University of Georgia Press

The University of Georgia Press or UGA Press is a publishing house and is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Founded in 1938, the UGA Press is a division of the University of Georgia and is located on the campus in Athens, Georgia, USA. It is the oldest and largest publishing house in the state and one of the largest in the South.

Publications
The UGA Press publishes 70-80 titles each year of scholarly and academic, regional, and literary works with a focus on American and Southern studies. It is also a leading publisher of African-American studies, civil rights history and environmental studies.

The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction was established by Charles East, then the editor-in-chief of the UGA Press, in 1983 to recognize gifted young writers.

In conjunction with the Georgia Humanities Council and GALILEO, the UGA Press created the New Georgia Encyclopedia, an on-line resource of Georgia history.

The UGA Press has successfully published original novels and works by writers such as Rick Bass, Erskine Caldwell, Terry Kay, Jim Kilgo, Barry Lopez, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Mary Hood, Harry Crews, Tom Wicker, Calvin Trillin, Roy Blount, Jr., Eugene Genovese, Rebecca Solnit, David Carkeet (of Campus Sexpot fame), and Catherine Clinton.

Controversy
The Press has been the subject of several scandals. Documents uncovered by the website Foetry.com revealed that the 1999 University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry series prize to Peter M. Sacks had been judged by Jorie Graham, a colleague of Sacks at Harvard who subsequently married him. Throughout the course of the controversy, series editor Bin Ramke had insisted that judges of the contest be kept secret, and until Foetry.com obtained the names of judges via The Open Records Act, the conflict of interest had been undisclosed. As a result of the critical coverage from Foetry.com and elsewhere, Ramke resigned from the editorship of the series. The University of Georgia Press now discloses the names of its poetry judges, who "are instructed to avoid conflicts of interest of all kinds."

On October 27, 2005, the University of Georgia Press rescinded author Brad Vice's Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and recalled copies of his collection The Bear Bryant Funeral Train. Vice was alleged to have plagiarized sections of one story from Carl Carmer's book Stars Fell on Alabama (1934) (a charge that Vice and others dispute).