TCU Press

TCU Press has traditionally published the history and literature of Texas and the American West. As the press has grown steadily in stature and in its ability to bring credit to its parent university over the last twenty years, it has been praised for publishing regional fiction, which often doesn’t find a market in New York, and for discovering and preserving local history.

TCU Press has several established series and some new ones. The Texas Tradition Series reprints classic Texas literature which would otherwise disappear from bookstores and libraries—novelist Elmer Kelton is the mainstay of that series. The Chisholm Trail Series offers books that capture the history and culture of Texas, and Chaparral Books for Young Readers are historical fiction for middle-school students. We believe that history frequently comes alive more through fiction than textbooks, and the aim of the Chaparral series is to captivate youngsters with Texas history.

The Texas Biography Series, sponsored by The Center for Texas Studies at TCU, offers scholarly, documented biographies of second-tier Texans—Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin have been covered extensively, but many who made strong contributions to Texas history have not. The first volume, Emily Austin of Texas: 1795-1851, by Light T. Cummins, won the 2010 Liz Carpenter Award for Research in the History of Women. Edmund J. Davis of Texas: Civil War General, Republican Leader, Reconstruction Governor by Carl H. Moneyhon appeared in the spring of 2010, while Fighting Stock: John S. “Rip” Ford of Texas by Richard B. McCaslin published in Spring 2011.

A TCU Vision in Action grant made possible the TCU Texas Poets Laureate Series, books collecting recent and new work by the Texas poets laureate beginning with Alan Birkelbach, 2005, through Karla K. Morton, the 2010 Texas poet laureate. Newly-named poets laureate are Dave Parsons, 2011, and Jan Seale, 2012.

Recently TCU Press has produced some wonderful four-color photography books—Calvin Littlejohn: Portrait of a Community in Black and White, text by Bob Ray Sanders, has been successful both in Fort Worth and throughout the state. Sanders was a featured author at the 2009 Texas Book Festival. Other photography books include: Day of the Dead, by Denis Defibaugh, photographer, and Ward Albro, essayist; Going to Texas: Five Centuries of Texas Maps, a project of The Center for Texas Studies at TCU; and Fort Worth: A Personal View, journalist and photographer Phil Vinson’s interpretation of Fort Worth. The most recent project by The Center for Texas Studies at TCU is A Century of Partnership: Fort Worth and TCU, telling the history of the relationship between town and gown.

TCU Press has won awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Western Writers of American, PENWest, the Rounce and Coffin Club, and the Southwestern Council of Latin American studies, among others. A number of our authors have been featured at the Texas Book Festival. Our Texas poets laureate series won a Fort Worth Addy for design.