The Poet’s Press Featured Authors

Printing History & Literature Lecturer Brett Rutherford has written articles and book reviews on printing history and is a book collector. He has given lectures for the John Russell Bartlett Society at The Providence Athenaeum, Brown University, and The Providence Public Library on "Elbert Hubbard and the Roycrofters," "Poe and Mrs. Whitman," and "Illustrated Editions of Edgar Allan Poe." At the Athenaeum, he has lectured on Edgar Allan Poe and Sarah Helen Whitman, and has read his supernatural poems there in a series of annual Halloween readings.
For the last two years, Rutherford has been a guest lecturer at New England Institute of Art (AI) in Brookline, Mass, where he has presented on H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe.

The H.P. Lovecraft Friends Group To foster local and international interest in H.P. Lovecraft and his Providence connections, Brett Rutherford established an informal H.P. Lovecraft Friends Group. This group meets sporadically for luncheons and field trips to graveyards, Lovecraft haunts, and other locales of spectral or literary interest. Rutherford usually runs these meetings and includes informal lectures on such topics as the origin of Gorgons, sea monsters, classic horror films of the 1930s and 1940s, Goethe's Faust, Lizzie Borden, and Poe- and Lovecraft-related topics. Sixteen issues of a tabloid-sized newsletter, titled The Cthulhu Prayer Society Newsletter, have been produced in print and on-line. Rutherford also runs a Yahoo discussion group called "Lovecraft In Providence," which encourages worldwide dissemination of these materials. Some people take delight in these things, although one librarian looked at the newsletter and snapped, "You people are nuts!"

Never Far From A Library Libraries are central to Brett Rutherford's existence. He grew up in places where they were minimal if not nonexistent. In recent years, he has donated almost all of his personal collections to libraries where they will be preserved and made accessible to the public. He gave more than 350 specimens of printing by the Roycrofters to The Providence Athenaeum, as well as his collection of 5,000 classical CDs. He has donated a collection of wood engravings by artist John DePol to the Providence Public Library's Daniel Berkeley Updike Collection, along with a number of books on printing history. Complete sets of the editions published by The Poet's Press have been donated to the Harris Collection at the John Hay Library at Brown University, and to Poets House in New York City. Rutherford chairs the Philbrick Poetry Prize Committee for the Providence Athenaeum, and is a member of Friends of the Library at Brown University.