Established in 2000 under the visionary guidance of former CEO of HarperCollins and distinguished visiting professor Stanley Colbert, The Publishing Laboratory serves as both a classroom for graduate and undergraduate students and a fully functioning micropress that issues original works under its own imprint.

 

Classroom Experience

Integral to the Department of Creative Writing, the Pub Lab incorporates into the apprenticeship of creative writers an applied learning experience in the process by which literary manuscripts, including their own, are designed, shaped, and edited into books and published to a wide audience of readers. Courses leading to the BFA Certificate in Publishing give students the opportuntiy to study the history of the book, the art of editing, and book design. For students interested in pursuing a career in book or journal publishing or attending graduate school in a related field, the Lab offers a foundation in the book arts by intensive work in conceptualizing, designing, editing, publishing, and marketing literary titles under The Publishing Laboratory imprints.

 

Book Imprint

Under the mentorship of director Emily Smith, editor Ben George, and other faculty advisors, a staff of graduate interns work for the small literary imprint, helping shepherd magazine and book projects through the publication process. They also help students produce limited-edition chapbooks and use bindery equipment during open lab hours. In the third year, graduate assistants teach their own independent sections of either bookbuilding or editing.

 

The Pub Lab published its first book, a reprint of J. Marshall Crews’s history of Wilmington College, in 2001. It published its first novel, Sorayya Khan’s Noor, in 2005, and Audubon North Carolina Education Director Andy Wood’s Backyard Carolina: Two Decades of Public Radio Commentary followed in 2006. In 2008 the Lab published a record four books, including an anthology of the Chautauqua Writers' Center, an anniversary edition of Ben Dixon MacNeill's classic Outer Banks memoir, The Hatterasman, the trade paperback edition of Ann Cottle's The Roots of Penderlea, and its first full color venture, The Bottle Chapel at Airlie Gardens: A Tribute to Minnie Evans by Fred Wharton and Susan Taylor Block.

 

The lab also publishes two literary journals: the Creative Writing Department’s award-winning national literary journal of place-based writing, Ecotone and Chautauqua, redesigned in 2008 under new editors Jill and Philip Gerard.

 

Pub Lab Staff

Emily Smith, director
Robert Siegel, assistant director

 

Ecotone

David Gessner, editor-in-chief

Ben George, editor

 

Advisory Board
Clyde Edgerton
Ben George
David Gessner

Robert Siegel

Emily Smith

 

Graduate Assistants

Lee Cannon
Amanda Gonzalez Moreno
Kiki Johnson

Corinne Manning