SLAPERING HOL PRESS

The Hudson Valley Writers' Center publishes new works of literature under the imprint of Slapering Hol Press (named from the Old Dutch for Sleepy Hollow). Established in 1990, the press provides opportunities for promising new poets who have not yet appeared in book form, and it also publishes anthologies.

In 2003, for the first time, Slapering Hol was able to publish two individual poetry collections. This summer, we are raising funds so that we can continue to publish two chapbooks each year. Both of our 2003 authors are accomplished in other genres. Brighde Mullins is an award-winning playwright, the recipient of a Whiting Foundation Award. David Tucker, the 2003 SHP contest winner, is a journalist at the New Jersey Star Ledger. He was the editor for the paper's award-winning investigation of racial profiling by the New Jersey State Police. David praised our press: "The editing is painstaking and thoughtful...the same standards hold for production. The slim little books they do at Slapering Hol are understated and elegant and, as with everything else they do, professional."

In 2002, SHP published Susan Case's The Scottish Cafe. Susan, who had witnessed the 9/11 catastrophe, wrote poems about the mathematicians of Lvov, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine) who continued their work at the Scottish Cafe, when the Third Reich kept them from their work in the universities. The theorems they wrote in the so-called "Scottish Book," buried for safekeeping in a soccer field, have proved foundational for modern mathematics.

The Scottish Cafe chapbook is now found at Yad Vashem in Israel, the Hebrew Union College in NYC, and many other libraries. Two of the poems have been published in Polish, and the entire volume has been translated into Ukrainian, with plans afoot for a Ukrainian exchange with The Hudson Valley Writers' Center. A literary event in Kazakhstan was held in honor of the collection.

As Susan said, "In my wildest fantasies, I never imagined any of my poems in foreign languages. And of all countries-Ukraine and Poland-these were two of the three places that my grandparents fled from around the turn of the century. The realization that these poems touched people in a place so far away...in these particular places, was jolting. It was like a reconciliation. If people there relate to these poems, it meant, for me, that people weren't doomed to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors. It was a way that, even though my grandparents were all dead, they were returning home."

Earlier SHP winners have gone on to distinguished careers. Dina Ben-Lev Rhoden, chapbook winner (1991), went on to earn an NEA fellowship, publish a second chapbook, and win a national contest for her first full-length book, Double Helix. Rachel Loden, winner of the 1997 chapbook contest, subsequently won the 1998 Contemporary Poetry Series Competition of the University of Georgia Press for the publication of her first book, Hotel Imperium, later named one of the 10 best poetry books of 2000 by the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review.

Producing chapbooks with great attention to graphic design is a major emphasis of the Slapering Hol Press. Dave Wofford of Horse & Buggy Press in Durham, North Carolina, who designed our last four chapbooks, is also a letterpress printer, bookmaker, publisher, and papermaker. His An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold was recognized as being among the 50 best designed books of 1999. His publications are collected in the Rare Book Room of the New York Public Library, the Overseas Special Collection within the British Museum Library, the Public Library of Paris, and the private library of the Vatican.

We hope that you will support the Slapering Hol Press and will want to purchase some of our chapbooks.