Western’s Publishing Grad Students Release First Anthology

Monsters, Movies & Mayhem

The very first graduating cohort of Western Colorado University’s GPCW Publishing program is proud to release their original anthology, Monsters, Movies & Mayhem. This collection of 23 stories is written by best-selling and award-winning authors, as well as those who are soon to become household names.

The graduating students had planned to hold a gala book-signing event at the Gunnison Arts Center during their final summer residency, but due to the pandemic they have adapted and will now hold a virtual launch party online for the students and faculty of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing to celebrate the book’s official release on July 15.

Producing the Anthology

The students conceived the anthology, solicited the stories, read 435 slush-pile submissions and selected the best ones. They wrote rejections and contracts, edited, designed and produced the anthology. Monsters, Movies & Mayhem recently received a starred, featured review in Publishers Weekly, the “palpable love of supernatural cinema is infectious; horror fans won’t want to put this down.”

Kevin J. Anderson, Publishing Program Director, says,

“This was the first proof-of-concept year for our new program with a full cohort of students. We had to be nimble and adapt. The entire publishing world went through great upheavals even before COVID-19, and I am extremely proud of how the students showed their mettle and produced such remarkable results for their career portfolios.”

For their solo thesis project, each student also produced an original book, start-to-finish, usually a public-domain classic work by H.G. Wells, Alexandre Dumas, and others. One student chose to publish the only novel written by GPCW student Cheryl Hardy, who passed away in 2019 shortly before receiving her MFA from Western.

These individual books are scheduled to be released throughout the calendar year, but to celebrate this event, the Publishing program has made them available to the Western community months before actual release at http://www.wordfirepress.com/GPCW. All profits from these books will go to funding future projects for Western’s Publishing program.

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