Maple House Fellowships

Maple House Fellowships are an opportunity for young printers to work at Sutton Hoo Press and learn the craft and trade of literary fine press printing, book design, and editing. Fellows assist the director with SHP projects and shop management, and earn time at the press to produce their own projects. They are tutored as they work and introduced to other members of the book community. Fellows take residence at the press and are sometimes offered a small stipend. Prospective fellows would be familiar with the press, its publications and mission, and would have pre-fellowship experience working in letterpress. There is no application process. After Fall 2004, the Maple House Fellowship will be called the Alpenhouse Fellowship as the press takes up its new location in the woods of the Stockton Valley in Minnesota.

Zachary Cody Lee Carlsen was the 2004 Maple House Fellow and the 2005 Alpenhouse Fellow. Pressbooks under his imprint, Gendun Editions, founded in 2003, include Shakespeare’s Wages by Marvin Bell and A Peal of Sonnets by Alan Michael Parker. Zachary’s work on Sutton Hoo Press projects includes William Mathews’ Provisions, Mark Doty’s Fire to Fire and Peter Everwine’s What a Word Dreamt.

Zachary holds a B.A. in English and French and is pursuing an M.F.A. in poetry at the University of Montana in Missoula. He has received scholarships for achievement in letters and humanities, and academic achievement, as well as grants and awards for poetic and creative work. He studied at the Paul Valery Institute for Languages in Montpelier, France and taught English in Belfort and Besançon, where he lived for two years. In 2008 he finished a translation of the Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars’ complete poems. His own poems have appeared in various publications including The Cimmaron Review and Dislocate. He is also a marathoner, visual artist, drummer, and advocate for adults with disabilities. To see his fine press projects, visit him at www.gendun.com.

Allison Quam is a graduate of the University of Maryland’s Creative Writing Program where she received a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry. For three consecutive summers, from 2001 to 2003, Allison was a teaching assistant for the Center for Talented Youth, a Johns Hopkins University summer academic program. In 2002, she received a Lannan Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. She also earned a Master in Library Science from the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies in the spring of 2005.

Allison Quam is the founding director of Zumbro River Press, a literary fine press, which produces limited editions of poetry. Allison has helped with numerous projects at the press and was awarded a Maple House Fellowship in the summer of 2003. She published Stanley Plumly’s Nostalgia, as well as helping print Provisions: Lost Prose by William Matthews. She has also published Last Hour’s Light by Boyd White, They Gather by Casey VanderVeen, and Agon by Shara Lessley. Allison moved to Winona, Minnesota in 2005 to begin her career as an Academic Librarian at Winona State University where she continues to work.

Betsy Wheeler is a poet, bookmaker, and the editor and publisher of Pilot Books. She studied English and Book Arts as an undergraduate student at UW-LaCrosse in the mid-90’s where she was a Maple House Fellow, and earned her MFA in poetry at The Ohio State University. She held the Stadler Fellowship at Bucknell University from 2005-2007. Her chapbook, Start Here, was published in 2007 by Small Anchor Press and will be available in September 2009 in a Chinese translation. Her poems have appeared in such publications as: Bat City Review, The Journal, MiPoesias, Pebble Lake Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Octopus, and elsewhere. She lives in Northampton, MA where she writes, teaches, and studies yoga.