Ellis Press

About the editor, David Pichaske

Editor in Chief, Dr. David Pichaske’s Beowulf to Beatles (1972) was one of the first poetry textbook-anthologies to include song song lyrics, recognizing the literary significance of people like the Beatles and Bob Dylan . . . winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature.  Pichaske further established his credentials as spokesman for the sixties generation with A Generation in Motion (1979; translated into Greek in 2016), The Poetry of Rock (1981), and Song of the North Country: A Midwest Framework to the Songs of Bob Dylan (2010).

In the 1970s, like many members of his generation, Pichaske retreated to the country, developing a second life as editor-publisher of Spoon River Quarterly and Spoon River Poetry Press, author of The Jubilee Diary (1982), Late Harvest: Rural American Writing (1992), Southwest Minnesota: the Land and the People (2000), A Place Called Home (2003), and most recently Rooted: Six Midwest Writers of Place (2006). As editor-publisher of Spoon River Poetry Press and Ellis Press, Pichaske published over a hundred books by Midwestern authors.  “The voice of Midwestern Literature,” one critic called him.
           

In the late eighties and nineties, Pichaske went global, with four years of Fulbright fellowships to Poland, Latvia, and Outer Mongolia . . . each the subject of several articles and books including Poland in Transition (1994), UB03: A Season in Outer Mongolia (2003), and Bones of Bricks and Mortar (2017).