Alan Brownoff’s Work Recognized by AU Presses Once Again

Heartiest congratulations to our designer Alan Brownoff, winner of two selections at the Association of University Presses 2021 Book, Jacket, and Journal Show, an international design award.

Alan is recognized in the Scholarly Typographic category for his work on the monumental Our Whole Gwich’in Way of Life Has Changed / Gwich’in K’yuu Gwiidandài’ Tthak Ejuk Gòonlih: Stories from the People of the Land, by Leslie McCartney and the Gwich’in Tribal Council, which records twenty-three Gwich’in Elders from the Northwest Territories communities of Fort McPherson, Tsiigehtshik, Inuvik, and Aklavik sharing their joy of living and travelling on the land.

Alan is also recognized in the Poetry and Literature category for his design of I Am Still Your Negro: An Homage to James Baldwin, by Valerie Mason-John, in which the spoken-word poet unsettles readers with potent images of ongoing trauma from slavery and colonization.

Alan’s skill and talent are on full display in these books. The care he puts into every project adds tremendous value to their production, shining a brighter light on the authors’ writing. Both of these books are examples of why university press publishing is so important and why it is necessary to recognize the enormous amounts of labour that goes into the endeavour of publishing scholarly and literary writing. 

  • A sepia photograph by James Jerome from the NWT Archives featuring a fisherman in a canoe pulling in his fishing net with a medium-sized fish and a plastic bottle caught in the threads. The canoe is offshore, not far from the bank, and a fishing camp appears in the background with two visible tents and a large table where another person is standing. The fisherman is wearing sunglasses and a long-sleeved robe with patterns on the cuffs. The authors’ names feature at the top left corner in small white letters, and the title, in English and Gwichʼin language, features in medium-sized white letters at the centre of the cover just above the fisherman’s head.
The covers of the two winning selections.

About the 2021 Book, Jacket, and Journal Show

The Association of University Presses (AUPresses) announces 101 outstanding examples of university press publications with the 2021 Book, Jacket, and Journal Show now on virtual display at https://design.up.hcommons.org/.

The annual show and its juried selections honours the university publishing community’s design and production professionals. The Association recognizes achievement in design, production, and manufacture of books, jackets, covers, and journals, and the Show serves as a spark to conversations and source of ideas about intelligent, creative, and resourceful publishing.

Open to AUPresses member publishers worldwide, this year’s competition attracted 523 submissions, all published during 2020.