Tag / NDSU Press

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Big Prize for a Little Book

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)

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C’mon in! The door’s open!

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).

by ndsupress

Fond Farewell

Note from NDSU Press Publisher Suzzanne Kelley

We are elated/sad to announce that Oliver West Sime, our Graduate Assistant in Publishing, has accepted an offer to work at the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting in St. Louis Park. This move is a perfect fit for Oliver, and of course it is the kind of career move we hope for all of our graduates. However, that means his last in-person day with NDSU Press is September 28. We are redirecting e-mail regarding fulfillment, marketing, and publicity from Oliver’s email to ndsu.press@ndsu.edu.

Oliver’s presence will be sorely missed. A master’s in History student, he has also taken part in Public History activities, most recently aiding in interpretation and planning activities at a museum in Minot. His varied roles with Thunder Radio, KNDS 96.3—the student-run radio station hosted by NDSU’s Communication department that features independent and alternative music—landed Oliver front and center as example of how students at NDSU are at the center of hands-on learning.

Oliver at the mic, in just one of his roles at NDSU, captured for the landing page at NDSU.edu website.

Likewise, Oliver’s work with NDSU Press captures his hands-on, real-world, responsibility-driven experience, first when he earned the Certificate in Publishing, followed by his many opportunities to meld his goals and aspirations with the aims of this decades-old university press. The dual mission of NDSU Press is to publish the best books and to provide fabulous opportunities—through our Certificate in Publishing and its unique relationship with NDSU Press—to prepare the next generation of publishers, in whatever form that might take. In Oliver’s case, his experiences here put him in perfect position to work as Communication Director at a non-profit museum.

Practicum in Publishing book team from February 2020. Working on Half the Terrible Things, a novel by Paul Legler, are (left to right) Zachary Vietz, Oliver Sime, Nataly Routledge, and Kalley Miller.

As Graduate Assistant in Publishing, Oliver has overseen all of our shipping operations, and—requiring more creative thinking and professional writing—he has taken on the nomination of books for awards, creating press releases and other physical and digital forms of outreach, and traveling to conferences and book festivals far and near as envoy for the press.

Oliver Sime, pointing out our listing among other stellar university presses at the Western History Association conference, Portland, OR.

Oliver credits his research activity and experiences with the Department of History, KNDS, and NDSU Press for providing him the opportunity for a fully-rounded resume in his job search. We hate to see you go, Oliver, but we’re so glad everything worked out beautifully for this next stage in your career.

by ndsupress

Birds of a Feather

Last Friday, friends and fans–birds of a feather, one might say–joined poet Margaret Rogal in a reading in Vermont to talk about birders, birding, poetry, and the North Dakota landscape. Reporting from Middlebury, Margaret shared her after-event thoughts:

a lovely reading [of her Field Notes] at the Jewish community house, outside in the parking lot. Beautiful evening—cool with stars appearing as the skies darkened. Twenty-five people in attendance. One person said I should consider the stage, and another said, “adorable.” Hmmm—rather different comments! I’m struck, as I read, again, how unusual Field Notes is—a combination of natural history, art—thanks to you, Mike [Jacobs] (people comment on the watercolors frequently)­—and language. I’m so glad you brought it into the world! And I still like the poems.

Hope all is well in North Dakota.

Cheers, 
Margi

Congratulations, Margi! Field Notes, poetry by Margaret Rogal, illustrated by Mike Jacobs, is the first volume of our Little Book about North Dakota series. Check out this terrific review of the work here: Mike Jacobs Always in Season: Whimsical poems capture North Dakota birds – Grand Forks Herald | Grand Forks, East Grand Forks news, weather & sports

Margaret Rogal, reading from Field Notes in Middlebury, VT

 

Here is a sample of a two-page spread from our debut Little Book about North Dakota, featuring a full-color illustration by Mike Jacobs and one of Rogal’s poems.

by ndsupress

NDSU Press Receives Grant

The NDSU Press has received a $15,000 grant from the Literary Arts Emergency Fund, which is administered by the Academy of American Poets, the Community of Literary Magazine and Presses and the National Book Foundation. In total, the fund has granted $4.3 million to 313 nonprofit literary arts organizations and publishers across the U.S. that have experienced continued financial losses due to COVID-19.

“Of the 313 presses receiving support, we are one of only seven university presses, including the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison, Letras Latinas at University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies and the University of Arizona Poetry Center,” said Suzzanne Kelley, NDSU Press editor in chief. “With paper shortages, higher costs and delays in printing and shipping, and multiple disruptions in the supply chain, we at NDSU Press are tasked daily to overcome industry challenges and expenses. This important one-time grant provides sure footing for our future.”

Check out the complete announcement at NDSU News: NDSU Press receives grant | NDSU News | NDSU

 

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Tune in Today at 5:00

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.

by ndsupress

A Ponder & a Podcast

a note from Suzzanne Kelley, Publisher, North Dakota State University Press

 

These cold and blustery northern plains days are perfect for sticking around the home-front, preferably indoors and near a fireplace. Friday is a work-from-home day for me, and I look forward to hearing the washer agitate and the dogs snore as I edit and write and read and ponder the business of publishing.

