Clara Totten

@tottencs.bsky.social

327 Followers 358 Following

Director at Kent State University Press. Library enthusiast. Cats and plants, too. (she/her)

Book cover of “The Madison Women: Gender, Higher Education, and Literacy in Nineteenth-Century Appalachia” by Amanda E. Hayes
Exhibit materials for Kent State University Press, including a blue tablecloth with the KSUP logo, a stack of books, and a box with Civil War History journals in it.
A stack of books with their spines out. From top to bottom, the books are: “Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless” by Maria Pinto, “Abbott Awaits” by Chris Bachelder, “A Moveable Feast” by Ernest Hemingway, “Of the Land” by Will Stovall, “Pat the Lion on the Head” by Raymond DeCapite, “The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate” by Jacqueline Kelly, “Barracoon” by Zora Neale Hurston, “The First 649 Days” by Eric LeMay, “Yesteryear” by Caro Claire Burke, “The Extinction of Irena Rey” by Jennifer Croft, “Kent State” by Derf Backderf, and “Picasso Cut Papers” by Burlingham and Pesenti.
A rectangular space in a parking lot outlined by pink granite and short pillars. It outlines the spot where Jeffrey Miller was shot by National Guardsmen on the Kent State University campus on May 4, 1970.
A plastic plate with a circle of colored m&m candies on it around the edge. There is a shallow layer of water on the plate, causing the colors of the m&m’s to be pulled toward the center of the plate, creating a rainbow effect.
Excerpt from the linked keynote address. The text reads: Subheader: A critically generous approach to editing is about co-creating solutions. Body text: Critique means taking a text, its author, its readers, its communities, and its stakes seriously. It means giving a damn enough to intellectually, emotionally, and corporeally engage rather than sit outside, at a distance, judging. It means bringing our whole selves and our bodies to the text and to its context—and encouraging authors and readers to do the same. It means finding pockets of agency in a publishing and editing milieu otherwise structured by white settler capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and ableism. In this sense, critical generosity entails an explicitly progressive politics and ethics, baking those values into our editorial interventions as well as the infrastructures we design around them.
A large, off-white spherical lump, a giant puffball mushroom, on a woodland floor. To the left is a woman’s foot in a blue shoe, size 11, for scale.
A brown and black tortoiseshell cat is curled up next to someone who is sitting sideways in a big armchair. The cat is looking at the camera. In the lower right corner is the edge of a printed out manuscript.
A large, brown and black tortoiseshell cat is sprawled across a desk, with a hand scratching her under her chin. Her front paws are draped across a keyboard at the bottom of the screen. On the left, a laptop is sitting up on a stack of books; behind the cat, there is a second monitor.