PRESS 254 is a handmade teaching chapbook press founded by Steve Halle (Director of the Publications Unit at Illinois State University) in 2012. Each year we publish four chapbooks in two distinct series—currently, the Sutherland Series, which publishes writers from Illinois State University and the Bloomington-Normal community, and Spoonfuls, in collaboration with SRPR (Spoon River Poetry Review). All chapbooks are edited, designed, produced, and marketed by undergraduate students enrolled in English 254: Introduction to Professional Publishing, taught by Publications Unit staff. Because of its structure as a teaching chapbook press, publication is an intentionally collaborative process between authors and students—beginning with a “meet the author” day and culminating in a launch reading during which students introduce the authors and their work.
Before helping run PRESS 254 as Assistant Director of the Publications Unit, I was one of its Sutherland Series authors. From 2019–2024 I was a PhD English Studies / Creative Writing student at ISU, and during my studies I was asked if I’d like to publish a chapbook with the press. Having now been on both sides of the publishing process makes me more fully appreciate the structure of the press and the opportunities it affords authors and students alike. When Halle founded the press, the English 254 course taught editing and publishing concepts using units, textbooks, editing tests, layout tests, and the like, and he really wanted to implement a version of the course with project-based learning and real projects. After brainstorming some ideas that included using his online journal Seven Corners as a vehicle for applied learning, he came up with the idea to publish chapbooks by recent alumni who had received the Sutherland Fellowship, which is a distinction awarded to incoming creative writing Master’s students—one in prose and one in poetry in most years. Sutherland Fellow alums would receive an email and have the option to send a trove of creative work that Halle and summer interns and grad workers would develop into a chapbook manuscript or submit a finished manuscript without developmental editing.
The ongoing teaching chapbook press and workshop concept for PRESS 254 has also included partnerships with reading series, such as the Bloomington-Normal-based Word Bombing, and collaborations with local writers and writing groups like The Word Weavers, before settling into an ongoing collaboration with SRPR. The project-based learning environment of PRESS 254 raises the stakes for students and accelerates their learning progress. It is also emblematic of Halle’s thinking as an administrator, where he prizes win-win or, in this case, win-win-win thinking in his efforts as head of the Publications Unit. For PRESS 254, publishing studies students win by getting to work on real chapbook projects every semester; creative writing alumni win by being able to have a significant, early career chapbook publication; and English 254 instructors win by having the opportunity to have every semester be filled by the challenge of completing new works, by new authors, with a new set of emerging publishing professionals.
photos:
(top) Cover and interior of the Spring 2026 Spoonfuls titles—Everything Small Is Moving by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, and Inhale the Ghost by Nicholas Alti.
(lower)
PRESS 254 students binding chapbooks
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Phil Spotswood is a poet from Alabama, and Assistant Professor of English at Huntingdon College. His most recent work can be found in Action, Spectacle, mercury firs, and ritual dagger. His chapbook, The God of Knots, is out now with bedfellows. You can find more of his work at https://www.philspotswood.com.
