The PromptPress Artist Book Series
PromptPress publishes and produces multi-modal collaborations across the arts. We publish one artist book each year. Each project begins with an anchor prompt (this may be ekphrasitic, such as a body of work from a visual artist; or it may be a written prompt that deals with a pressing issue of social justice, such as our current prompt from Sarha Ruhl.)
Selected responses are published online on a rolling basis. Our goal with our books is to create a ballance, and provocative interplay between written and visual responses. For this reason, we stagger our visual art and written submissions periods. For our current issue, for example, we are accepting written submissions until August 1st, and then will invite visual artists to respond to the written responses. For past books we haven reversed this order. At the end of our open submission period, all published responses are included in a limited edition artist's book.
Prompt Press PerFormances
Every other year PromptPress engages performing artists living in Iowa to contribute responses to a prompt centered on a pressing matter of social justice. Our goal is to create a multi-modal, cabaret style performance that encourages community members to lend their voices, and take small actions toward social change.
The Gallery Series
The Gallery Series works with pairs of visual artists and writers as they work together over several months to collaborate on fresh work. The result is a new set of poems, a new story, a strange hybrid, and raw data for our driving question: how does looking closely at visual art inform the process and product of writing?
TEEN PROMPT
TeenPrompt is our online and book art project just for teens! Once a year we showcase new work from a teen visual artist on Teen Home. We then invite teens age 12-19 to create writen responses. Responses will be published online and in a TeenPrompt chapbook.
IMAGE+WORD
In our exploration of how image becomes word becomes image, we publish interviews, book reviews, and essays concerning interdisciplinary image and text work.
Mission Statement
PromptPress provides inspiration for and invites collaboration between writers and visual artists. We believe cross-media collaboration strengthens existing art communities and is vital to the creation of innovative work. PromptPress provides a space for artists to connect, study each other’s work, and publish within the national scene. In our exploration of how word becomes image becomes word, we invite book artists, for whom words can be images, to design special editions of our biannual print journal.
As a member of The James Gang, Prompt Press is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization.
FOUNDING AND FICTION EDITOR
Jennifer Colville
Jennifer holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Utah and an MFA from Syracuse University. Her collection of short stories, Elegies for Uncanny Girls, was published with Indiana University Press's Break Away Books in 2017. She lectures and leads workshops on the inventive female voice and the creative intersection between visual art and writing. Find her work at jennifercolvillewriter.wordpress.com.
POETRY EDITOR
Susan Goslee
Susan Goslee received her MFA from the University of Alabama and her PhD from the University of Utah. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Salamander, and The Cimarron Review. She is an assistant professor at Idaho State University.
BOOK ARTS EDITOR
Kalmia Strong
Kalmia is an Iowa City–based bookmaker, educator, and arts organizer. She received an MFA from the University of Iowa Center for the Book and is currently program director for the arts organization Public Space One. Her collaborative, commissioned, and individual book work has been shown and collected nationally, and she regularly teaches book and print workshops and instigates collaborative projects.
VISUAL ART EDITOR
Elizabeth Munger
Elizabeth Munger is mixed media artist with a penchant towards printmaking, textiles, books and papermaking. She received her BFA in Printmaking and her MFA in Book Arts at the University of Iowa. Various artist books can be found in Special collections around the states. Her other work has been gracioulsy shown in a number of group and solo shows. She is based in Iowa City where she runs a small job printing business in conjunction with making work, teaches print and sewing workshops, and contemplates the universe. Find samples of her work at elizabethmunger.com.
EDITOR AT LARGE
Christopher Colville
Christopher is an artist working to push the boundaries of the photographic medium in both experimental and traditional forms. He holds an MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico. Recent awards include the Ernst Cabat Award through the Tucson Museum of Art, Critical Mass Top 50, the Humble Art Foundations New Photography Grant, an Arizona Commission on the Arts Artist Project Grant, a Public Art Commission from the Phoenix Commission on the Arts, and an artist fellowship through the American Scandinavian Foundation. Christopher’s work has been reviewed in national and international publications including Art in America, the LA Times, Boston Globe, and GUP Magazine. His work can be found at christophercolville.com.
MANAGING EDITOR / IMAGE + WORD EDITOR
Margaret Yapp
Margaret Yapp is from Iowa City. Margaret is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa Center for the Book. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Second Factory, Asphalte, and elsewhere. Her debut book of poetry Green for Luck is forthcoming from EastOver Press (spring, 2024). You can read more at Margaret’s website which is margaret yapp dot com.
