith Silva (In Inheritance of Drowning) and Cati Porter (The Body at a Loss) about their writing journeys and the craft of poetry. Cati Porter: Dorsía, you read and reviewed my first poetry collection, Seven Floors Up, for a

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Five Questions with Alison Bashford, author of “Decoding the Hand”

December 17, 2025

Decoding the Hand is an astounding history of magic, medicine, and science, of an enduring search for how our bodily surfaces might reveal an inner self. From sixteenth-century occult physicians to twentieth-century geneticists, and from criminologists to eugenicists, award-winning historian Alison Bashford takes us on a remarkable journey into the

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Read an Excerpt from “Atlas’s Bones” by D. Vance Smith

December 10, 2025

Atlas’s Bones is a major new look at Africa’s influence on European culture and how colonization remade Africa in the image of a medieval Europe. D. Vance Smith reveals that much of what is claimed as European culture up to the Middle Ages—its great themes in literature, its sources in

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Five Questions for Joshua B. Freeman, Author of “Garden Apartments”

November 25, 2025

In his new book, eminent historian Joshua B. Freeman turns his attention to an overlooked feature of the American landscape: garden apartments. He details their outsized influence on housing and social policy, helping improve living standards for working people. Inspired by the architectural innovations and socialist politics of British garden

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Five Questions with Cynthia Cruz, poet and author of “Sweet Repetition”

November 21, 2025

As we continue to celebrate the amazing writers, editors, and translators in our Phoenix Poets series, we’re delighted to highlight poet Cynthia Cruz, whose latest poetry collection, Sweet Repetition, published with the series in October. Sweet Repetition centers its movement on repetition and return, integrating Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis, continental

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Read an Excerpt from “The Adaptability Paradox” by Stephen Skowronek

November 18, 2025

Faith in the resilience and adaptability of the US Constitution rests on a long history of finding new ways to make the system work. In The Adaptability Paradox, political scientist Stephen Skowronek examines the rearrangements that regenerated the American government in the past and brings that experience to bear on

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From the Archives and Spotlight Collections from Chicago Journals

November 13, 2025

In 2023, the University of Chicago Press Journals Division launched a new online feature called “From the Archives” to bring new readership to less recent and archival scholarship. Each month, our team works to choose a different topic, and articles are selected for inclusion on the page via keyword search.

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Teaming UP at the South Side Science Festival

November 10, 2025

Since 2023, the University of Chicago Press has been proud to participate in the South Side Science Festival, a yearly event that brings STEM research to the families of Chicago’s South Side. Along with representatives from across the University of Chicago’s divisions, members of the press volunteer at the festival,

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5 Questions for Emily Lieb, author of “Road to Nowhere”

November 4, 2025

In the mid-1950s Baltimore’s Rosemont neighborhood was alive and vibrant with smart rowhouses, a sprawling park, corner grocery stores, and doctors’ offices. By 1957, a proposed expressway threatened to gut this Black, middle-class community from stem to stern. That highway was never built, but it didn’t matter—even the failure to build it

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In his years in the public limelight, Paul Vallas has developed a reputation for accessibility — and wonk. Host: Mary Dixon; Reporters: Mariah Woelfel