Welcome to the Spring 2026 issue of the University Press of Florida and UF Press newsletter. We are thrilled to be making this newsletter available on our newly designed website! This issue includes a tour of our new website’s notable features. Also, we are looking forward to Giving Day on February 19, 2026. For information on how to make a gift to support our not-for-profit publishing program, click here.
New Books
Spring & Summer 2026
The books in our Spring & Summer 2026 season have started releasing! Our staff have been anticipating these books for some time as we have worked with this season’s amazing authors to prepare their books for publication, and there is nothing better than receiving the first finished copies from the printer.
This season showcases the subject areas we specialize in, featuring exquisite dance storytelling and photography; Florida creative nonfiction, nature, and history books; medieval and modernist literature; Latin American and Caribbean media and cultural studies; and archaeological studies on many different topics, including shipwrecks, disability, foodways, industrial waste, and animals. Visit our catalog page to browse these and more books releasing now through August 2026.
Welcome to Our New Website
Now that our new website is live and we have been settled into our online home for three months, we wanted to use this space to highlight some of the website’s features we are most excited about. We hope this mini-tour will help our visitors take full advantage of the information and products available here, whether you are a prospective author looking for publishing guidance or a reader looking for books on topics that matter to you.
Accessibility
The accessibility of our website to everyone, including people with disabilities, was a big reason behind the site’s rebuilding. The new website was designed to conform to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1, Level AA, and we work to maintain this standard as we add content and make updates.
We are also committed to making our ebooks as accessible as possible, which means making our books available in epub file formats and ensuring that these epubs meet current accessibility expectations. For more information about our efforts to make our newly produced epubs meet these expectations and our efforts to remediate epub editions of older titles, please visit our accessibility page.
Ebook Sales
We now sell ebooks directly to customers on our website! We were not able to do this on our old website—previously, we sold our ebooks through third-party vendors only. But now our website visitors have the option to purchase ebook formats when available in addition to hardcover and/or paperback formats. Once purchased, ebooks can be accessed by readers via Glassboxx’s Leaf eReader app. For examples of ebook format options, visit one of our book pages.
Open Access
Many of our books are freely available in open access editions. For a list of these free digital editions, visit our open access titles page. To access the free ebook of your choice, navigate to the book page and click the “access” button next to the ebook format. Some of these open access books are available thanks to generous funding from various institutions, and others via open access initiatives such as JSTOR’s Path to Open program, through which a significant number of our recent scholarly titles are being made available as open access three years post-publication.
Browse by Subject
On our new website, books are organized by subject according to a custom-designed subject scheme that aligns with our primary publishing areas. The careful coding that went into this work—yes, each of our 2,500+ books in print was assigned one or more custom codes before our website launched—now results in a better search experience for visitors looking to find their next read and prospective authors looking to assess whether their manuscript is the right fit for us.
Meet the Acquisitions Team
If you are a prospective author, you won’t want to miss this page. Meet our acquisitions editors to learn what subject areas the editors acquire, the series they work on, and the recent titles they have published. This page should help you determine which editor is the right match for your book. And if you are ready to take the first step toward publication, you can find information on how to get started here.
Author Events
If you are interested in meeting our authors at their upcoming book events, this part of the website is for you. Visit our events page for a list of the upcoming author events on our calendar. If you spot a great upcoming event near you, click “Read More” for additional information and a link to the event venue’s page. If you would like to find upcoming events for a specific book, navigate to the book’s page (see an example here) and scroll down for upcoming events for that book.
We enjoyed thinking through our website’s user experience as we worked on it over the course of the past year, and we hope you appreciate these new features too. We invite you to explore our homepage and its menus to discover more areas that we haven’t covered here—our book series, our thematic reading lists, our recent award winners, our journals, and our new blog, for starters.
Thank you for spending time on our website and for reading Florida books!
New Reviews
Of Slash Pines and Manatees: A Highly Selective Field Guide to My Suburban Wilderness
Andrew Furman
“These essays . . . are themselves as tangled, diverse, and alive as the subtropical forests and swamps of South Florida—a suburban wildness where boundaries blur and unexpected connections thrive.”—Terrain.org
Miami’s Art Boom: From Local Vision to International Presence
Elisa Turner
Elisa Turner was interviewed about her new book Miami’s Art Boom on WLRN South Florida.
