Clara Totten
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tottencs.bsky.social
Clara Totten
@tottencs.bsky.social
240 followers 190 following 68 posts
Making books happen at Kent State University Press. Library enthusiast. Cats and plants, too. (she/her)
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tottencs.bsky.social
My campus walk today took me to the parking lot at Kent State where students were gunned down on May 4, 1970. Always a visceral reminder of how threatened some feel by the expression of constitutional rights—and how critical it is that we honor these students’ legacies.
A rectangular space in a parking lot outlined by pink granite and short pillars. It outlines the spot where Jeffrey Miller was shot by National Guardsmen on the Kent State University campus on May 4, 1970. A triangular marker made of pink granite that says. “May 4, 1970 Jeffrey Miller.” There are a couple small, handmade lanterns in the foreground and, near the middle of the picture, a small, pink Himalayan salt chunk.
June 27, 2025 at 6:22 PM
tottencs.bsky.social
A candy science workshop at my local public library. Libraries are the best 🌈
A plastic plate with a circle of colored m&m candies on it around the edge. There is a shallow layer of water on the plate, causing the colors of the m&m’s to be pulled toward the center of the plate, creating a rainbow effect.
February 11, 2025 at 11:34 PM
tottencs.bsky.social
This whole keynote is so, so good <3
Excerpt from the linked keynote address. The text reads: Subheader: A critically generous approach to editing is about co-creating solutions. Body text: Critique means taking a text, its author, its readers, its communities, and its stakes seriously. It means giving a damn enough to intellectually, emotionally, and corporeally engage rather than sit outside, at a distance, judging. It means bringing our whole selves and our bodies to the text and to its context—and encouraging authors and readers to do the same. It means finding pockets of agency in a publishing and editing milieu otherwise structured by white settler capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and ableism. In this sense, critical generosity entails an explicitly progressive politics and ethics, baking those values into our editorial interventions as well as the infrastructures we design around them.
August 24, 2023 at 6:43 PM
tottencs.bsky.social
It’s puffball mushroom season! #foraging

(and friends, I am tall with big feet)
A large, off-white spherical lump, a giant puffball mushroom, on a woodland floor. To the left is a woman’s foot in a blue shoe, size 11, for scale.
August 23, 2023 at 3:30 PM
tottencs.bsky.social
My assistant loves reading manuscripts together #CatsOfAUPresses
A brown and black tortoiseshell cat is curled up next to someone who is sitting sideways in a big armchair. The cat is looking at the camera. In the lower right corner is the edge of a printed out manuscript.
August 23, 2023 at 1:21 PM
tottencs.bsky.social
Me: So glad I finally cleaned my desk. Much easier to focus now.

Pinecone: yes this looks great thank you
A large, brown and black tortoiseshell cat is sprawled across a desk, with a hand scratching her under her chin. Her front paws are draped across a keyboard at the bottom of the screen. On the left, a laptop is sitting up on a stack of books; behind the cat, there is a second monitor.
August 21, 2023 at 3:04 PM