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!
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:
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.
“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.”
Note from NDSU Press Publisher Suzzanne Kelley
We are thrilled that our first Little Book about North Dakota has made it as a finalist in the Independent Book Publishers Association Benjamin Franklin Award Program!
With more than fifty competitive categories, IBPA recognizes “excellence in book editorial and design” and is “regarded as one of the highest national honors for independent publishers.” More than 160 book publishing professionals administer and assess the competition, including librarians, bookstore owners, reviewers, designers, publicity managers, and editors. That our first launch for the Little Book about North Dakota Series has made it to the top in the large category of Poetry is a huge pat on the back for our author, Margaret Rogal; series editor and illustrator, Mike Jacobs; and designers Jamie Trosen (cover) and Deb Tanner (interior). Dreaming up the series was the work of Suzzanne Kelley (editor in chief) and Ana Rusness-Petersen (graduate of the Certificate in Publishing). The NDSU Press Editorial Advisory Board unanimously endorsed moving forward with the series in March 2020.
Each of the three finalists are already winners as one will take the Gold Award and the others will win Silver. The Gold winner will receive an engraved trophy marking the author’s achievement. The winners are “announced to major trade journals, select libraries, all IBPA social media channels . . . and more.”
In addition, all winners (Gold and Silver) receive:
Recognition prior to the awards ceremony on the IBPA website.
Archived listing after the awards ceremony on the IBPA website.
Two tickets to the awards ceremony recognizing all of the award winners.
15% off all IBPA marketing programs during the book(s) winning year.
A press release template to use when personally announcing the winning book(s).
A personalized award certificate.
Special award stickers to affix to the winning books.
While this is the first time we’ve had a Little Book in the running, it is not our first star-studded appearance at the IBPA awards. In 2021 we won Gold with Denise K. Lajimodiere’s collection of poetry, His Feathers Were Chains, and in 2022 we won Silver for The Night We Landed on the Moon: Essays between Exile & Belonging, a memoir by Debra Marquart.
Help us keep tabs on this year’s announcement of the Gold and Silver winners by checking in at this website: Winners: Poetry | IBPA Book Award (ibpabenjaminfranklinaward.com)
For a more detailed essay about our Little Book about North Dakota Series, follow this link: Little Books with Big Impact | North Dakota State University Press (ndsupress.org)
All of our books are available at Ingram, Amazon, your favorite independent bookstore, and our online store: Welcome to North Dakota State University!. NDSU Press (nbsstore.net)
Publisher’s note from Suzzanne Kelley
Here you see visible proof of why moving our chapbook publishing project from the spring to the fall semester was a good choice. Iron Man Tracy Moch, with the South Central Threshing Association, illustrates how this winter is progressing as he works to gain access to The Braddock News Letterpress Museum, located in Braddock, North Dakota. As our spring semester draws to a close, we would have been hard pressed—with snow piled high—to conduct our letterpress printing project of printing, assembling, stitching, trimming, and numbering individual chapbook copies. Instead, our students in the Certificate in Publishing program now use the spring semester to acquire our next chapbook collection in preparation for publishing in the fall.
Facing east from inside The Braddock News Letterpress Museum. Thank you, Allan Burke, Pressman Extraordinaire, for this picture and the photo of Tracy. Between his work at preserving and operating The Hunter Times (Bonanzaville, West Fargo, ND) and The Braddock News Letterpress Museum, Allan has his hands full of good projects!
These days, as we hunker down in the wake of more blizzardy weather, we continue the process of giving first reads to dozens of manuscript submissions for our 8th Poetry of the Plains & Prairies (POPP) Award. Students learn how the acquisition process works for literary press prizes.
The first step is to learn how to navigate our online submissions portal at Submittable, a platform used by more than 11,000 organizations. Submittable is known to poets and writers of all genres as a place to submit their work for publication consideration. In a 2023 review conducted by FinancesOnline, Submittable ranked 3rd of 253 popular apps used for applicant tracking. I chose Submittable because of its familiarity among authors at large, its user-friendly design, and its price. Submittable is an easy place for students to see how publishers (and nonprofits and institutions offering grants and scholarships) are able to receive and track submissions, and it is a place where authors can keep track of all the presses and magazines where their work is being considered.
At Submittable, we are able to design our online entry forms. Here is what the form for submitting POPP Award nominations looks like.
Once manuscripts start rolling in, students in the Practicum in Publishing—taught every spring—learn how to assess manuscripts based on the aim of the POPP Award series and the mission of the press. They will each read each of the submissions, ranking them in accord with this call for submissions:
North Dakota State University Press seeks poetry submissions of any style for our annual Poetry of the Plains and Prairies 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.
