The Center for Literary Publishing—a Colorado State University publishing institution that provides graduate students with the hands-on experience of working at a small literary press—was recently awarded its twelfth grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
This year’s $15,000 in funding will support the publication of the latest title in the Mountain/West Poetry Series—Susto, by Tommy Archuleta—and two issues of Colorado Review, the acclaimed national literary journal founded in 1956 at CSU.
“While the NEA funding makes it possible to do this work, having the enthusiastic support and encouragement from our country’s premier arts-funding organization is also extraordinarily meaningful,” said Stephanie G’Schwind, the CLP’s director.
Established in the Department of English in 1992 by Professor Emeritus David Milofsky, the CLP dynamically partners with writers to bring exceptional fiction, poetry, and nonfiction to readers through a variety of platforms, while training and cultivating the publishing professionals of tomorrow through its internship program. Since its founding, more than 350 graduate students have apprenticed with the CLP. Former interns have been hired into publishing positions at Coffee House, the Sun, Seneca Review, Nelson Literary Agency, Wick Poetry Center, the Oxford University Press, and elsewhere.
“From the beginning, the Mountain/West Poetry Series was conceived as both a way to create a poetic conversation and as an opportunity for our graduate student interns to practice the art and craft of modern book production.” To date, G’Schwind said, more than fifty interns have served as copyeditors, typesetters, proofreaders, and designers to create twenty-one M/WPS books.
For MFA fiction graduate student and CLP intern Carolina Bucheli-Peñafiel, the experience of designing the cover for Archuleta’s first book was tremendously impactful.
“I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to work on Susto. It has allowed me to enhance and deepen my design skills, acquire experience in the process of publishing a book, and navigate the professional editorial world.”
As one of only 58 grants given in the Literary Arts category, the CLP’s award was part of nearly $28.8 million in Grants for Arts Projects that the NEA announced on Jan. 10 in its first significant funding announcement of 2023.
About Susto
Due out in March, Tommy Archuleta’s Susto surveys many settings: the body, the soul, and the terrain the soul encounters upon leaving the body. But the setting is also the high desert landscape that is the poet’s northern New Mexico home, a land whose beauty today is as silencing and brutal as was the colonization of the region and her Anasazi descendants by Archuleta’s Spanish antipasados.
As a debut author, Archuleta’s expectations of collaborating with the CLP team were fully exceeded—and then some.
“I could not have asked for a warmer, more welcoming home for Susto than the Center for Literary Publishing,” said Archuleta. “Apart from food and story, song is a chief preserver of culture. Becoming a Mountain/West Poetry Series author has given me the opportunity to preserve—through these poems—the tradition of curanderismo, as practiced in my northern New Mexican family. It’s a medicinal healing practice that dates back to 1598–my family being one of the many to arrive to this region as part of the Oñate Conquest.”
Tommy Archuleta is a mental health and substance abuse counselor for the New Mexico Corrections Department. His work has appeared in the New England Review, the Laurel Review, Lily Poetry Review, the Cortland Review, Guesthouse, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. A native of Santa Fe, New Mexico, he lives with his family on the Cochiti Reservation.
A featured guest of the Creative Writing Reading Series, along with Jos Charles, Archuleta will read from Susto on April 13, 2023 at 7:30 pm at the University Center for the Arts’ Runyan Music Hall.
Susto is available to order from CLP’s distributor, the University Press of Colorado: https://upcolorado.com/university-press-of-colorado/item/6293-susto
About the Mountain/West Poetry Series
Launched in 2011 with funding from the NEA, the M/WPS publishes one to two collections of poetry each year by poets living in the United States west of the Mississippi River, including Alaska, Hawaii, and the US Pacific Territories and seeks submissions that are relevant, environmentally conscious, and culturally engaged. The editors are interested in manuscripts that are vital in care, honest in ethics, formally inventive and astute, attuned to and questioning of tradition, historically aware, and oriented to the overlapping concerns of the earthly, animal, and human.
The series editors are Stephanie G’Schwind, Dan Beachy-Quick, Camille T. Dungy, Donald Revell (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), and Kazim Ali (University of California, San Diego).
The Department of English is in CSU’s College of Liberal Arts. For more information about the Center for Literary Publishing, including how to subscribe to the Colorado Review, visit coloradoreview.colostate.edu.
