You don’t get to 75 without turning over some new leaves, trying every trick, and doing a little reading between the lines. UT Press has done all that and then some.
In addition to multitudinous journals, the university publishers have ushered more than 4,000 books onto shelves, from selected poems to political commentary and plenty of sociologically interested biographies and reviews in between. At their 75th birthday celebration, their pluralistic yield is out to play with readings and conversations tackling Texas’ unique natural history; racial intersections at the rodeo, in the kitchen, and on the high school football field; distortions in the development of history; and, to close out the festivities, a discussion about pathbreaking music writing with American Music Series editors Jessica Hopper and Hanif Abdurraqib. With a steady center in the Lone Star State, the publishing outfit has pushed their roots into topics far and wide, digging into a nuanced understanding of humanity and its environment.
A pioneering fixture in music criticism, Hopper is a UT Press-published author herself and has seen firsthand the press’ practiced author-centered and passion-informed publishing experience.
“You get a sense of what it’s like to work with people that truly care about what they’re doing and have so much experience,” she says. “There’s not a hurdle they haven’t cleared in the last 75 years.”
If the words “American Music Series” don’t conjure images of boundary-smashing, barn-door-opening, future-forming music memoirs and critical biographies, you might not be familiar with UT Press’s run of publications. Under that unassumingly academic name, Hopper, poet and cultural critic Abdurraqib, and Rhodes College professor Charles L. Hughes have put forth hand-picked stories that answer the question of what music means to people – those playing it, listening to it, writing about it, and all of the above.
“Sometimes you won’t have precedent on an important book,” Hopper says. She recalls reading the first pages of co-editor Abdurraqib’s lyrically historical, culturally personal ode Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest and calling up the series’ acquiring editor Casey Kittrell: “This book is gonna change everything,” Hopper told him. “By virtue of doing this book, we’re gonna get other folks who not just want to do something like this, but want to do books that are talking to us from the future.”
Her prediction has held true. In recent years, the series has added Sasha Geffen’s effervescent exploration of music and gender fluidity, Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary and Margo Price’s no-holds-barred memoir of songwriting through motherhood, loss, and sexism, Maybe We’ll Make It. Hopper points to these works, and upcoming oral-history release Mothership Connected: The Women of Parliament-Funkadelic, among others, to illustrate the kind of deliberately unconventional, thoughtfully critical space Hopper and her editors have striven to create through their work with UT Press.
“We all come from different perspectives of lived experience and are very interested in using this series to bring folks in from the margins,” Hopper says. The three editors all have their own works published by the storied university press. Hopper’s own UTP-published book, Night Moves, follows the journalist through the late nights of her 20s in mid-Aughts Chicago, weaving her love for the city through her development as a writer and a person.
With the backing of UT Press’ time-polished, weather-wise publishers, these leading-edge editors are bringing a new generation of music writing to readers. Onstage, Hopper and Abdurraqib will reminisce on their work as writers and editors and plot a path for the future of this storied publisher.
University of Texas Press at 75: A Celebration of Books and Ideas
Sunday 21, Austin Central Library
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story misspelled Casey Kittrell’s name. The Chronicle regrets the error.
This article appears in September 19 • 2025.