NEW MARKETING DIRECTOR JOINS UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS PRESS

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — The new marketing director for the University of Arkansas Press brings a wealth of experience and love for books to her work.

Laura Helper worked at several university presses before coming to the University of Arkansas, and also has worked with its director, Larry Malley, before coming to Northwest Arkansas.

Helper has family ties to Arkansas. Her grandfather worked for Garver and Garver, helping to build the elevator at Blanchard Springs Caverns and railroad bridges at the time the White River was flooded. Her uncle was a professor of biochemistry at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock and tutored one of the students integrating Central High School.

"I’ve been hearing about Arkansas my entire life," she said. "But I never imagined I would move to Arkansas."

Helper and Malley had kept in sporadic touch through a mutual colleague, Peter Agree, who is currently a senior acquisitions editor at University of Pennsylvania Press. When Malley told Agree about the position, he brought up Helper’s name.

"Laura is a good match because of her publishing experience and her academic credentials," Malley said. "She is able to handle the books conceptually and work with booksellers."

Helper also has found the match to be a good one.

"It makes sense with all the different kinds of things I’ve done in my life," she said. "And when I came here to visit, I fell in love with Fayetteville."

Helper received a bachelor’s degree in English from Bryn Mawr College in 1984, a master’s degree in anthropology from Northwestern University in 1990 and a doctorate in anthropology at Rice University in 1997. Her dissertation was an ethnography of race relation and crossover audiences for rhythm and blues and rock & roll in 1950s Memphis.

While she earned her degrees, she worked in the marketing department at Northwestern University Press and did a range of freelance work for a number of other university presses — jobs ranging from making indexes to writing copy. She has also taught anthropology, worked as a publicist at Burke's Book Store in Memphis, and consulted with the Smithsonian Institution on the Memphis Rock & Soul Museum. Recently, Helper signed a contract for her own book with Duke University Press — the Memphis ethnography — again with an editor hired by Malley.

She recently spent a week at the University of Kansas Press in Lawrence, Kan. as an American Association of University Presses/Whiting Week-in-Residence Fellow.