WSU Press’s Beth Blakesley Works with Authors to Bring Their Stories to Life

As the WSU Press acquisitions editor, Beth Blakesley has enjoyed the variety of proposed manuscripts submitted to the university academic publisher. One of those is the story of Sister Kathleen Ross, who served as the founding president of Heritage College, now Heritage University, on the Yakama Indian Reservation in Toppenish, Washington, in 1982. Ross’s book, Hope Finds a Campus, is due to be published this fall.

The university grew out of Ross’s work as provost at Fort Wright College of the Holy Names in Spokane, Washington, where she oversaw the creation of outreach programs in Toppenish and Omak, Washington, that extended the opportunity for four-year college degrees to rural, underserved, and low-income populations. When Holy Names closed, Ross joined forces with two Yakama Indian women, Martha B. Yallup and Violet Lumley Rau, launching Heritage College to continue that important work.

Under her leadership as founding president, Heritage College grew from 85 students to 1,400 before Ross stepped down in 2010. But the longtime higher-education champion is still involved with Heritage University and shares its model with colleges and universities around the country.

Hope Finds a Campus is a “compelling story about how Ross created a university out of thin air, through her resilience and determination,” Blakesley said.

“In our day-to-day work, we don’t often think about how universities were formed,” she added. “The book is a bird’s-eye view of how a university is built from the ground up.”

Blakesley, also an associate dean of WSU Libraries, began working in January 2025 as an assistant editor to support WSU Press, which was newly housed in the libraries. She has extensive experience editing and collaborating with authors submitting their work to academic journals and other publications.

By the end of the year, Blakesley’s job duties for WSU Press changed to focus on the many new manuscript submissions that come in. She and press director Linda Bathgate consult on the manuscripts, then Blakesley walks future authors through the different steps toward publication, such as peer review and revisions.

Blakesley has seen several fascinating manuscripts in her role at the press, including Laura Laffrado’s forthcoming book about Ella Higginson, an early woman writer in the Pacific Northwest, and Ron Holcomb’s Tragedy at Whatcom Creek, which explores the 1999 Olympic Pipeline explosion.

“It’s really interesting to see how much research is going on,” she said. “It’s exciting to come in at the beginning of a book project.”