Wells Book Arts Center

Wells College Press is staffed by Mary Tasillo, Director of the Book Arts Center, and Rebecca Gilbert, our current Victor Hammer Fellow.

Editorial work for our chapbook contest and poetry broadsides is the purview of Dan Rosenberg, Chair of the English Department.

Mary Tasillo brings two decades of experience in book arts, letterpress, papermaking, and zine communities as an artist, educator, and arts administrator to her role as Director of the Book Arts Center. She is a founder of The Soapbox, a community print shop and artist book and zine library in Southwest Philadelphia, where she has taught classes and organized numerous community events. Her background in book arts, studio management, and letterpress began when she apprenticed with Quercus Press in Waltham, Massachusetts. She holds an MFA in Book Arts and Printmaking from the University of the Arts and a BA in Visual Arts and Children’s Literature from Bennington College.

Rebecca Gilbert is an artist whose work exemplifies a dedication to traditional printmaking processes. Rebecca currently teaches letterpress, wood engraving, and printmaking at Wells College. She serves on the board of The Wood Engravers’ Network, and is represented by The Print Center Gallery Store in Philadelphia. Among Rebecca’s most recent awards are an Illuminate the Arts Grant to support her current project, A Dance of Death in Two Parts; a Creative Research and Innovation Grant to support a research trip to England to study the history and practice of wood engraving; an Independence Foundation Fellowship; and a Winterthur Artist/Maker Fellowship.

Dan Rosenberg‘s most recent book of poetry is Bassinet (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2022). His work has won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize and the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest, and recent poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets. Rosenberg holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Ph.D. from The University of Georgia, where he was a Presidential Fellow. He is the chair of the English department at Wells College, where he  teaches literature, creative writing, and translation theory.