Category / NDSU Press News

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NDSU Press and the Use of AI

from NDSU Press Publisher, Suzzanne Kelley

NDSU Press “shall not upload the Work or any of Author’s personal information to consumer-facing AI systems for purposes such as generating summaries, assessments, or marketing copy.” And, NDSU Press “agrees that it will not use AI to edit a manuscript, other than for the use of basic spelling and grammar-checking applications. Further, NDSU Press warrants that any textual or art changes it proposes will not have been created by AI.”

Such matters of ethics have been in flux in the publishing world, and we appreciate the forthrightness of the above statements delivered today from an informational group we keep up with called Publishers Lunch. The text comes from “Today’s Meal,” which shares recommendations from the Authors Guild in regard to manuscripts and AI tools.

 

The concern as expressed in Today’s Meal follows reports that professionals are “uploading manuscripts and authors’ personal information into consumer-facing AI systems for uses such as generating summaries, assessments, and marketing copy.” The ethical practice of refraining from use of such systems avoids the potential of having original content used by AI companies for training and/or contributing to AI-generated content.

In addition to practices in acquisition and marketing, we are working on a similar ethics statement to use in our contracts to ensure that authors are likewise contributing only original content. In consultation with our copyrights attorney, we find that at present such a statement seems to be a moving target, hard to set in a fixed format just yet. So, for now, we stick to our present contract terms, which state in brief: “Author will be the sole author of the Work [and] the Work is original with Author.”

Follow this link If you’d like to subscribe to Publishers Lunch (it’s free!).

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“the best thing I’ve done here!”

from NDSU Press Publisher, Suzzanne Kelley

Lexie Karst, who has earned her Certificate in Publishing while working with NDSU Press, pronounced her experience here as project manager as “the best thing I’ve done here!” Well, she’s accomplished a lot here at NDSU in her studies as a Music major with a minor in Creative Writing, so we’re glad her publishing experience is right up there at the top!

In addition to many other tasks, Lexie served as project manager for Aurora, poetry by Thom Tammaro, which we released on April 1. She was tasked with copyediting; developing marketing, publicity, & distribution plans; producing metadata and a creative brief for the designer; and liaising with her author. Pictured here is Lexie opening the first box of Aurora from the printer . . . you can see she truly is excited about having shepherded the manuscript through all the production stages, and now she’s seeing the final product for the first time.

Firsts. When someone is learning the history, business and practice of small press and university press publishing, there are a lot of “firsts.” The “firsts” of our enterprise include responsibility. Lexie took to heart the seriousness of checking for edits and industry standards throughout the whole process. And now she reaps the reward of her labor. We’re going to miss having her steady hand and cheerful outlook around here.

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In Memory of Adrienne Stepanek

from NDSU Press Publisher Suzzanne Kelley

Sadly, we report the recent passing of one of our authors, Adrienne Stepanek. I met Adrienne a few years ago in the cafe section of Books on Broadway in Williston, North Dakota. While sipping some of Chuck’s splendid coffee, we talked about a book project she was working on with her co-author, Doreen Chaky. We–including a book team consisting of Certificate in Publishing graduates Taylor Blumer, Mike Huynh, and Connor McCormick–published their manuscript in 2024. Grounded in research–one of Adrienne’s special skills–Lynched: Mob Murders on the Northern Great Plains, 1882-1931 went on to win:

  • Bronze, Independent Publishers Awards in the category of Nonfiction Regional, Plains
  • First Place, Independent Press Awards, in the category of Western History
  • First Place, Independent Press Awards, in the category of History, United States

Co-authors Doreen Chaky (at left) and Adrienne Stepanek visit with Suzzanne Kelley, editor in chief, at Books on Broadway, Williston, ND.

It was our pleasure to work with this dynamic team, and we mourn the loss of Adrienne’s continued contributions to history and her good nature.

Those wishing to make a donation in her honor are asked to consider the Williston Community Library or a charity of your choice.

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New Author Signing!

Please join us in welcoming Thom Tammaro to our author lineup! The NDSU Press is proud to be publishing his poetry collection, Aurora, in 2026.

Thom has produced a variety of work, from authoring poetry collections including Italian Days & Hours and Holding on for Dear Life, to co-editing anthologies such as Invisible World: Fifty Tiny Poems of Walt Whitman (with Sheila Coghill) and To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets from Pre-Territorial Days to the Present (with Joyce Sutphen and Connie Wanek). He has also co-edited several poetry collections inspired by the work of creatives such as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Bob Dylan.

Thom’s extensive body of work has won a variety of awards, including Minnesota Book Awards, the Midwest Booksellers’s Honor Award for Poetry, and a WILLA Award for Poetry from the Women Writing the West Association. His work has also been featured in publications including American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In addition to his career as author and editor, Thom served as an English professor at Minnesota State University Moorhead for thirty-four years, retiring as Professor Emeritus in 2017. During his time there, he co-founded and directed the MFA in Creative Writing program.

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Publishing Students to Print 10th Annual Chapbook on Antique Printing Presses

from NDSU Press Publisher Suzzanne Kelley

Students in the Introduction to Publishing class at NDSU Press will be printing the cover of the tenth annual poetry chapbook for NDSU Press on an antique printing press at Bonanzaville, Sat., Sept. 27.

