Poojana Prasanna, 3rd year UI Center for the Book MFA candidate, has been awarded a Caxton Club Artist Book Award. Prasanna will use the funds from this award to work on her thesis project for the MFA in Book Arts. Congratulations Poojana!
The Caxton Club brings together archivists, authors, binders, book artists, booksellers, collectors, conservators, designers, editors, librarians, printers, publishers, scholars, and others. Members from these diverse backgrounds form a community that shares a love of printed, handwritten, and digital books and related textual objects, such as pamphlets, broadsides, maps, and ephemera. The club provides a forum to learn about the arts, history, and technologies of these materials, as well as a space to share the joys of appreciating and collecting them.
From Poojana:
Two years ago, I moved from India to Iowa City to pursue the MFA in Book Arts at the University of Iowa Center for the Book. As I settled down in this new place, the river by the department, the tree behind the Old Capitol, the vibrant colours of fall, the great sugar maple tree I walk past every day, the morphing of days into days and nights into nights on opposite sides of Earth all anchored me to the new life I undertook. My emotions were manifold, and I turned to creating books to cope with my emotions. These anchors of my new life manifested into handmade books—My Tree Friend and Yesterday Tomorrow—which I began producing towards the end of 2024. These two books will be a part of a body of work I am creating for my thesis project—A Portrait of Home (working title)—consisting of articles/ visual essays/ visual dialogues about my rumination on typography. I find myself returning to the comforts of type, image, type as image and image as type every time I need to make sense of the world—throughout the movement, change, growth and my shifting realities.