Dr. Patrick W. Conner is being honored with the 2010 Ethel and Gerry Heebink Award for Distinguished and Extended State Service for his exceptional dedication to the State of West Virginia through his directorship of the West Virginia University Press from 1999-2008.

Conner revitalized the WVU Press during his tenure as director, taking it from a languishing imprint to a vibrant academic publishing house that shines a bright light on the culture of West Virginia and the Appalachian region.

He began as chair of a small task force that restructured the Press by appointing an editorial board, setting up a strong peer review system and aligning operations with professional scholarly publishing standards.

Although this process may seem dull to some, Conner’s first brush with the internal workings of an academic press sparked his creativity.

“At the time, I think my selection had mainly to do with the fact that one of my fields of study is the history of books, but I realized that as director of the Press, I would be working with people who were masters of their fields, shaping their work to its best advantage for public presentation,” he said.

He was also attracted to the day-to-day challenges of learning about contemporary book printing, design and editing while building and running a new venture from scratch.

“How do you encourage sales of something you believe is important? How do you get people to expect high value from a book that says West Virginia University Press on its title page when readers don’t know anything about us as a publisher? This struck me as a fascinating thing to try,” Conner said.

And he ran with the challenge, creating two important imprints, “Vandalia Press” which promotes creative work by Appalachian writers and “The West Virginia Sound Archive” which conserves various types of Appalachian music.

Conner also established several highly regarded research series, including “West Virginia and Appalachia” and “Medieval European Studies,” as well as growing the stable of WVU Press scholarly journals from one, the internationally renowned Victorian Poetry, to five, including West Virginia History, all of which are now available digitally via Johns Hopkins University Press’s distinguished journals distribution system, Project Muse.

In addition, Conner acquired and published many texts important to the state, including Davitt McAteer’s “Monongah: The Tragic Story of the 1907 Monongah Mine Disaster,” which won an Independent Publisher Book Award for 2008, and Glenn Taylor’s fictionalized history of the state, “The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart,” which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

“Without a doubt, the highlight of my service to WVU and West Virginia as director of the Press was the publication of Senator Byrd’s autobiography, ‘Robert C. Byrd: Child of the Appalachian Coalfields’.” Conner said.

“The senator’s book is long, but then, he has had a lot of experiences, and when it comes time for historians of the future to evaluate his work as well as the way West Virginia filled its niche in the nation’s history, Senator Byrd’s own story will be a primary source of information for them. Thus, its publication is an exceedingly important document, and represents the best kind of work an academic press does for its region or state,” he said.

It is Conner’s work beyond the bounds of campus and his dedication to West Virginia as a whole that inspired the selection committee to honor him this year.

“The people of West Virginia have, in fact, always been immensely kind to my family and me, and I am very proud of having helped along an enterprise they value,” Conner said.

“The work of the Press is never the work of a single person, and the Heebink award honors everyone who has labored on behalf of the Press since 1999: its staff, the members of the editorial board, a number of freelance artists and, surely, my successor, Carrie Mullen,” he remarked with great humility on this esteemed honor.

Conner is currently the Eberly Centennial Professor in the Humanities, teaching Medieval English literature, British literature, linguistics and research methods in the WVU department of English, where he served as chair from 1994-2000.

Conner will be formally recognized during the WVU Weekend of Honors, April 9-11.

The late David Heebink created two Heebink Awards in memory of his parents Ethel, a long-time WVU English professor, and Gerry, an Extension dairyman in the WVU Agricultural Extension Service.

WVU presents the award for extended service every year and the award for beginning service every two years.

-WVU-

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