We accept new submissions for the POPP Award every year from January 17 through March 17. Answering a series of questions about the aim and mission for each submission, students—undergraduate and graduate, coming from studies in multiple disciplines—take part in winnowing the submissions down to about seven to ten finalists. Where submission selections are close, we meet to advocate for favored collections. Thus, the experience prepares students for work at other literary presses, where interns or other in-house readers pore through what they call a “slush pile,” discerning which manuscripts should go forward for further review and acquisition. Our finalist selections are then sent to the previous year’s POPP Award winner, who serves as our finalist judge and selects the winning manuscript.
Our team of students learn about the history and form of chapbooks in the Introduction to Publishing class. They take the POPP Award-winner’s manuscript, chosen in Practicum in Publishing, and they are introduced to the line-editing process, standards for book design, selection of cover art, building a copyright page, and developing marketing and publicity plans.
Instead of printing, assembling, stitching, and trimming chapbooks at the Letterpress Museum during our chill “spring” months, the hands-on labor takes place in the more accommodating fall months. How lucky we are to have the good fortune of reading poetry manuscripts indoors, while the snow piles up around us!
For more information about the Certificate in Publishing, check out our course descriptions for undergraduate and graduate students. If you are age 65 or older, and you would like to audit the publishing courses for free, check out the option in Project 65.
Destiny Manifested, by Bonnie Larson Staiger, was our first POPP Award chapbook publication solicited through competition. The award was first named Voices of the Plains and Prairies, and—in 2019—the award name changed to Poetry of the Plains and Prairies Award (the POPP Award).
The 2021 NDSU Press Party had presentations from Denise Lajimodiere, Paul Legler, Carolyn Dahl, and the friends and family of Timothy Murphy. The NDSU Press Party provides an annual presentation from the authors who published with NDSU Press each year and is held the first Thursday in March.
Note from NDSU Publisher Suzzanne Kelley
Tune in today for this weekend’s edition of Prairie Public Presents, and you’ll see author/artist/academic Denise Lajimodiere read from her newest book with NDSU Press: His Feathers Were Chains. The program is a recording of Denise’s recent performance at the Plains Art Museum, kicking off local programming for the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read.
I had the good fortune of attending Denise’s reading, with fabulous musical interpretations from musicians and composers at Concordia College AND drummers and jingle dress dancers. Here is a link to tonight’s program on Prairie Public and, below this message, you’ll find some photos I took on the night of the original performance.
from our friends at North Dakota State University Relations…
The annual NDSU Press Party, scheduled for Thursday, March 4, will be held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The event, now in its 6th year, will feature readings by four NDSU Press authors and a presentation by the NDSU Press cover designer.
Participants are asked to register.
NDSU Press publisher Suzzanne Kelley is set to begin the party at 7 p.m.
“We’ll miss our Cat Sank Trio musician friends and the delicious hors d’oeuvres from NDSU Catering, but we’ll relish the opportunity to hear our authors share their inspirations for—and some passages from—their newest publications,” Kelley said. “Attendees will learn the secret code for discount prices and we’ll interrupt the program briefly for some giveaways, too.”
Her welcome will be followed by readings presented by:
• Denise Lajimodiere, who wrote “His Feathers Were Chains”
• Paul Legler, who wrote “Half the Terrible Things”
• Jamie Trosen, graphics artist, will give a talk on book cover design
• Carolyn Dahl, who wrote a book of poetry titled “A Muddy Kind of Love”
• Timothy Murphy’s family and friends will read from his book “Hiking All Night”
The NDSU Press Party is expected to conclude about 8:30 p.m.
As a student-focused, land-grant, research university, we serve our citizens.
Publisher note from Suzzanne Kelley
*If you are a letterpress printer, please see my purple note at the end of this message.
Since 2016, the NDSU Intro to Publishing students, working with NDSU Press, have had the chance to learn how to operate turn-of-the-20th-century letterpresses. We begin with a Saturday at Hunter Times, a museum located in West Fargo at Bonanzaville. Having learned about Chandler & Price letterpresses and safety measures, students take a turn at letterpress printing. Allan Burke–an expert in all matters about letterpress history and operations–provides a tour, and then in small-group format, students begin the process of letterpress printing the chapbook covers for the current winner of our Poetry of Plains and Prairies Award.
Students at Hunter Times, learning to operate the Chandler & Price letterpress, one page at a time. Left to right: Raechel Heuer, Sydney Olstad, Ken Smith.
Later in the semester, on a Friday afternoon, we load up a caravan of cars and head for The Braddock News Letterpress Museum, located on the vast grounds of the South Central Threshing Association. The drive is about two-and-a-half hours from campus, and for some of my students, it is the farthest west they’ve ever been.
