UDP’s paid apprenticeship gives a yearly cohort of three to four early-career artists and literary professionals the skills to launch careers in publishing, nonprofit administration, graphic design, and the arts.

We place apprentices at the center of the book production process. Over the course of the year, they participate in all stages of book publication—everything from design, typesetting, and proofreading to post-publication marketing and distribution. Apprentices assist with typesetting books and designing covers; they learn the basics of hand-setting and printing in our letterpress workshop. In addition to essential tasks like shipping orders, review galleys, and desk copies, they maintain the Presse’s website and social media accounts, publicizing our authors and our books and reposting poetry, translation, and small press news. Apprentices compose press releases for new titles and prepare promotional copy for our online and print catalogs; they research academic contacts and new partnerships with bookstores and libraries.

In this learning-by-doing approach, apprentices play an essential role in the day-to-day operations of a nonprofit publisher. However, with guidance from our editorial collective, they also propose and undertake their own projects—like interviewing UDP authors, facilitating in-studio workshops, and researching organizational partnerships—making direct, individual contributions to UDP’s mission. They also manage a blog where they post original features about our backlist titles, compose photo-essays about recent events and highlighting archival materials, and advocate on behalf of small press concerns.

UDP recognizes that unpaid internships have long presented an equity and representation bottleneck in arts and cultural sector careers, effectively denying a valuable first credential to those who cannot afford to work for free. Concerned with this issue, especially as it impacts small press publishing, we have worked to fund these apprenticeships at a fair wage. Since 2018, private foundation support, paired with several rounds of grant funding from the New York State Council on the Arts and the NY Regional Economic Development Councils, have allowed us to train four apprentices per year, each earning $19 per hour for a two-day a week position—a training program with an annual budget of $60,000. (We greatly appreciate individual financial support to keep this opportunity available in years to come. You can donate here; all donations are tax-deductible.)

UDP’s mission carries forward small press traditions of autonomy and invention; our apprenticeship, like all our educational programs, emphasizes the cultural importance of editor- and artist-run publishing collectives. As a nonprofit publisher with a letterpress workshop in-house and an output of more than twenty titles a year, UDP provides a working experience that is broadly recognized and valued; apprentices and interns have gone on to positions at WW Norton, Oxford University Press, Zone Books, and more. But others have used the experience to launch careers as freelance photographers, graphic designers, letterpress artists, and editors, and some went on to found their own literary magazines, chapbook presses, and other independent, nonprofit, and collective artistic ventures.