It has been just over ten years since I moved to Ann Arbor to take up a position at the University of Michigan, and the institution and my colleagues here have provided me with an incredible opportunity to contribute to building a publishing organization that is widely thought of as as a leader in rethinking scholarly publishing.  Without any family ties to this area of the world, I could easily relocate to pursue professional opportunities, but I have found that the U-M Library, my colleagues here, and life in southeast Michigan have all been able to offer me better opportunities and a better lifestyle than I would find elsewhere.

Sometimes, though, life takes you suddenly in a new direction. The University of North Texas Libraries has offered incredible opportunities for Julie and me: she will become the Principal Archivist in Special Collections, and I the Director of Library Publishing, with a charge to collaborate with the UNT Press, the Digital Scholarship Co-Operative, the Digital Libraries division, and other parts of the UNT Libraries.  Both of these are new positions in an institution that with a rising stature and in a library system known for its entrepreneurial spirit.  We’ll be relocating to Denton in April. While North Texas doesn’t exactly have my ideal climate (literally or politically), I look forward to this exciting personal and professional change. As one of my coworkers said, “A cowboy’s gotta do what a cowboy’s gotta do”!

We’ll be only about a 30-minute drive from Dallas/Forth Worth International Airport and 45 minutes from Dallas Love Field (with lots of new non-stop destinations beginning in late 2014!), so we look to continuing our globetrotting adventures. And I hope you’ll get in touch if you find yourself in the North Texas area.

This work by Kevin Hawkins is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International