Returned to campus to find our distributor requesting immediate shipments of books by Jesme, Maloutas, Henry, Ackerson-Kiely, and Strickland. Also found the Dan Beachy-Quick chapbook from the printer! Gorgeous. Haven’t figured out how to price it yet.
MFA Series: Katy Lederer reads Nov. 4
Author/Poet Katy Lederer will read at Boise State University this coming Tuesday, November 4th. The event will be held at 7:30 P.M. in the Farnsworth Room at the Student Union Building. This is part of the MFA Reading Series and is free and open to the public.
A Brief Bio:
Katy Lederer is the author of the poetry collection, Winter Sex (Verse Press, 2002) and the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown, 2003), which Publishers Weekly included on its list of the Best Nonfiction Books of the Year and Esquire Magazine named one of its eight Best Books of the Year. Her second poetry book, The Heaven-Sent Leaf, was released by BOA Editions in the fall of 2008.
Katy Lederer’s poems and prose have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Harvard Review, GQ, and elsewhere. She has been anthologized in Body Electric (Norton), From Poe to the Present: Great American Prose Poems (Scribner), and State of the Union (Wave Books), among other compilations.
Again, the event is FREE, and books will be available for purchase.
Hope to see you there!
Wednesday
VOTED!
…and went to the dentist.
Ahsahta-wise, worked on cover for Kate Greenstreet’s new book. Haven’t heard from Jeff Clark yet on Maloutas and Jesme backs. Heard from C.D. Wright that she won’t be at AWP to read with Maloutas, alas.
Found a reference to “T.S. Eliot’s ‘Four Quarts'” in a student paper…
Tuesday
Good news: the Dean read enough of my Ahsahta annual report to drop me a note about it. He was not completely discouraging about our request for $4,000 in additional annual funding, though he seems to think that the request for travel funding was for students, not for me. He recognizes that Ahsahta’s success is good for the University. He took no note of my announcement that I am leaving the press in 2013. Maybe he thinks I didn’t mean it?
Somehow it took all a.m. to answer mail, take care of sending review copies to people who want them, and (new, least favorite task!) invite people to join Ahsahta’s Facebook group. I still have to write Jeff Clark about the backs of the Jesme and Maloutas books.
Mostly, Tuesday is a classroom day: I am in the Art classroom 4:30pm to just before 6pm, when my Grad Seminar in Poetry & Poetics meets — and today I have to deliver my paper! Luckily I feel very prepared.
Monday
I spent much of today dealing with Rachel Loden’s book, which is being overhauled — she’s sending me a new Word file to edit with rearranged poems, a new poem, and complete acknowledgments, dedications, etc. We exchanged several e-mails and then had a half-hour conversation by telephone trying to figure out how to go. She wants, also, to hire a publicist to help her promote the book since she is not comfortable planning that on her own and I have given her all the help I can. It’s on my to-do list — Lytton Smith is in this business, I believe, and I’ll drop him an e-mail.
Over the weekend, I updated Charles O. Hartman’s web page with three MP3’s he’d recorded of him reading three of the poems from his book. I also added a link to an interview Brigitte Byrd did with Oranges and Sardines.
On the academic side, I wrote a little paper for my own ENGL532 class, since the person whose paper was due today has dropped the class. Title: “We Have Met the Enemy, and They Is Us: The Troubled and Pressured Pronoun in the Later Works of Juliana Spahr.” I’d assigned two respondents to each paper, and they needed a paper to respond to . . . therefore, I trotted out my academic prose style.
Spending today refreshing myself on Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. I don’t remember its being so sad. I remembered the funnier parts — Geryon and his mother, and his autobiography in sculpture. Such a pleasure to sit and read with a nice cup of coffee over in the library!
This week’s work
I thought I’d go over the work I accomplished this week for Ahsahta Press.
I spent most of the week trying to find out how much money Ahsahta Press had in its accounts so that I could with confidence arrange for the reprints of G.E. Patterson’s To and From, Susan Tichy’s Bone Pagoda, and Susan Briante’s Pioneers in the Study of Motion. The issue is complicated because our cover designer, Jeff Clark, doesn’t want his covers reproduced as digitally printed covers (which is what Bookmobile does), and I’m trying to honor that — but it’s more expensive. It turned out that no deposits had been made to the Ahsahta account for six to eight weeks because our financial person has been out of the office for that long with back surgery, and the replacement hadn’t made any deposits. It turns out there were over $4300 worth of checks awaiting deposit, so I easily had enough money for reprints. The dept. secretary walked them over and I went ahead and ordered the Patterson reprint from Thomson-Shore.
I put together a full-page ad for the SPD spring catalog. It’s our first, but SPD has been great for us in the past two years, putting six of our books on the best-seller list. It took about four hours.
I logged into JacketCaster, which is the service that uploads book information, cover images, etc., to all the online services, the Library of Congress, and others. It’s a long process to enter the information for just one book (you have to pull the endorsements, the jacket copy, resize the cover twice, fill in the Library of Congress info, etc.), and I was entering it for both Kath Jesme’s THE PLUM-STONE GAME and Barbara Maloutas’s THE WHOLE MARIE. I checked today and Amazon.com has both the books listed.
I set up a web page so people ordering the book from England can add the international postage. At the moment, that’s $11.95 in an international mailer. The university dropped DHL as a carrier, which is a blessing since they’ve mangled at least three of our deliveries.
I also set up the web pages for Jesme and Maloutas books. I now have to have these ready at the same time we mail out galleys, because the galleys refer to the websites. There are six pages for each site: the home page for the book, the author statement, the author bio, the sample poem, the audio page, and the reviews page.
I did a complete new layout of Ben Doller’s book. He’d sent me a newer version of his manuscript, and it was easier for me to redo it from the getgo than to move the pages around & reproof. That took most of a day; then I went through and proofed it against the Word file, wrote a bunch of author queries (he doesn’t like to capitalize “French,” but he does it on purpose), and then put in his corrections. That should be ready to go to the galley printer whenever I have a finished cover. Carrie Adams’s book is already ready, which is good. So is Rachel’s!
So went the week. There were also my grad seminar and ENGL406 classes, plus my painting class.
New blog
Right now, I’m waiting for the office staff to get back (the department office has been closed for about an hour), so am testing the features of this new blog I’ve been given, courtesy of the English department. I’ve been having a heckuva time trying to get the cover artist for Ahsahta Press paid for his last two covers and as well getting our last reader her check. Our usually redoutable financial person is out with back surgery, and everything is falling behind — not good if you’re actually a business, which Ahsahta Press pretends to be.
I think I’ll try to restrict this blog to goings-on about the Department, the MFA Program, Ahsahta Press and Boise. That is, I won’t be blogging about politics, which is actually the foremost thing on my mind right now.
The Unacknowledged Legislator 