New Editions 2019

Kent Aldrich

Having been born in Zamboanga City in the Philippines in 1964, Kent Aldrich has since managed to make his way across the globe and has been pretending to be a letterpress printer in St. Paul, Minnesota for the last 30 years. While the commercial or “Jobbing” work that Mr. Aldrich has produced at his print shop, The Nomadic Press, is what has earned him the most accolades, and still better, money, he is also an accomplished artist working in wood engraved and linoleum block prints. When not spinning the flywheel of one of his 100-plus year old platen presses Mr. Aldrich rides and restores vintage Vespa motor scooters and shoots a decent game of pocket billiards. He also takes pleasure in wrapping a necktie around his throat, donning a porkpie hat and accompanying his best friend (and wife of 30 years) Emily and their two adult children, Elsie and Maxwell, out to a breakfast of french toast and bacon.

Robyn Awend

Robyn Awend is an Art Director, Visual Artist, and Activist. Her background in fine arts and art curation has led her work in the local nonprofit arts community for the past thirteen years. Robyn’s personal artwork uses words and word fragments to inspire her prints and mixed-media installations, exploring identity through cultural and societal influences. Awend is a long time member of MCBA and a founding member of Form+Content Gallery. Awend’s recent work, handmade paper from discarded clothing, features the quote, “It Takes Courage To Be Who You Really Are.” Robyn lives in the Minneapolis burbs with her husband and three children.

Dara Beevas

Dara Beevas is a writer and publisher based in Minneapolis. She received her Master’s Degree in publishing and is the co-founder of Wise Ink Creative Publishing, a publishing company committed to changing the world through offering platforms to marginalized voices. Dara was a 2009 Givens Foundation for African American Literature Emerging Writers Fellow. She’s was also a 2017-2019 Bush Fellow. She’s the author of The Indie Author Revolution, Social Media Secrets for Authors, and Buzz: The Ultimate Guide to Book Marketing. Her next project is a children’s picture books series profiling black queens through history. A native of the Washington, D.C. area, Dara currently lives in Minneapolis with her daughter Genesis, and her husband Tomme, who is the owner of local restaurant Pimento Jamaican Kitchen.

Mary Bruno

Having grown up in a small town in Central Minnesota, Mary Bruno is a printer and learned her love of printing from her design professor father, Don Bruno. Since his passing in 2003, she has taken over his small letterpress print shop in St. Joseph, Minnesota and expanded, both physically and figuratively. She carves linoleum and hand-sets wood and lead type to make posters, broadsides, calendars, and fine art prints. Mary has an irreverent line of greeting cards and more that is sold nationwide. She teaches the old school tradition of letterpress printing the way her father taught her to her many interns, as well as workshops for the public. She organizes international travelling art exhibitions with printers all over the world. Mary is a community go-getter and loves to collaborate with other printers, poets, musicians, kids, and designers to make beautiful things. Printing her designs is what feeds her soul along with travel and meeting new people.

Todd Thyberg

Todd Thyberg is the owner of Angel Bomb Design + Letterpress, a Minneapolis-based graphic design and letterpress studio. He first formed Angel Bomb in 1997 and added letterpress in 2007. When not creating work for clients, he makes limited edition art prints, greeting cards and books. In 2011 he received an MCBA / Jerome Foundation Book Arts Fellowship in order to create The Airship, a letterpress graphic novel and in 2013 he received an Artist Initiative grant from the MN State Arts Board to create American Manifesto. American Manifesto is an activist book inspired by Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. He has since gone on to create a mini version of Frankenstein titled Mr. F that is sized to vend from a vintage cigarette machine and is currently working on his largest, most ambitious book project to date inspired by the cosmic fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.