Taking A Trip to the Moon with Prof. Woodward’s Literary Publishing Class
By Daniel Graham ’26
Professor Steven Woodward’s Literary Publishing class has one rule: it won’t say ‘no’ to anything. You want to make a cover design based on tarot cards? Sounds good. You want to do illustrations? Go for it. You want to write a letter begging your class to include your letter in the anthology? Let’s find a way to sneak that in.
On February 4th, the Fall 2025 class unveiled its latest iteration, A Trip to the Moon, at its release party during that week’s English and Creative Writing Coffee House. Students and faculty alike crammed into Old Main 400 to eat Moon Pies and hear from the students behind the book.
The publishing world is full of rejection, but Prof. Woodward offers students a kinder, more creative introduction to the industry. He started teaching Literary Publishing back in 2019. At first, he taught the course as a straight-up primer on the literary publishing world, but in 2022, he took a new approach: let students publish their own anthology. And let them lead the process. From start to finish, from cover design to content to typesetting to promotion, the students are in control. And thanks to the department’s Critchett Fund, they get a professionally printed product in the end.
It started with MoonSprout: A Literary Garden in Fall 2022. Future classes adopted that title to make “MoonSprout Publishing” the name of their little company, signified by the miniscule figure at the bottom of the spine with a sprout for a head. In 2023, the anthology was Sketches of a Body: Faulty Projections, then 2024 was The Orchard: A Prose and Poetry Anthology.
A Trip to the Moon went through the same democratic process as the others. After students compiled their written works, they worked in four different groups to create cover concepts, then voted on the best one. Maren Stewart-Tanner 028 designed the moon tarot card theme that ended up as the final cover.
“When I met with my cover design team, we pretty quickly decided we wanted to do some sort of digital collage,” Stewart-Tanner said. “So, the cover that it now has is a collage of physical art pieces. We have a watercolor piece for the background, two sketches that were then digitized for the wolf and the spider, and then a moon that was drawn on paper and then scanned into the computer.”
Students divided themselves into groups to work on different aspects of production, like typesetting, cover design, and public relations.
“The course is designed to give you a taste of all of the different things that you could do,” Prof. Woodward said. “Because it’s just one semester, you have to move really quickly … You get exposure to a lot of different things, but then you have to go and explore a lot more to really discover, ‘Okay, here’s the things that I like.’”
The course isn’t just about the labor of publishing, though. Prof. Woodward is very well-connected in the industry, and he leveraged those connections to give his students meaningful experiences in the literary world.
“We had a lot of class field trips,” Carmen De Souza Bronshteyn ’26 said. “Like to the Twin Cities Book Fair, which is an event that’s been around forever, and I’m from here, but I’ve never experienced [that] before. And [we got] to see Ocean Vuong’s reading. And [we] have a professor who is just in it, and involved for so long, it was really cool learning about it behind-the-scenes.”
The fall semester was Prof. Woodward’s last at Macalester. He’s now working a full-time gig at Normandale Community College. The course that started before him will continue after him, though — he has made sure of that.
“It’s a little bittersweet,” Prof. Woodward said. “All endings are. But I think the great thing about it is that the anthology was just always meant to be something that students could take and turn into a vehicle for things that they wanted to do. And so, hopefully, the class continues to be that type of thing where people come in and they say, ‘Here’s what I’ve been doing. Here are the things that I’m interested in. Here are the directions that I would like to take my interest in publishing’ — and that will still exist.
“And even if they quit doing anthologies, the class is still an opportunity for people to be able to do that,” Prof. Woodward continued. “And to understand publishing is really less about having to do things in a very specific way than it is about taking what you already like and are interested in and adding that to the world of books.”
Thank you to Prof. Woodward for teaching the Literary Publishing class for six years and producing four Anthologies! The English and Creative Writing department will miss you. Best of luck on your next chapter!