Tag / Anthony J. Albright

by ndsupress

Cover Reveal: The Distance That Isn’t Miles

from NDSU Press Publisher Suzzanne Kelley

This Sunday and Monday, our Intro to Publishing students will commence printing the covers for our newest Poetry of the Plains & Prairies (POPP) Award winner, The Distance That Isn’t Miles, by Anthony (Tony) J. Albright. We’ll meet at The Hunter Times, located at Bonanzaville, where pressmen Allan Burke and Sawyer Flynn have been prepping the Chandler & Price letterpress machine and making sure our printing plate is working in good order.

The selected cover concept for The Distance That Isn’t Miles.

 

This collection is about a Choctaw man (the author) who enters the military and becomes a parachute rigger. That means he’s in charge of packing parachutes for his army peers to use when they jump.

After reading and discussing the poetry collection, students prepared a creative brief for our designer, Deb Tanner, who does the bulk of our design work. The brief included senses and colors and emotions evoked by the poems, along with a summary of the collection and favored poem samples. We expressed a desire to add a design embellishment, perhaps something to represent parachute fabric or other textures to resonate with a rigger’s work.

Tony also provided specifics about parachutes; rigger uniforms and colors; suspension lines for parachutes; planes and helicopters commonly used with paratroopers; and more. He included these excerpts from his Author Questionnaire:

This book is therapy for me. I was able to cast many of my personal stories . . . and explore the ways in which my branching web of choices led to one outcome or another. In writing these poems, I found myself returning to the emotional residue of those years: the impressions, sensory flashes, the moments that never fully left my body . . . [These impressions/sense memories] reveal my in-most thoughts of my journey to climbing out of the circumstances of my childhood and end just short of the series of events that led to my successful and comfortable life of today. In that sense, the book became a way of honoring the younger version of myself who survived those years. At the same time, a literature of the Choctaw Nation is currently lacking, especially in specific use of the language . . . the inclusion of Chahta Anumpa isn’t decorative–it’s structural. It’s how memory actually sounds in my mind, how identity assets itself even in places designed to strip it away.


Our designer provided five concepts for us to choose from. Here is an excerpt from Deb’s description of the concept we chose. 

These are variations using the silk ribbon woven through the cover. The first page shows what would be printed; the last page shows how the ribbon could be woven into the cover. When reading about being a rigger, I imagine it to be a very precise, exacting job, which is the direction I went with the text and feel of this option. Very structured, very secure. The woven ribbon also evokes the sense of a road, which references miles. 

Upon seeing the concepts, Tony wrote:

I think the one I like best is the last one in the 5-page file, where the sage is woven through the title and continues on the other side. I think it’s a good analog for a journey in green with multiple fits and starts. 

Our author, students, designer, and I were unanimous in our selection! We have since chosen a brown cardstock and a sage-colored ribbon. Once the covers are printed, we’ll thread the ribbon to complete the full cover effect.

 

In the next couple of weeks, after the ink dries on the covers, we’ll add the satin ribbon embellishments. Then, in early October, we will print the interior pages at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum. There, the students will print, fold, and assemble all the pages; stitch; and trim each chapbook. Tony will join us, and he’ll autograph each copy as it rolls off the assembly line. Copies will be available for purchase upon our return.

If you’d like to reserve limited edition copies, we are accepting advance purchases here: The Distance That Isn’t Miles. 

by ndsupress

The Distance That Isn’t Miles: Our 2026 POPP Award Winner

Every year, we host our annual Poetry of the Plains & Prairies (POPP) Award competition. In 2026, we are pleased to announce that Anthony J. Albright is our winning author. This fall, we will letterpress publish Tony’s chapbook-length poetry collection, The Distance That Isn’t Miles, as our 11th chapbook in the series.

Tony will receive nationally distributed publication, ten comp copies, $400 ($200 at the signing of his contract + $200 when he serves as next year’s finalist judge), and our author’s discount.

Tony is a Choctaw writer, army veteran, and scholar whose work traces memory, landscape, and recovery across the Plains. His poetry and prose appear in North Dakota Quarterly, Hawaii Pacific Review, and Issued: Stories of Service. He holds a PhD in Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture from North Dakota State University.

 

Our POPP Award competition is conducted with double blind peer review. This year we had ten in-house readers and two finalist judges. Usually, we have just one finalist judge, but co-authors won last year, so Tony received double-good powerful praise. 😊 We’ve included both of the finalist judges’ comments below, and we’ve changed the pronouns they used for the narrator–since they did not know the author’s identity–to Tony’s name. The finalist judges are Josh Gaines and Ben Clark, co-authors of After the Floating Barn and other fine works of poetry and prose.


From Josh: 

Ish haklo ho? The Distance That Isn’t Miles is a military journey through narrative poems that carried me through places I am familiar with as a veteran, but unfamiliar with as a non-Native American. This book creates a new lens, changing the view of common experiences into the uncommon, the spiritual, and even the magical. Tony Albright writes, “I feel the land daring me to rise. I whisper holisso, book-spirit, teach me how to read this place before it reads me first,” while at the same time this book is teaching me how to read it, how to experience. Words give dimension to thought, and so with new words I learn a new way to think. This holisso reminds me of the things I value, of promises I’ve made, and of lives I gave up before I could even name the one I was already living.
“Every mile feels borrowed from another life,” writes Albright. And whose life or lives we are living, our own, our ancestors, our government’s? The narrator begins with putting his life in the hands of the military with a signature, and the military does what it does and accepts the offer. Nothing can be the same past this moment. The world grows smaller as it is crossed. There is training, gas to breathe, wars to witness and bear the scars of, while the narrator clings to vanished versions of themselves. T.S. Eliot said, “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” Distance That Isn’t Miles says, maybe not. It asks, what happens if we can never truly arrive where we started because part of us can never leave where we’ve been. It asks, what if home is only a thing one can leave.

 

From Ben:

I was pulled into the journey of The Distance That Isn’t Miles and the effortless way the poems worked together in a uniform, chronological narrative, while also standing alone as individual pieces. What a great use of the chapbook format. And what wonderful language: descriptive, understated, emotive, and masterfully paced: “Her fingers are small storms,” “windows rattling like restless bones,” “humming hvshi hvshi / under my breath, the syllables slipping / like sparks between whistling teeth,” and “Dawn here is a blade: sharp, sudden, / cutting the night from the day with no apology.”
This is a narrator that is stripped of everything, remade, but is also resilient enough, thankfully, to keep hold of his language, which he uses like a prayer, a shield, a song passed down through generations. This language is the road, if not back to who they were before the military, then to the version of themselves that “can fall— / not metaphorically, / but literally, repeatedly, / with something like grace.” Repeatedly, the key word in this poem, as it implies rising from the fall with something like grace as well.

 

Past POPP Award Publications:

  • 2025 After the Floating Barn, by Joshua C. Gaines (Nebraska) and Ben Clark (Minnesota)
  • 2024 Dakota Dreaming, by Marjorie Buettner (Minnesota)
  • 2023 Forgotten Frequencies, by Brendan Stermer (Minnesota)
  • 2022 Surrender Dorothy, by Brett Salsbury (Nevada)
  • 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, by Denise Lajimodiere (North Dakota)
  • 2016 Land of Sunlit Ice, by Larry Woiwode (North Dakota)

Next year’s POPP Award submissions period will be open (as usual) from January 17 through March 17. Poets, please mark your calendar! Submissions can be uploaded here when the portal opens: NDSU Press Submission Manager.