Publishing and Copyright

Former Los Angeles Times Publisher and CNN President Tom Johnson will discuss his new book Driven: A Life in Public Service and Journalism from LBJ to CNN as part of the University of Georgia’s Fall 2025 Signature Lecture series on Wednesday, October 29. The public conversation with Red and Black Executive Director Charlotte Varnum will begin at 4 p.m. at the UGA Special Collections Libraries Building, with a light reception and a book signing to follow.

For UGA Libraries, Thomas May’s job centers around film and audiovisual work, but the archivist also enjoys the printed word. In fact, he was named one of the best authors in the state, as a recipient of a 2025 Georgia Author of the Year Award in the science fiction/fantasy category.

May serves as the audiovisual systems archivist and access coordinator with the Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection, one of three special collections units at the University of Georgia Libraries. He’s also a novelist, who self-published his debut fantasy novel Alan Dreams of Giants in November.

University of Georgia faculty and graduate students have more than double the opportunities for open access publishing, thanks to new UGA Libraries read and publish agreements with Elsevier and Springer Nature, two of the largest academic journal publishers.

Even before three books arrived on shelves this year, UGA librarians were a part of the production. Three faculty members have been credited as author or editor in books published in 2025.

“Librarians do the essential work of acquiring, preserving, and sharing knowledge,” said university librarian Toby Graham, “but our librarians also are university faculty who contribute new scholarship, themselves, as we see from the recent publications by Ruta Abolins, Melody Rood, and Sara Wright.” 

Most recently, Abolins added a chapter to the UGA Press book The Archivability of Television: Essays on Preservation and Perseverance. Edited by Lauren Bratslavsky and Elizabeth Peterson, the book was published June 1.

The newest members of the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame have broken barriers across genres — from journalism to fiction to poetry — and all three have inspired the next generation of writers through teaching and mentoring.

The 2025 class includes Tina McElroy Ansa, novelist and founder of DownSouth Press; Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer; and Tony M. Grooms, poet, novelist, and co-founder of the Georgia Writers Association. Events will be held throughout the year at the University of Georgia Special Collections Libraries in Athens to celebrate each of the honorees.

The University of Georgia is pleased to announce Feminisms, Gender, and Space, a new critical geography series that will publish cutting-edge and engaged social science on the topics of intersectional feminisms, sexuality, and gender as they relate to geographical spaces and places.

For the third time in four years, The Georgia Review, a literary journal based at the University of Georgia Libraries, is being recognized as one of the best fiction outlets in the nation.

The publication is a finalist for the Award for Fiction, presented by the American Society of Magazine Editors, in association with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. The Georgia Review has been named a finalist three times in the past four years, including in 2022, which the publication took the prize home to Athens.

A unique opportunity to perform research at one of the most ecologically and historically significant sites in Georgia is available to University of Georgia graduate students and faculty, hosted by the Center for Research and Education at Wormsloe (CREW), an interdisciplinary research site administered by the UGA Libraries. 

This Black History Month, two events at the UGA Special Collections Libraries highlight Black voices in history and journalism.

The events include a discussion with author Michael Thurmond on his book about Georgia’s founder and a panel discussion about Black publishing in Georgia in honor of the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame induction of Robert Sengstacke Abbott, the founder of The Chicago Defender.

On Thursday, Feb. 13, Thurmond will discuss his book James Oglethorpe, Father of Georgia: A Founder’s Journey from Slave Trader to Abolitionist, published by the UGA Press. The book explores Oglethorpe’s relationships with Ayuba Suleiman Diallo and Olaudah Equiano, two of 18th-century England's most influential Black men, and how they influenced his philosophy on the issue of enslavement.