Joseph Bednarik

Joseph Bednarik is an editor with Story Line Press in Eugene, Oregon.

Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison is a widely admired poet, novelist, essayist, and screenwriter. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, Harrison is an artist whose work enjoys a substantial world-wide following among critics and general readers alike. He has written a special introduction to the Michigan State University Press signed, limited edition of Sumac Reader.

His novels and novellas have been published in twenty-two languages, and many of them have been adapted to the screen as feature motion pictures. His has written nine volumes of poetry. Last year Harrison published his first children's book. His only book of non-fiction is Just Before Dark(1991), an anthology of work from three decades that includes essays on food, travel, literature, and the natural world which have appeared in publications as disparate as Sports Illustrated, Esquire (where he once served as food editor), and Psychoanalytic Review, was released in Europe in 1993.

Dan Gerber

Dan Gerber was born and grew up in western Michigan and received his bachelor's degree from Michigan State University in 1962. He has worked as a corporate executive, an automobile dealer, a professional racing driver, and a high school teacher. From 1968 through 1972, with Jim Harrison, he co-edited the literary magazine Sumac. He has traveled extensively as a journalist, particularly in Africa. He has been writer-in-residence at Michigan State University and Grand Valley State College and has lectured, read, and taught at numerous colleges, universities, libraries, schools, and museums throughout the United States and England. He and his wife, Debbie, divide their year between central California and southeastern Idaho.

Dan Gerber has published three novels, a short-story collection and six books of poems, including A Last Bridge Home; New Selected Poems and Trying to Catch the Horses. He was the recipient of the Michigan Author Award in 1992, had work selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry 1999, and received the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contributions to Midwestern Literature in 2001.

Sumac Reader, a Limited Numbered Edition, Signed by Jim Harrison, Dan Gerber, and Joseph Bednarik

Joseph Bednarik

Jim Harrison

Dan Gerber

 Edited by

SIGNED BY JIM HARRISON, DAN GERBER, and JOSEPH BEDNARIK: each book is signed by all three contributors, and numbered by hand 1-100 on a special tipped-in page; cased with a rich brown leather spine, gilt titles, and embossed green covers.

If you wish to order a specific number in the edition, send a secondary email to our Order department after using our Shopping Cart.

The original Sumac was a Michigan-based literary journal founded in 1968 by poets Dan Gerber and Jim Harrison; novelist Thomas McGuane joined the editorial staff in 1969 as the fiction editor. When the inaugural issue appeared, more than 250 American literary magazines were listed in The Directory of Magazines and Small Presses; within three years, Sumac rose to the first tier of these publications and was nationally recognized for its eclecticism and editorial quality. The Library Journal called it "one of the best little magazines now being published." Remaining true to Sumac's energetic catholicity, The Sumac Reader is an anthology that contains poetry, experimental fiction, and works in translation that originally appeared in the magazine. Contributors include four Pulitzer Prize-winning poets - Galway Kinnell, Charles Simic, Louis Simpson, and Gary Snyder - along with Paul Blackburn, Hayden Carruth, Richard Hugo, Denise Levertov, Ezra Pound, Adrienne Rich, and Diane Wakoski. There are early poems by Charles Simic, James Tate, and Michael Waters, as well as a complete section from Galaway Kinnell's classic, The Book of Nightmares. Fiction is represented by a first-published Jim Heynen story "Coyote" and early prose by William Kittredge. Translations from Chinese, French, Spanish, and Russian bring to American readers the work of masters such as Tu Fu, Lorca, and Li Po. A variety of poetic forms are represented, including ghazals, narratives, suites, found poems, and the freest of free verse. Dan Gerber and Jim Harrison each provide an introduction. Appendices include an index of all work appearing in the original issues of Sumac, images of all the periodical's covers, and a complete list of contributors to each issue. ______________________________________________ "This collection functions as a cultural time capsule . . . [T]hese selected works, observed in hindsight, suggest that Sumac's contributors captured the pulse of the times with remarkable clarity." -Publisher's Weekly

Limited, Signed Editions from MSU Press