Dawn McCusker and Karin Tollefson-Hall have spent the past year creating 147 handmade chapbooks

The chapbooks were made to commemorate the 25th anniversary of JMU's Furious Flower Poetry Center, the nation's first academic center for black poetry. 

SADAH professor McCusker (graphic design) and associate professor Tollefson-Hall (art education) produced the entire 40-page book, making paper for the covers and printing every page using traditional letterpress methods on two Vandercook presses.

 The book features 25 poems written by prominent African American poets; five of the poems are accompanied by a carving interpretation created by SADAH students under the direction of SADAH faculty Jack McCaslin, Trudy Cole and Susan Zurbrigg. Additionally, the book begins with a frontispiece created by Zurbrigg.

The chapbook will be presented at the Furious Flower 25th Anniversary Celebration, Sept. 27-28 in Washington, D.C. 

A chapbook is a type of street literature printed in early modern Europe. Produced cheaply, chapbooks were commonly small, paper-covered booklets, usually printed on a single sheet folded into books of 8, 12, 16 and 24 pages.