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Another interesting thing about working at a small press is that they have to do all their own publicity and such-- press kits, fliers, mailings, etc. There's no specific department for that when the office is as small as AJB is, so the publicity duties get shared around. I've had to relearn Adobe InDesign, a design program that I used to use to make the newspaper in high school. It often makes me want to tear my hair out (my computer design skills were never the best), but it's useful to relearn it and be able to use it should the need arise. I've been making a lot of fliers for the AWP conference that the editors will be going to next week-- my favorite today was a flier for the AJB off-site poetry reading. It's at the same time as the official AWP Dance, but obviously we don't want people to go to the dance when they could be going to our poetry reading! So we put a picture of people dancing really, really awkwardly, and told them they should probably come see poets read instead.

So designing that flier was entertaining. Today I also sorted through some of the finalist & semi-finalist manuscripts for the Beatrice Hawley award...interesting to see who got it and who didn't! (I leafed through some of them...)