Registration Opens for AUPresses 2026 Annual Meeting
The Association of University Presses (AUPresses) is pleased to share plans for its 2026 Annual Meeting, to be held in Seattle, Washington, on June 13-15.
The preliminary program for this flagship event is available and registration is now open.
The 2026 Annual Meeting Program Committee, co-chaired by Jason Fikes (Director, Abilene Christian University Press) and Antonia Pop (Vice President, Publishing Division, University of Toronto Press), has organized 2 plenaries and 35 concurrent sessions to inspire, inform, and engage, providing high-quality professional education and collaborative networking opportunities to Association members.
Two plenary speakers will discuss the very real need for university presses in the current moment and the valuable contributions of their mission-driven work:
Author and journalist Lynda Mapes will explore why university presses matter in their home communities and how they help readers make sense of the world. Mapes is the author of six books, most recently The Trees are Speaking: Dispatches from the Salmon Forests (2025, University of Washington Press). She has been twice recognized with the Kavli Gold Award for Science Writing by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in local reporting with a team at the Seattle Times, where she has covered environmental news, nature, and Native cultures and governments for 27 years.
Kate Starbird, Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington (UW), will address the current flourishing of online misinformation and disinformation and how that ecosystem is reconfiguring information flows and politics around the globe. She is a co-founder and former director of the UW Center for an Informed Public, which applies research, education, and policy recommendations to strengthen democratic discourse, building resilience to online misinformation, propaganda, and manipulation.
A wide range of concurrent sessions will consider big-picture challenges and dive into day-to-day operations, such as:
- “A Service, Not a Product: The Value Proposition of University Press Publishing”
- “Growing a Journals Program—Strategies, Partnerships, and Press Perspectives”
- “Accessibility in Production: Big Projects in Small Presses”
- “Making the Most of Your Website”
- “Expanding Voices: Advancing Bibliodiversity in Global Academic Publishing”
- “Publishing Digital Scholarship at University and Library Presses”
- “Who is the ‘Educated Lay Reader’?”
- “Collaborative Strategies for Bookstores and Presses”
- “How to Open Your Previously Gated Content without Losing Your Mind”
- “Building a Resilient Board.”
In addition, collaboration labs will engage participants in considering and sharing best practices for AI, ebook accessibility, and ethical publishing with and about indigenous communities. Pre-meeting gatherings will address topics of particular interest to business operations and journals professionals as well as press directors.
During the conference, the AUPresses community will also celebrate 2026 Book, Jacket, and Journal Show, an annual juried competition that honors exemplary university press publication design.
AUPresses Annual Meetings alternate yearly between in-person and virtual formats, embracing a full spectrum of collaborative, educational, and networking opportunities for all members and the wider network of community partners. Read more about this strategy.
Immediately following this year’s Annual Meeting, the AUPresses and Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) communities will also enjoy a day of joint programming on June 16. The joint summit, Responding to Universities in Crisis: A Summit for University-Based Publishing, will be held on the UW campus, and the LPC’s 2026 Library Publishing Forum will follow on June 17-18.