Your autumn media list from UW authors and artists
New fall books (and more!) to keep you up-to-date on the UW community.
Any music recommendations from UW-affiliated artists? Leave us a comment!
This spring, 18,883 degrees were conferred upon graduates of all three UW campuses. We estimate there are just under 600,000 living alumni of the UW. And the UW supports or sustains 100,520 jobs, making it the fifth-largest employer in the state. No wonder we’re always hearing about new books, music, podcasts and film projects from the UW community.
Read on for a few recent accomplishments from Huskies in the media.
The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want
by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna
Harper Collins, 2025
With their sharp critique of today’s artificial intelligence boom, UW Professor Emily M. Bender and her co-author, sociologist Alex Hanna, seek to expose the hype around technology known as AI and the potential societal harms it brings. Readers will also get a view to the potential of a more equitable digital future.
Attend a lecture by Bender and Hanna through the UW’s Public Lecture Series on Oct. 21.
Severalty
by Laura Da’, ’01
The University of Arizona Press, 2025
In her third poetry collection, teacher and poet Laura Da’ explores Indigenous endurance in the face of dislocation, cultural loss and the erasure of Native peoples from their living land. The author makes connections between colonization and its epigenetic impacts across generations to explore what it means to endure and persist.
Rez Ball
Featuring Devin Sampson-Craig, ’25 (Yakama/Pauite)
Netflix, 2024
Sampson-Craig plays Bryson, a member of the Chuska High School Warriors. The Navajo Reservation basketball team loses its star player in this drama about its journey to a state championship. Read more from the College of Arts & Sciences.
Ways of Knowing
This UW podcast highlights how studies of the humanities can reflect everyday life. Through a partnership between The World According to Sound and the UW, each episode features a faculty member from the UW College of Arts & Sciences, the work that inspires them and resources for learning more about the topic.
Season 2 features current and former CAS professors Anna Preus, Richard Watt, Hamza Zafer, Stephen Meyers, Jayadev Athreya, Golden Marie Owens, Mal Ahern and Sara Goering.
The Complete Kennections
by Ken Jennings
Scribner, 2025
Seattle resident and one-time UW student Ken Jennings clearly has a passion for trivia, having written books about geography and trivia and, well, won Jeopardy! 74 consecutive times and hosted the show himself. Since 2012, Jennings has created and distributed a (sometimes frustratingly difficult) puzzle with trivia questions whose answers have something in common. Now, trivia fans can tackle 5,000 questions in “The Complete Kennections,” a print version of their favorite weekly brain teaser.
Back to School
UW School of Art + Art History + Design
A new podcast from the UW School of Art allows alumni to come back to campus and reflect on their art practices. Each episode, host Liz Copeland speaks with a guest on their journey from student to practitioner while chatting about new ideas. You can expect artists, designers, curators, academics and everyone in between.
night myths: before the body
by Abigail Pollokoff, ’16
Red Hen Press, 2025
Poet Abi Pollokoff makes her literary debut with “night myths: before the body,” which explores the many intricacies of womanhood. From identity and expectation to self-preservation and doubt, Pollokoff uses an ecofeminist lens to blur the lines between body and natural world.
Show Me Where the Hurt Is
Hayden Casey, ’17
Split Lip Press, 2025
Hayden Casey explores insecurity, grief and love (and a little bit of body horror) in thirteen stories with complex characters. “For an assortment of stories about people who don’t know where they belong, they hit awfully close to home,” writes Tatiana Rickman, author of “The Ancestry of Objects.”
Casey’s debut novel, “A Harvest of Furies,” is a contemporary retelling of a Greek tragic play. It will be released on Oct. 14 by Lanternfish Press.
Mothersalt
Mia Ayumi Malhotra, ’11
Alice James Books, 2025
In these poems, Mia Ayumi Malhotra examines the experiences of pregnancy and early motherhood, centered on resilience, healing and joy. Malhotra writes about the vulnerability of giving birth in America, where autonomy in pregnancy is not always a given. She has received the Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry and the Singapore Poetry Prize. Malhotra is a Kundiman Fellow and currently lives in San Francisco.