Submission Information for Western American Literature

Sunday, June 13th, 2010

Western American Literature publishes literary criticism and interdisciplinary work with a literary focus. We invite manuscripts on any aspect of the literature, culture and place-oriented pedagogy of the North American West, including western Canada and northern Mexico. We are especially interested in work that advances the field in new and provocative directions and that engages in a conversation with the latest scholarship in the field.

If unfamiliar with our journal, take a look at recent copies available on Project Muse.

Due to space limitations, WAL will not consider essays more than 35 pages in length, inclusive of endnotes and works cited. Please do not submit an essay that is under consideration elsewhere or that has been previously published.

Essays should be submitted via our online portal, which you can find here: http://wal.edmgr.com/.

Do not put your name anywhere on the essay or in a running head, and veil any references to your own work (if applicable) to assure anonymity with the readers. You will need to register with the online portal before submitting, so we will have your personal information in the system keyed to your entry.

Typically, the peer-review process takes 3-6 months, sometimes longer. Please be patient.

NOTE: Your manuscript should follow the new, 8th edition of MLA style. Please use endnotes, not footnotes. Long discursive notes should be avoided and will count toward the page limit.

You are welcome to provide illustrations that are pertinent to your essay. Images should be scanned at 350 dpi or higher and saved as a TIF or EPS file. It is your responsibility to obtain reprint permission for images, for both print and digital formats. (We can provide sample permission forms.) The editors and the publisher reserve the right not to use poor-quality images.

Also, if you are writing about poetry, it is almost certain that you will need to obtain permission to quote from the poems. If you don’t do so ahead of time, be prepared to seek permission immediately should your article be accepted. (Again, we can provide a sample permission form.)

A word to the wise: we receive many submissions on a few authors about whom much has already been written, in particular Cormac McCarthy, Willa Cather, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Please be sure you have something truly new to say about these authors and are familiar with the latest critical studies of their work.

For more details contact the editor, Amy Hamilton.

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Advertising Specifications for Western American Literature

Sunday, June 13th, 2010

We welcome your advertisement in Western American Literature. Please find advertising specifications on the University of Nebraska Press website.

If you have any questions, please contact Joyce Gettman at UNP.

Joyce Gettman
Marketing and Fulfillment Manager
Accelerated Publishing & Management
University of Nebraska Press
1225 L Street, Suite 200
Lincoln NE 68588-0630
Ph.: 402.472.8330

NOTE:

Advertising in the WLA Conference Program is handled by the Director of Operations, not by UNP. Please view rates for our conference program here.

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Instructions for Peer Reviewers

Monday, June 14th, 2010

This page is meant to provide instructions for individuals who have recently agreed to serve as a peer reviewer for an essay submitted to Western American Literature.

To request inclusion on our reviewer database, please e-mail us.

Download a Micrsoft Word version of our essay evaluation form, or download the form in rtf format.

Thank you for your willingness to do some reading for Western American Literature. We appreciate your willingness to share your time and expertise.

We often send essays to two readers, one a “general” reader in western literature and one an expert on the subject under discussion. We would like to publish essays accessible and interesting to both audiences.

Our essay evaluation form provides only general suggestions for the kind of response we’d like. If possible, we prefer typed responses rather than handwritten ones because they are easier to excerpt for the writer. Feel free to send your response by email to Amy Hamilton, Editor. You do not need to return the manuscript unless you write on it, which you are certainly free to do; in that case, we will return it to the author. Do please dispose of the manuscript when you’re done with your review.

We try to respond to submissions within a two-month period so, if possible, we would like our reviewers to respond within a month. Of course we understand the ups and downs of academic schedules and will understand if readers take a bit longer. If we don’t hear from you in six weeks, we will send you a reminder.

In the past year or so, Western American Literature has received several reviews with harsh phrasing, which often include a note asking, “please do not send any wounding words.” We appreciate that desire and try to avoid sending overly negative reviews. But it’s very difficult to summarize reviews without resorting to not-very-useful general terms. It’s helpful to the journal if you can provide wording that can be readily excerpted.

