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Meet the University of Bridgeport Press Team
Dr. Randy Laist, Director
Randy Laist is a professor of English, Chair of the English Department, and Director of the Division of Arts and Humanities at the University of Bridgeport in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He is the author of Rethinking Writing Instruction in the Age of AI, The Twin Towers in Film: A Cinematic History of the World Trade Center, Cinema of Simulation: Hyperreal Hollywood in the Long 1990s, and Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo's Novels. He has also edited volumes of essays on college movies, plant studies, Indiana Jones, retro-representations of the 1980s, and inclusive educational design. He lives in New Haven with his wife, two kids, Star the dog, and Sigmund the cat.
Mike Barlow, Acquisitions Editor
Mike Barlow teaches English classes at the University of Bridgeport. He is the author of Learning to Love Data Science and coauthor of Smart Cities, Smart Future, The Executive’s Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy, and Partnering with the CIO. He is also the ghostwriter of more than a dozen respected business books and hundreds of articles on a wide range of business and technology topics.
Dr. Brian A. Dixon, Executive Editor
Brian A. Dixon is a professor of English at Goodwin University. He has served as the assistant editor of ATQ: The American Transcendental Quarterly and as the editor of Revelation: Apocalyptic Art and Literature. He is the author of Sex for Dinner, Death for Breakfast: James Bond and the Body (2025) and has edited volumes including Figures of Freedom: Representations of Agency in a Time of Crisis (2024), the acclaimed television retrospective Back to Frank Black: A Return to Chris Carter’s Millennium (2012), and Columbia & Britannia: An Alternate History (2009), nominated for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History.
Eric D. Lehman, Executive Editor
Eric D. Lehman is the author or editor of twenty-three books, including New England at 400, The Quotable New Englander, A History of Connecticut Food, Literary Connecticut, A History of Connecticut Wine, Bridgeport: Tales from the Park City, Connecticut Town Greens, and New England Nature. Lehman’s biography of Charles Stratton, Becoming Tom Thumb, won the Henry Russell Hitchcock Award from the Victorian Society of America, and was chosen as one of the American Library Association's outstanding university press books of the year. His revolutionary history Homegrown Terror: Benedict Arnold and the Burning of New London was a finalist in two categories of the Next Gen Indie Book Awards and was used in a question on Jeopardy. And his novella, Shadows of Paris, was the Novella of the Year from the Next Gen Indie Book Awards, a Silver Medal for Romance from the Foreword Review Indie Book Awards, and a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award. He is a regular contributor to Estuary, for which he has won several awards from the Connecticut chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, and has been consulted on diverse subjects and quoted by The Atlantic Monthly, USA Today, the BBC, the History Channel, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, and The Wall Street Journal.
Amy Nawrocki, Executive Editor
​Amy Nawrocki is the author of six poetry collections and four nonfiction works. She is the recipient of numerous awards including honors from The Connecticut Poetry Society, New Millennium Writings, The Hamden Arts Commission, and The Connecticut Center for the Book. Her collection, Mouthbrooders, was a finalist for the 2020 Connecticut Book Award. Her nonfiction book, The Comet’s Tail: A Memoir of No Memory, was a 2018 Foreword Review INDIES finalist for best memoir and has been awarded a Gold Medal for the Living Now Mind-Body-Spirit Awards. She is the Dean of the College of Science and Society at the University of Bridgeport.