Open Letter

About

This chapbook was designed and produced by Center for Book Arts 2020-2021 Book Artist-in-Residence Alva Mooses for poet Simone White‘s Open Letter manuscript on the occasion of CBA’s 25th Anniversary Chapbook Competition in 2021.

CBA’s Annual Chapbook Competition is an open call for poets to submit manuscripts. Submissions are reviewed blindly by a Guest Judge who selects one winner and two runners-up. As part of the awards package, CBA publishes respective limited-edition chapbooks for the Guest Judge and Competition Winner as well as respective limited-edition broadsides for the runners-up. White served as the 2021 Competition Guest Judge.

For this chapbook, Mooses created impressions in handmade paper using cast forms of shoe soles and other objects alluding to bodies in motion—which she felt captured the evolving nature of poetic composition in White’s manuscript.

In addition to Mooses’ chapbook for White, CBA published a limited chapbook for the 2021 Competition Winner, Bianca Rae Messinger, that was designed and produced by artist Yuchen Chang. CBA also published limited-edition broadsides for the respective Competition Runners-Up: Dujie Tahat‘s was designed and produced by CBA 2020-2021 Book Artist-in-Residence Oswaldo García and Benjamin Aleshire‘s was designed and produced by CBA Administrative Assistant and artist Allison Carter Beaulé.

Colophon

Open Letter by Simone White, judge of Center for Book Arts’ 2021 Chapbook Competition was set in Merriweather and letterpress printed on Hahnemühle Bugra, marble grey, 130 gr.

Alva Mooses created the handmade paper pieces that hold the printed poem during her residencies at the Center for Book Arts and Lower East Side Printshop—she produced the handmade paper at Carriage House Paper with guidance from Katharine L. DeLamater.

The typographic layout for Open Letter was designed by Faride Mereb and Oriana Nuzzi.

Special thanks to Mauricio Cortés Ortega, Sarah Frankie Sigman, Sok Song, and Sophie Imamura for their support with production.

This chapbook was designed and printed by Alva Mooses at Center for Book Arts in an edition of 100 copies.