Thanks again for your help.

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Book Review Information for Western American Literature

Monday, June 14th, 2010

Book Review Editor: Kyle Bladow. You can reach him at waljournal@gmail.com.

How to Become a Reviewer for Western American Literature
Would you like to review?

If you have a general interest to review for Western American Literature, we encourage you to join the Western Literature Association so that your name and scholarly interests will be on file when we search our database for possible reviewers. If you are already a member and would like to review in a specific area, you can contact the journal and we will see if we have any works in your area in our current collection of active books.

Do you know of a book you’d like to review?

The field of western American literature has become so rich and wide-spread that it is impossible for us to keep up with everything that is happening, and so, in part, we do depend on members and scholars in the field letting us know when interesting, new works are published (we only consider books published within the last year or so). If you know of a new book that might be of interest to our readers and you would like to review it, please do not send completed reviews. Instead, please query us <waljournal@gmail.com> with the name of the book, a brief description suggesting why it would interest our readers, press information (if possible), and a brief sense of your writing credentials (if you are not an active member of the Western Literature Association). We will contact you soon with a “go ahead” and information for writing the review, if the book meets our needs and isn’t already being reviewed by someone else. Reviewers get a free review copy of the book and a PDF of their published review.

Short Review Guidelines

Our hope is that, in addition to giving a summary of thesis or plot, your review will demonstrate how the work(s) under review reflect(s) themes or issues important in the study of western American literature. Book review length is typically 500–700 words per assigned book, though we sometimes publish multiple reviews, which run longer. Please do not exceed the suggested length by more than a small amount as doing so requires us to heavily edit your review. We have fairly strict space limitations for each issue of the journal.

Deadlines

Due dates are typically two months from the time the book is sent to you. We will send a reminder shortly after the deadline. We can be flexible on due dates, especially if we know beforehand that there may be a scheduling conflict. However, we are trying to reduce the amount of time that elapses between when we receive a book and when the review appears; your adherence to deadlines will facilitate this effort. Also, unless other arrangements have been made, if a review is more than six months overdue we will presume it is not being done and will cancel it.

Format

Please begin your review with a heading, in bold, that includes the following bibliographical information in this format:

Kim R. Stafford, Lochsa Road: A Pilgrim in the West. Lewiston, ID: Confluence Press, 1991. 84 pp. Hardcover, $40; paper, $8.95.

Ralph Salisbury, So Far So Good. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2013. 274 pp. Paper $19.95; e-book, $10.

Please list all formats in which the book is available—hardcover, paper, e-book—and relevant prices, as shown. You may need to consult the publisher’s website for this information.

At the end of the review, put your name (normal font) and affiliation (in italics) flush right like this:

Jane Doe
Podunk State College

We prefer reviews to be as copy-ready as possible. We can convert variations on these formats, but it takes additional time. Based on the University of Nebraska Press’s guidelines, this means:

• Italics (not underlining) for book titles
• 1-inch margins
• 2.0 spacing throughout
• Left justification
• Prose quotations (four lines or longer) and quotations from poetry (two lines or longer) are indented as block quotes.

If you wish to quote from the book, please use MLA style as follows: “a quote from the book” (172). When quoting from poetry, give the line number(s), not the page number.

Please send your review as an e-mail attachment in Microsoft Word format to waljournal@gmail.com. Signal “book review” in the subject line.

Authors and Publishers

If you have a book you believe is an important contribution to the field of western American literature, and you would like us to consider reviewing it, send a copy to

Western American Literature
Attn.: Book Reviews
Northern Michigan University
1401 Presque Isle Ave
Marquette MI 49855

We cannot, of course, guarantee that it will be reviewed; but we will certainly give it due consideration.

If you have any questions, please contact Dr. Bladow at waljournal@gmail.com.

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