The class will be hand-feeding the covers into a Chandler & Price press from 1897 in The Hunter Times building in Bonanzaville’s pioneer village. The students will work in shifts from 10 a.m. to 3:45 p.m.

Fall 2025 Intro to Publishing Students: (at front, left to right) Grace, Maddie, Hannah, Mason, Maverick; (standing, left to right) Morgan, Eliza, Maggie, Tara, Alison, Aidan, Dr. Kelley, Ingrid.

 

Past publishing students at The Hunter Times: (left to right) Abbie, Breanna, Jamie, and Anish.

The students will travel to Braddock, ND, to print the inside pages of the chapbook on antique presses at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum the weekend of Oct. 10-12.

This year’s winners of Poetry of the Plains and Prairies (POPP) Award are co-authors Josh Gaines, Portland, OR, and Ben Clark, Minneapolis, MN, for their manuscript After the Floating Barn.

In our archives, we’ve found copies of, and photos of, chapbooks being letterpress published by poet and faculty member Richard Lyons in the 1950s and 1960s. Decades later, in 2016, NDSU Press returned to publishing chapbooks on letterpress equipment. Now, as we produce our tenth POPP Award publication, I’ve expanded the enterprise by taking my publishing students into North Dakota communities; by publishing state, regional, and nationally located poets; and by providing national distribution for our prizewinning chapbooks.

The success of our project is the result of our collaborative arrangement between Bonanzaville and The Braddock News Letterpress Museum of the South Central Threshing Association and the dedication of Allan and Leah Burke, retired weekly newspaper publishers, who are the driving force behind the collection, preservation, and revitalization of letterpress printing. We also rely upon the generous nature and expertise of pressman Mike Frykman and the Iron Men (and women) of the threshing association.

Beth Jansen, executive director of Bonanzaville, said she is pleased to welcome the students to the pioneer village. “There is nothing better than to have students visit Bonanzaville to experience history through 19th Century technology,” Jansen said.

Introduction to Publishing is one of the required classes for NDSU’s Certificate in Publishing.

 

 

 

 

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A Safe Place

. . . where-in we share “A letter to Lance Richey,” author of Champagne Times: Lawrence Welk and His American Century (NDSU Press 2025) from Allan Burke, Secretary-Treasurer, Friends of the Welk Homestead, Inc., presented here with Allan’s permission.

Author Lance with a photo of Lawrence.

Lance,

I found one of your statements in the recent radio interview so profound that I spent considerable time transcribing it. I’m sure there is a way to transcribe it instantly with AI, but I did it the old-fashioned way by listening, typing, rewinding, listening, typing . . .

Here’s that section, which I’d like to title “A Safe Place”:

“Lawrence gave the people what they wanted. He was an entertainer. He wouldn’t describe himself as an artist. He loved Jazz music. He loved Dixieland. But he said, ‘I don’t play much of that on my television show because the audience wants something different.’

“Lawrence’s greatest success on network television actually came in the most tumultuous times, the 1960s. He hit the Top Ten of all television programs in 1968. In 1969 when the nation was coming apart at the seams with the Baby Boomer revolution, with the Vietnam War, with the civil rights movement. Because everyone knew for one hour a week I can check into Lawrence Welk and I’ll hear music I recognize, I won’t have politics in my face, and I can just for a moment step away from all the turmoil and enjoy a show that presents to me the America that used to be or that I imagine used to be. That was Lawrence’s secret.”

This section is what I think could be the heart of a marketing campaign for the [Welk] biography and documentary.

The times we live in today, highlighted by this week’s assassination of Charlie Kirk and earlier by the shootings of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband (not to mention school and other shootings), call for “A Safe Place.” At the risk of being declared sophomoric, I believe Public Television can provide that with the Welk documentary and The Lawrence Welk Show, and NDSU Press can market Champagne Times: Lawrence Welk and His American Century.

It seems to have gone unnoticed that The Lawrence Welk Show by Joyful Voices drew an estimated 600 people to the Welk Homestead on June 1. This past Sunday, Joyful Voices’ Lawrence Welk Hoedown drew several hundred people to a steamy machine shed at the South Central Threshing Show at Braddock, N.D. Contrary to the notion that Mr. Welk’s fans are dead, none of the people at the show in Braddock appeared to have left this life. In fact, there was some dancing at the end of the show.

In my opinion, public television stations across the country should be adding The Lawrence Welk Show . . .

Just some thoughts.
The best to you and Carol,
Allan


P.S. from Suzzanne Kelley, Publisher, NDSU Press: Here are some links to the Prairie Public documentary about Lawrence Welk (viewed already by 37,000+ people!) and the NDSU Press publication of Lance’s book Champagne Times: Lawrence Welk and His American Century. The biography (a 3-volume limited edition [just 500 copies, autographed and numbered], printed as hardcovers in a beautiful protective slip-case) contains photos and stories beyond the documentary with more insights to Welk’s motivation, aspirations, and success-driven route from farm boy roots to becoming a media mogul millionaire. A history of Lawrence Welk–North Dakota’s and the nation’s eminent entertainer of his time–is also part of a month-long exhibit at the NDSU Memorial Union Gallery, showcasing unique historical objects and running through October 9. For parking as the guest of NDSU Press, email NDSU.Press@ndsu.edu to obtain a free pass. 