Alive in Their Garden: The True Story of the Mirabal Sisters and Their Fight for Freedom
Dedé Mirabal
Translated and Edited by Ana E. Martínez and Heather Hennes
Alive in Their Garden was
featured on a Literary Hub list of great books in translation published by university presses.
Dance and Science in the Long Nineteenth Century: The Articulate Body
Edited by Lynn Matluck Brooks, Sariel Golomb, and Garth Grimball
“Readers . . . will be rewarded with new insights and new sources to consider, whether their interest is in nineteenth-century science or in dance of that period.”—H-Net
New Awards
On a Rising Swell: Surf Stories from Florida’s Space Coast
Dan Reiter
Kirkus Best Indie Books of the Year 2025 and Kirkus Best Indie Books About America 2025
Gary R. Mormino, author of Dreams in the New Century: Instant Cities, Shattered Hopes, and Florida’s Turning Point and Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida
Florida Humanities Hall of Fame Inductee
Shaping Dance Canons: Criticism, Aesthetics, and Equity
Kate Mattingly
American Society for Aesthetics Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics
Silvia Pedraza, coauthor (with Carlos A. Romero) of Revolutions in Cuba and Venezuela: One Hope, Two Realities
Distinguished Career in Cuban Studies award from the Latin American Studies Association Cuba Section
Recent Author Events
A Letter from the Director
Dear Reader,
With this newsletter, we’re excited to introduce our brand-new website, which went live at the beginning of November.
The Press’s digital story stretches back to the early days of the web. In the late 1990s, our first URL was http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~upf, hosted by the Northeast Regional Data Center (NERDC), at a moment when campus departments and publishers everywhere were experimenting with what it meant to have an online presence. By the mid-2000s, we moved to a more streamlined address, www.upf.com, and began selling books online. Over the years, the site received several aesthetic updates, but much of the underlying structure stayed the same.
This new website represents more than a redesign. It’s a major step forward in how we connect readers with our books and how we support the people who make our publishing program possible—our authors, reviewers, partners, and campus stakeholders. Working with the terrific team at Supadu and Joanne Thomas from Longleaf Services, we set out to build a site that is simple but elegant: a place where visitors can quickly find what they need, where our publications take center stage, and where the experience feels welcoming and intuitive from the first click.
As we’ve highlighted in this newsletter’s website tour, a key focus throughout this project has been accessibility. We wanted a website that reflects our values as a university press: expanding access to knowledge and ensuring that as many people as possible can engage with our content. The new site includes meaningful improvements to readability, navigation, and usability, and it was built with accessibility best practices in mind.
The new platform also allows us to do things we simply couldn’t do before. We now offer ebooks for sale directly through our website—an important long-term goal—and we’ve created clearer, more centralized resources to help authors navigate the publishing process.
This website has been a long time in the making, and it would not have been possible without the support of the Council of Academic Vice Presidents of the State University System of Florida. We are deeply grateful to the provosts whose shared commitment helped make it possible for the Press to strengthen its reach and service across the state. I’m also grateful to our marketing team, whose expertise, persistence, and care carried this project from planning to launch and continue to shape how we show up for our audiences every day.
I hope you’ll take a moment to explore the new site and share it with colleagues and friends. We’re proud of what it represents—and even more excited about what it will enable in the years ahead.
Read Florida Books!
Sincerely,
Romi Gutierrez
Director, University Press of Florida and UF Press
Make a Gift
Giving Day is February 19, 2026. All donations made to our publishing program on February 19 will receive a “Read Florida Books” sticker. Donations of $100 or more will receive a “Read Florida Books” tote bag featuring the new logos for University Press of Florida and UF Press.
By giving to the Press, you will enable us to continue two important initiatives. You will support our internship program, which allows students to explore publishing as a career and gain useful workplace experience. You will also support publications by first-time authors, enabling the Press to publish change-making works by new voices.
Please mark your calendar for February 19. Thank you for considering making a gift! In the meantime, if you would like information about opportunities for supporting the press year-round, please visit our Support the Press page.
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