In the spirit of the day, I want express my gratitude to all of you who have helped make this past year at Bear Star an especially wonderful one.
First, big thanks to Rhonda Smith, my wizard of a neighbor, for recently changing the web site over to PayPal from CCNOW (which is going out of business at the end of the year). She says it was easy, but I know it took time away from other things she could have been doing. Rhonda also does every other kind of site update the Bear requires, and I'm very grateful. It's a wonderful thing to live so far from town but have help so close at hand.
I'd also like to thank the reviewers who have been kind enough to take a look at the books here and say some things, often very kind things, about them.
Thanks, too, to the awards committee for the Washington State Book Award for choosing Woodnote as the 2012 poetry winner. I couldn't be more pleased.
Thanks go out to several professors who assigned Bear Star books to their students this year and in years past. That really helps the ol' bottom line!
Thanks to the organizers of Butte College's Wordfire conference, which gave me a chance last spring to speak to students about publishing, and to the English Graduate Student Council at Chico State for inviting me to do the same.
Thanks, Deborah Woodard and Joanne Allred, for your assistance in reading finalists and determining the annual winner for The Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize. I so value your time and attention.
Thank you, Bear Stars, for writing books that have been such a pleasure to read and edit and design. You folks are of course the linchpins of this entire enterprise.
Gracias to my parents for their support and encouragement, and to my husband of almost 30 years, Antoine Baptiste, for putting up with a wife who spends nearly all her time reading.
Finally, thanks to those of you who have bought and read books by the poets here and to those writers among you who have submitted mss. to the contest. This place runs on love, but your dollars help pay the printing bills. Bear Star couldn't exist without you.
(Photo: Ivan, the resident sled dog here at Bear Star Press. Tony and I are very grateful to his former owners for letting us have him when they were no longer able to give him the time he needed.)
