La Frontera is New Publisher in Town

It's good news when Wyoming gets a new book publisher.

La Frontera Publishing has set up shop in Cheyenne -- and its first book is by a Wyomingite. La Frontera chose Encampment's Candy Moulton as its debut author with the second (and revised) edition of her 1994 book "Legacy of the Tetons: Homesteading in Jackson Hole." It will be distributed by the University of New Mexico Press and is featured in the press's spring catalog.

This new edition features a special section on "Mormon Row" and the handcart migration along the Mormon Trail. La Frontera's publisher, Mike Harris, sent me a review copy. It's a good-looking book, with a cover photo featuring one of the Mormon Row cabins with the distinctive Tetons in the background. Lots of photos are included, as is a map produced by WAC fellowship recipient Hannah Hinchman.

I know very little about this aspect of WYO history and look forward to reading the book before the next time I see Candy, which probably will be at the June 1-3 Wyoming Writers, Inc. conference in Thermopolis.

Mike and his wife plan to complete their move to WYO from southern California this summer. He has two more books in production. One, Mike says, is a fictional "family saga set during the Black Hills gold rush of 1876" and the other is "a nonfiction account of the last U.S. mining rush that took place around Death Valley in 1913" which is also "a bit of a true-life murder mystery."

Mike says he wants to let this blog's readers know that the press is looking for historical nonfiction manuscripts about Wyoming. "I have a slot open in my spring 2008 publishing schedule for a nonfiction book and I'm hoping to find something about Wyoming's Old West (about 1830s to around 1918) that would fit the bill. Our guidelines are on our the web site.... We don't accept printed manuscripts -- everything needs to be on a CD-ROM and presented in Microsoft Word or an RTF format."

Labels: humanities, publishing, Wyoming history

- posted by Michael Shay @ 10:25 AM