Eric Hoffer Likes Us!

Note from NDSU Press Publisher Suzzanne Kelley

We are pleased as punch to announce we have just been notified that Surrender Dorothy, by Brett Salsbury, has won 1st Runner-Up in the Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry in the Chapbook category!

 

Brett Salsbury, winner of the 2022 NDSU Press Poetry of the Plains & Prairies Award for his chapbook collection, Surrender Dorothy,”and 1st Runner-Up in the Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry in the category of Chapbook. Brett is a writer of poetry and prose who has split most of his life between Kansas and Nevada. His work has also appeared in Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, The New Territory, and Concrete Desert Review, among others. He was the 2022 recipient of the Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award in Prose.

Brett was our 2022 prizewinner of the Poetry of the Plains & Prairies Award, resulting in our standard publication contract, ten comp copies, author discount, and the hand-letterpress publication of Surrender Dorothy. This collection of poetry is the seventh in our series of chapbook publications, produced by the students in the Introduction to Publishing class, which meets every fall. The class is part of our Certificate in Publishing, which is offered to undergraduates, graduate students, and Project 65 students.

Introduction to Publishing students learn the art of letterpress printing. Here, at The Hunter Times Museum located at Bonanzaville, West Fargo, students feed paper through the antique Chandler & Price printer, examining each cover with close scrutiny. Not in the picture is Allan Burke, pressman extraordinaire, who provides history, guidance, and mentoring to our chapbook-printing projects. Left to right: Saraa, Ella, Levi, and Monika.

Individual cover samples and a bucket of ink.

We print the covers at The Hunter Times, and then we travel far west to Braddock, ND, to print the interior pages and assemble some 300+ copies at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum.

Past winners of the POPP Award are:

  • 2021 Prairie Madness, by Katherine Hoerth (Nebraska)
  • 2020 A Muddy Kind of Love, by Carolyn A. Dahl (Texas)
  • 2019 Harvest Widows, by Nick Bertelson (Iowa)
  • 2018 Destiny Manifested, by Bonnie Larson Staiger (North Dakota)
  • 2017 Thunderbird (out of print), by Denise Lajimodiere (North Dakota)
  • 2016 Land of Sunlit Ice (out of print), by Larry Woiwode (North Dakota

But Brett’s chapbook prize isn’t the only award we’ve garnered from the Eric Hoffer Awards. In 2022, our 2021 POPP Award Winner, Prairie Madness, by Katherine Hoerth, won Honorable Mention, and in 2019, Thunderbird (now out of print), by Denise K. Lajimodiere, also received Honorable Mention in the Chapbook category.

In other categories, Mammals of North Dakota, 2nd Edition, by Robert Seabloom, was the 1st Runner-Up in the Reference category, and David Mills’s Operation Snowbound: Life behind the Blizzards of 1949, won the Gold Medal in the category of Culture.

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“The Eric Hoffer Book Award honors the memory of the great American philosopher Eric Hoffer by highlighting salient writing, as well as the independent spirit of small press publishers. Since its inception, the Hoffer has become one of the largest international book awards for small, academic, and independent presses.”

NDSU Press Seeks Submissions for 7th Annual Poetry of the Plains & Prairies Award

North Dakota State University Press seeks poetry submissions of any style for our annual Poetry of the Plains and Prairies (POPP) Award and letterpress chapbook publication. While authors may call any place home, their submissions must deftly capture the feeling of, as well as the reality of, living on the plains and prairies. Authors may submit any number of poems equaling thirty to thirty-five pages in length, with no more than one poem per page. (Single poems may extend more than one page.) The selected poetry collection will be published as a limited-edition chapbook, hand-printed with antique letterpress equipment. Our finalist judge is Katherine Hoerth, winner of our 2021 POPP Award.

Simultaneous submissions with other presses are not allowed. Authors should include acknowledgment of poems previously published elsewhere. Authors may submit more than one manuscript, but only if there is no overlap in content. Manuscript pages should be numbered, and all work must be of the author’s own composition, free from copyright restrictions. Authors may not win the POPP Award in two consecutive years.

Submissions will be accepted at https://ndsupress.submittalbe.com/submit through March 17, 2022. The winning manuscript collection will be announced in May.

In the case of unforeseen circumstance, the press reserves the option not to publish a chapbook; all decisions of the press in this matter are final.

If selected for publication, the author will receive $200, our standard university press publishing contract with royalties, ten free copies, an author discount on purchases of additional copies, and national distribution. The author(s) must agree to give a public reading at a time and place in North Dakota (or via Zoom), convenient to NDSU Press and the author, the day of, or soon after, publication. There are no fees to enter this competition.

Now Accepting Submissions for the NDSU Press 2020 POPP Award

We’re looking for poetry! NDSU Press has opened its 2020 submissions portal for our Poetry of the Plains and Prairies (POPP) Award!

North Dakota State University Press seeks poetry submissions of any style for our annual POPP Award chapbook publication. While the author(s) may call any place home, their submissions must deftly capture the feeling of, as well as the reality of, living on the plains and prairies. Authors may submit any number of poems equaling thirty to thirty-five pages in length, with no more than one poem per page. (Single poems may extend more than one page.) The selected poetry collection will be published as a limited edition chapbook, hand-printed with antique letterpress equipment.

Our POPP Award submissions date ends March 17, 2020. Please follow our NDSU Press Submittable link for details.

NDSU Press publishing interns print the 2019 POPP Award chapbook, Harvest Widows, by Nick Bertelson (Missouri Valley, IA) at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum.