FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Beginning this spring the University of Arkansas Press will be the exclusive distributor for two new partners — Moon City Press and a DVD, The Buffalo Flows. The press has been very much interested in adding distribution partners since that can help raise the press’ visibility and income as well as assist regional universities and businesses.

Moon City Press is a press imprint of the Missouri State University departments of English and art and design. With series lists in “Arts and Letters” and “Ozarks History and Culture,” Moon City Press proudly features collaborations between students and faculty over the various aspects of publication: research, writing, editing, layout and design. The press announced three new titles for the spring 2009 catalog, as well as two backlist titles.

Two of the new titles have a particular interest to the University of Arkansas community. For, From, About James T. Whitehead: Poems, Stories, Photographs, and Recollections, edited by Michael Burns (March, paper, $15.99), is a collection of pieces about Whitehead, the former University of Arkansas professor who helped establish the university’s program in creative writing and author, by a number of outstanding writers and poets, including Jimmy Carter, Barry Hannah and C. D. Wright, as well as present and former MFA teachers Miller Williams, Bill Harrison and Michael Heffernan. The book also includes a number of never before published pieces by Whitehead, one of which is a draft-excerpt from Coldstream, his projected sequel to his successful novel, Joiner.

Now available is Whitehead’s The Panther: Posthumous Poems (cloth, $15), also edited by Michael Burns, with a Foreword by James Tabor, author of The Jesus Dynasty. Through a series of dramatic monologues the 14 poems gathered here give life to the Jewish-apocryphal legend of “Jesus, son of Pantera” — the story that a Roman soldier sired Jesus.

Moon City Press has also published two books by Texan Jim W. Corder, a well-known specialist of composition at Texas Christian University, Jim W. Corder on Living and Dying in West Texas: A Postmodern Scrapbook (paper, $15), edited by Jim Baumlin, who also runs Moon City Press, and Eric Knickerbocker, and The Heroes Have Gone: Personal Essays on Sport, Popular Culture, and the American West (paper, $15), edited by Keith D. Miller and Baumlin. The press has also published The Gillioz “Theatre Beautiful”: Celebrating Springfield’s Theatre History, 1926-2006 (paper, $22.95), edited by Baumlin, which includes 80 historic colorized photographs and illustrations.

The University of Arkansas Press is also very pleased to announce distribution of The Buffalo Flows: The Story of Our First National River, a DVD ($19.95) written and produced by University of Arkansas journalism professor and award-winning filmmaker Larry Foley, with photography by Trey Marley, and edited by Dale Carpenter.

This one-hour documentary, narrated by Academy Award winner Ray McKinnon, tells the story of this internationally known, 135-mile river, free of dams. The film will premiere on AETN at 5 p.m. March 8; 6:30 p.m. March 12; 9 p.m. March 23; and 1 p.m. March 29. Copies of the DVD are now available through the University of Arkansas Press by calling 800-626-0090 or online at www.uapress.com; to view a clip, go to http://www.uark.edu/ua/buffriv/.

Foley has expressed interest in having the press distribute his other DVD documentaries as well, which the press would welcome. All proceeds from the sales of The Buffalo Flows will go to the University of Arkansas Documentary Fund. The press is also the exclusive distributor for three other publishers: the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, Ozark Society Foundation and Phoenix International, a small press based in Fayetteville.