Alas, the wave of closures overtaking small colleges and art centers now includes Wells College, and with it, the Wells Book Arts Center. To purchase a copy of this chapbook, please use the contact form to contact the poet, who has acquired the remaining stock of Independent City.

From the Wells Book Arts Center blog:  "Ultimately, Independent City stood out. The judges commented on “how each of these poems is rooted in an actual particular place or object, and how each unassumingly but authoritatively unfolds until it has conjured up the salient particulars of that place or that object.” They remarked on the writing’s “precision and depth, its quiet strength, power, and subtlety,” and summed up Independent City as a “really wonderful, powerful collection.”

J.R. Tappenden’s chapbook, Independent City, was selected as winner of the 2016 Wells College Press Chapbook contest out of a pool of over 160 submissions. The Wells College Press letterpress-printed and hand-bound the chapbook, which features a wood engraving by artist Wesley Bates commissioned specifically for this project. The production of the chapbook was overseen by Richard Kegler, Director of Wells Book Arts Center in collaboration with Michael and Winifred Bixler at the Bixler Press & Letterfoundry.