State of the Bay Conference

Michigan State University Press is excited to announce our upcoming attendance at the 2026 State of the Bay Conference, which will take place October 7th in Bay City, Michigan.

Even more exciting is that Dr. Lynne Heasley, author of The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes, will be the event’s keynote speaker! As well, the team which worked to create Exploring Mid-Michigan: A Guide to Flint, the Saginaw Valley, and the Thumb will be in attendance. Copies of Dr. Heasley’s book, alongside Exploring Mid-Michigan and a select list of other Michigan-related titles, will be available for purchase.

The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes

By Lynne Heasley

In The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes, Lynne Heasley illuminates an underwater world that, despite a ferocious industrial history, remains wondrous and worthy of care. From its first scene in a benighted Great Lakes river, where lake sturgeon thrash and spawn, this powerful book takes readers on journeys through the Great Lakes, alongside fish and fishers, scuba divers and scientists, toxic pollutants and threatened communities, oil pipelines and invasive species, Indigenous peoples and federal agencies. With dazzling illustrations from Glenn Wolff, the book helps us know the Great Lakes in new ways and grapple with the legacies and alternative futures that come from their abundance of natural wealth. Suffused with curiosity, empathy, and wit, The Accidental Reef will not fail to astonish and inspire.

Exploring Mid-Michigan: A Guide to Flint, the Saginaw Valley, and the Thumb

Edited by Mary Jo Kietzman & Paul M. Gifford

Inspired by the iconic American Guide Series published by the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s, this new guide to Flint, the Saginaw Valley, and the Thumb showcases the industrial-agricultural heart of Michigan, which has been beating irregularly for the last three decades, but whose importance to its people has lasted millennia. The ten counties featured in the book have lost population, industries, small farms, natural resources, and clean water. Instead of focusing on loss, the authors uncover the region’s unique history and culture, characterized by the productive tension between factories and farms, urban and rural spaces, labor and management, migrants and the mainstream, conservatives and progressives. The book documents the genesis of an ecological awareness that grew out of deforestation, habitat and species loss, and a succession of water crises. Encyclopedic in scope like their WPA forebears, the book is a functional guide that offers suggestions and strategies for enriching travel while celebrating the tenacity of those who came, worked, and stayed: lumberjacks, farmers, foundry workers, labor activists, judges, Indigenous peoples, African Americans, artists, poets, and environmental warriors.

Use code MSU20 for 20% off!