Things went kablooey last week, over the weekend, and on into this week. There are five of us holding down the fort at the Press—none of us full time, and some of us just a very little bit of time, but all of us pulling our weight . . . except that two tested positive for Covid (and a third had a scare this morning) . . . and one of our designers injured her back . . . and our other designer was out of town . . . and I accidentally deleted ALL of my emails (which are slowly being recovered) . . . which meant very little went according to my master plan. It is only now, at the end of this week, with everyone returning, slightly bedraggled but smiling and ready to pitch in, that I feel like we’re in forward motion again. In fact, this afternoon I turned off my email, shut my office door, and left my office only to refresh my coffee. I got enough good work done to lift my spirits. Supply-chain challenges and Covid be damned . . . we can do this!

In fact, we have all kinds of exciting happenings to share in the coming days and weeks. Here’s one piece now!

Check out this just-out-today announcement—featured on the NDSU News page!—about our brand-spankin’-new podcast: NDSU Press announces new podcast | NDSU News | NDSU

Announcing our brand new NDSU Press Podcast!

 

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Words by the Minute

note from Suzzanne Kelley, Publisher, NDSU Press

How fast do you read?

How about fifty pages in fifteen minutes? That is a pace with which I cannot compete, but Kyla Vaughan–an undergraduate at University of Wisconsin, Madison–consistently reads at that pace, and in the past year, she read 392 books, averaging more than 7 per week! Even when I shift from editor mode to just-enjoy-the-story mode, I cannot read that fast.

An exercise my Practicum in Publishing students will complete in a few weeks is to time how long it takes to read a chapter from the manuscripts they’re working from, and then to time themselves again when they are editing those same pages. In this fashion, they can mark an estimate for how many hours they need to block out in order to read and edit their manuscript projects. From my days as a freelance editor and from experience in teaching students to edit, I know that this exercise is an essential beginning to bidding out a job or completing a project by end of semester.

Practicum in Publishing book team from February 2020. Working on Half the Terrible Things, a novel by Paul Legler, are (left to right) Zachary Vietz, Oliver Sime, Nataly Routledge, and Kalley Miller.

The students think they are ready, and I know they are eager to begin, but we have some preparatory work to do. For example, in the upcoming weeks, they must become proficient at several tasks. Among those tasks are to:

  • practice awareness. Based on terminology coined by Karen Judd, editor and author, students will learn to attend to cognitive aspects of reading. Some readers are naturally observant, noticing and remembering where on a page some detail of a story appeared; catching that a name was spelled one way in an early chapter and another way in a subsequent chapter; watching for red flags of a factual nature. My students must double-down on being aware and observant.
  • become familiar with The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition. My publishing mentor, Mary Ann Blochowiak (long-time editor for The Chronicles of Oklahoma), tasked me with reading the first one hundred pages of the CMOS many years ago. This exercise formed my understanding of how books are published, physically and in accord with standards of practice. The reading assignment is a gift I pay forward to my students. Students will also be tasked with learning how to consult CMOS when formatting a manuscript for publication and when searching for guidance in matters of copyright, editing, punctuation, and proofreading. (Really, it’s all fun!)
  • learn to use standard proofreaders’ marks. As in all matters for book publishing, we rely upon the guidance of The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition. Using the CMOS Proofreaders’ Marks, we’ll practice posting carets, circling and underlining, and implementing various curlicues.
  • build a style sheet. We’ll draft a style sheet together for practice, and then students will be able to devise style sheets built upon their specific manuscript projects. Style sheets are records of the choices we make when editing. They are documents made to ensure the book interior is consistent throughout. 

This short list hardly encompasses all the actions students will take, but you can see they are in for some close reading in the coming weeks. As we carefully scrutinize every sentence, this will not be the year to set any book-reading records, but it is the semester to dive deep into the process of transforming a manuscript into a book. 

 

Related notes:

Article about Kyla Vaughan: “Need a New Year’s Resolution? Read a book a day. This undergrad did.” by Doug Erickson, University of Wisconsin–Madison, January 14, 2022.

Karen Judd. Copyediting: A Practical Guide. Menlo Park, CA: Crisp Publications, 2001.

The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Paul Legler. Half the Terrible Things. North Dakota State University Press, 2020.

 

Episode 1: Prakash Mathew on His New Book, We Are Called . . . To Do the Right Thing

North Dakota State University Press Podcast
North Dakota State University Press Podcast
Episode 1: Prakash Mathew on His New Book, We Are Called . . . To Do the Right Thing
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This is the first episode of the NDSU Press Podcast. In this episode, Prakash Mathew, the author of We Are Called to do the Right Thing: A Practical Guide for Leaders Based on Personal Reflections & Experiences from a Longtime Education Leader, sits down with host Oliver West Sime to discuss his leadership philosophies, his administrative career at NDSU, and the press circuit which followed the publication of his first book.

Prakash Mathew moved from India to Fargo in 1971. He Received a masters degree from North Dakota State University before embarking on a 38 year career at the university. Mathew worked his way up to Vice President for Student Affairs. We Are Called to do the Right Thing is Prakash Mathew’s first book.

North Dakota State University Press stimulates interdisciplinary scholarship of the Red River Valley, North Dakota, and the Great Plains, publishing peer reviewed scholarship, fiction, poetry, and more. To learn more about NDSU Press or purchase Prakash Mathews book, visit www.ndsupress.org or our Facebook page.

NDSU Press: Giving the region a voice.