Program Spotlight: Small Publications

As you know, we put a lot of motor oil* into publishing the writing that our students do in our programs, but sometimes our big publications—the yearly anthology the OMNIBUS and our Young Authors Book Projects—steal the spotlight away from the many other ways we showcase our students’ writing.

In addition to our two professionally-bound publications, every year we also produce between a dozen and two dozen zines and chapbooks; these are books that we design to the highest standards, and then print and assemble right here at 826michigan.

We also feature much of our students’ writing online. On the twenty-sixth day of every month at 8:26am, we publish a blog post on our website with eight pieces of student writing, spotlighting a different program. Every season, we release a new edition of our online literary journal, The Circuit, which features writing from our workshops and drop-in writing programs from the past workshop schedule. In addition, we love to provide a platform for our students’ voices through our Soundcloud page—check it out, you can actually hear our students reading their stories and poems!

During the 2014-15 program year, we published twenty-two printed chapbooks and zines, featuring the writing of 561 students.** Online, we published ninety-six students in our online gallery, fifty-two students in The Circuit, and sixteen on our Soundcloud page.

We owe huge thanks to the following designers who spent countless hours designing, typesetting, and preparing the fabulous in-house publications we printed this year!

Hannah Bender

Ken Caldwell

Kaila Keller

Meline Topouzian

Sarah Wolf

*The robot equivalent of elbow grease

**This doesn’t even include the hundreds up small books we publish every year through our field trips program!