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Good Prose: On Reading, Writing, & Publishing in 2024

Note from NDSU Press Publisher Suzzanne Kelley

Recently, Lonna Whiting, Communications Consultant for The Arts Partnership, asked member partners and artisans what books they liked best from 2023 and what they plan to read in 2024. I replied to Lonna with updates about some of our NDSU Press titles–past, present, and future–in an interview she published in the Arts and Entertainment section of The Fargo-Moorhead Forum, “Check out this list of the best reads for 2023.” We’re thankful for the attention provided to our press publications.

Lonna’s query got me to thinking about other kinds of reading that I conduct over the course of a year. As my TBR list for 2024 grows, I cannot help but think about books read previously–manuscript submissions under consideration for publication and books that help to inform which books we acquire, books that aid us in the professionalization of our work at NDSU Press, books that help us to stay au courant in the machinations of the publishing industry and in trends of scholarly and literary nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and translated publications. 

As the editor in chief for NDSU Press, I have the privilege of reading heaps of manuscripts before they come to the publication stage. Working through submissions can be a daunting task as we now receive more than one hundred submissions annually. I count my lucky stars to have the assistance of Dr. Kyle Vanderburg, Composer in Residence and Assistant Professor of Practice in the Challey School of Music. Kyle, a recent graduate of the Certificate in Publishing and a published composer, assists with our online submissions portal by tracking submissions, securing blind peer reviewers, and taking part in the first reads of submissions. 

Because our press has a regional mission, we are steeped in works about our state and the northern plains region. Happily, I love reading such works! But when I want to escape responsibility for edits and marketing, I reach for books outside the scope of our mission, but often within the scope of publishing as a field of study.

It’s hard to narrow my favorite reads from 2023 to just a few, but I’ll start with my top choice: Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver—a fabulous story that I did not want to end! I also loved Also a Poet, by Ada Calhoun, which I listened to as an audiobook. Calhoun’s biographical-memoir about her father (and her relationship with him) mesmerized me with her reading and her inclusion of audio excerpts from old-fashioned tape-recordings preserved from when her father was a younger man and she was just a child. I’m choosing, too, The Editor, by Stephen Rowley, a sweet, farcical fiction on the relationship between author and editor, with his editor being none other than Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

I’ve just finished reading Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd. This memoir by an author and his editor is a lovely back-and-forth narrative about building relationships and trust. The subtitle says this book is about the “art of nonfiction,” and it is, but my biggest takeaway is that the book is about the art of being a writer working with an editor and vice versa. Particularly on point for me, the editor, is a comment from p. 157: “[T]he ability to preserve the distinction between the writer and the writing is a skill the editor needs more than the writer does.” Kidder thus reminds us of the vulnerability of the writer, and that–as an editor–I must be cognizant of that vulnerability at every turn, because the distinction between the writer and the writing is not one that the author is always capable of making. The chapter called “Memoir” is one I especially recommend! 

I generally begin my New Year’s picks for reading by going to the National Book Awards winners and finalists, but right now I have on my desk two titles next in the queue. First up is The Pages, a novel by Hugo Hamilton that I just picked up at Full Circle Books. Described on the jacket as a “formally inventive novel,” with a storyline that takes place in the 1930s and is about “a book–a 1924 edition of Joseph Roth’s masterpiece Rebellion–[that] narrates its own astonishing life story.” I am intrigued by the notion of a book as narrator! Hamilton’s writing drew me in, and so did his connections that focus on censorship…apparently a timeless topic. Next on my TBR list is Index, A History of the, by Dennis Duncan. The perfect play of an index entry in the title won me over, and I’m eager to see how this story unfolds.

In addition to books, I subscribe to The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Publishers Weekly, all of which keep me up to date on current writing trends and topics and new and not-so-new authors in fiction and nonfiction. With these resources, I’m always spying new books for my reading list. AND, I’m always looking for recommendations from readers! Feel free to reply with YOUR recommended read. 🙂

 

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A Good Day to Give

Today is the perfect day to contribute in large or small ways to the work we do at NDSU Press. ALL of our production, marketing, and distribution are dependent upon sales and donations. Your contribution is most appreciated. Please help us in our efforts to give region a voice.

Follow the link below to Arts and Sciences and choose NDSU Press Endowment. THANK YOU.

https://bit.ly/NDSUPressGivingDay23
#NDSUPress #NDSU #NDSUFoundation

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Bus to Belcourt With Us!

We hope you’ll join us, July 27, 2023, for this historic event celebrating the appointment of Denise Lajimodiere as North Dakota’s Poet Laureate!

We’ve arranged for free transportation departing from and returning to Bismarck and Fargo for this single-day event. There is no cost to attendees. RSVP BY MONDAY, JULY 24, TO SUZZANNE AT NDSU.Press@ndsu.edu. There is limited seating available, so please RSVP ASAP!