Illustration by Michelle Lockamy. Image provided by Brink Literacy Project.
A new partnership with Brink Literacy Project, a nonprofit publishing organization, will offer Ohio Northern University students myriad opportunities for learning about and working within the publishing industry.
The Scotland and Denver, Colorado-based group champions literacy worldwide and provides platforms for exceptional storytelling “to positively affect the lives of people on the brink,” particularly those from underserved communities, its website states. For ONU students, it will offer a shot at paid internships within its organization along with other resources for learning about the complicated but captivating publishing world.
Brink’s internships are competitive but the company reserves a slot for its partner institutions, which means ONU students will have a slight advantage when applying. The internships provide students with hands-on editing, publishing, outreach, editorial writing, production and marketing work. Students will learn about polishing pieces for publication, choosing pieces for publication, content management and communicating with industry professionals from publishers to agents to celebrity authors. Paid internships are rare in the publishing industry. Most publishing internships are unpaid and are located in New York City where most U.S. publishing houses are based. Brink’s internships are remote, come with a small stipend, offer a wealth of networking opportunities and are specifically intended to allow access for underserved populations, including students from rural universities like Ohio Northern.
As a partner university, ONU students will also have free access to mock interview materials and virtual class visits from Brink’s founder and other staff members. Additionally, the University will receive discounts on issues of the organization’s magazine, F(r)iction, an art and literary publication that “pushes boundaries of all kinds and publishes new writers alongside literary luminaries,” says Jennifer Pullen, Ph.D.
Pullen, an assistant professor of creative writing/fiction at ONU, was instrumental in establishing the partnership. Along with her extensive and innovative teaching experience, she is a published author. Her piece titled “The Way to the Tower,” was published in F(r)iction #12 in spring 2019. She also contributed a chapter titled, “Our Hidden Prime Directive: How Classism Teaches People to Leave Spaceships and Wizards out of the Classroom,” in the recently published collection “Creative Writing: A Guide for Secondary Classrooms”; and authored the book “A Bead of Amber on Her Tongue,” a work of fiction that contemporarily revisits the stories of Helen of Troy and Aphrodite.
“I’m very excited for the doors this partnership with Brink Literary Project will open for our students and how it will enable them to see the connections between the work they do at Polaris (our campus undergraduate literary magazine) and the broader publishing world,” Pullen says. “Brink is an active and important part of our literary landscape.”