On Friday night, our host, Allan Burke, gives the students yet another tour. The Braddock News Letterpress Museum is home to multiple pieces of equipment dating from the late 1800s to the 1950s. Here, the students have hands-on access to Chandler & Price letterpresses, a 1940s stitcher, and a trimmer, dating also from the turn of the 20th century.
Fall 2019 Intro to Publishing students at the Braddock News Letterpress Museum, working on the chapbook publication, Harvest Widows, by Nick Bertelson. Students pictured from left to right are Laura Ellen Brandjord, Kalley Miller, Ryan Nix, Nataly Routledge, Zachary Vietz, and Alexis Melby.
Following our museum tour, we dine sumptuously courtesy of the Threshers Association Iron Men and board officers, some of whom do the welcoming, cooking, serving, and cleaning. Initial printing begins after supper.
Publishing student Samantha Soukup dishes up some homemade stew at Miss Kitty’s, the food hub (and pitstop) for our publishing team while on site at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum.
The students learn about moveable type, and we generally put that knowledge to work when we print our covers. For printing the interior, however, we do resort to some modernization. It would take too long to set type for the forty interior pages, so we order up raised-magnesium printing plates instead. Each plate prints two pages on one side of a sheet of paper. When the papers dry, we can flip them over to print two more pages.
Sample plates for printing pages from Harvest Widows, by Nick Bertelson. (Photo by Tim Jensen Studios.)
Maggie Krull, setting sheets out to dry. In the background, Angela Beaton and volunteer Jerome Schwartzenberger, retired publisher of the Napoleon [ND] Homestead, make sure everything is right.
Our team finishes up the final copies of Land of Sunlit Ice, by North Dakota Poet Laureate Larry Woiwode, the first chapbook project of our series. From left to right: Sydney Olstad, Amanda Biles, Jerome Schwartzenberger, Raechel Heuer, Clarence Hertz, Suzzanne Kelley, Angela Beaton, Allan Burke, Maggie Krull, and Ken Smith.
We start this enterprise as amateurs, and we finish as proficient Devils Printers…the official name for our interns with experience under their belts and ink under their fingernails.
In this, the year of the pandemic, our options for continuation of this splendid enterprise have become limited for the production of our newest addition to the chapbook series, A Muddy Kind of Love, by Carolyn Dahl. We must cut out our trip to Braddock. We’ll still meet face-to-face in small groups (optional, not required) at Hunter Times to print our covers for the newest addition to our chapbook series. Our current plan (subject to revision) is to hire a professional letterpress printer to print and assemble the interior. If you or someone you know fits the bill, please contact Suzzanne Kelley post haste for details. Contact information is available at our website.
Hear ye! Hear ye!
NDSU Press is pleased to announce our 5th Annual NDSU Press Party is about to commence! Free and open to the public, hors d’oeuvres and cash bar, music and readings, prose and poetry, cake—who could ask for more? Well, what the heck, since it’s our 70th anniversary, let’s throw in a 25 percent discount on book purchases and some door prizes, too!
When: Thursday, March 5, 2020, from 7 PM – 9 PM
Where: Harry D. McGovern Alumni Center, 1241 University Dr N, Fargo, ND
This year’s featured titles and authors:
NDSU Press aims to stimulate and coordinate interdisciplinary scholarship throughout the Red River Valley, state of North Dakota and the plains of North America. The press publishes peer-reviewed scholarship shaped by national or international events and comparative studies. NDSU Press operates under the umbrella of the North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies.
This project is supported in part by generous donors to the NDSU Press Fund; the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences; and a grant from the North Dakota Council on the Arts, which receives funding from the state legislature and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Hear ye! Hear ye!
NDSU Press is pleased to announce our 5th Annual NDSU Press Party is about to commence! Free and open to the public, hors d’oeuvres and cash bar, music and readings, prose and poetry, cake—who could ask for more? Well, what the heck, since it’s our 70th birthday, let’s throw in a 25 percent discount on book purchases and some door prizes, too!
When: Thursday, March 5, 2020, from 7 PM – 9 PM
Where: Harry D. McGovern Alumni Center, 1241 University Dr N, Fargo, ND
This year’s featured titles and authors:
NDSU Press aims to stimulate and coordinate interdisciplinary scholarship throughout the Red River Valley, state of North Dakota and the plains of North America. The press publishes peer-reviewed scholarship shaped by national or international events and comparative studies. NDSU Press operates under the umbrella of the North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies.
This project is supported in part by generous donors to the NDSU Press Fund; the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences; and a grant from the North Dakota Council on the Arts, which receives funding from the state legislature and the National Endowment for the Arts.
