Artist Laura Brown combines poetry and art with her letter-pressed postcards, prints and chapbooks. Each features the work of a contemporary Midwestern writer on one side, and a hand-printed piece of her own art on the other. Inspiration for the idea struck while she was attending a reading for poet MC Hyland — she found one of the pieces so striking that she turned it into an art-print.  And the concept only grew from there. “Since my prints deal with the Midwestern landscape and architecture, I was really drawn to poems that had to do with that,” Laura explained to us. “I knew there were other local poets whose work I also liked and would fit with the project. Six seemed like a doable number of poems to work with, so I chose six poets.”

Laura, who will be completing the project during her four month residency at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, has already been hard at work with her letter-press (that’s an original piece of hers, above). She’s not sweating the job, though: “I find myself staring at a huge mountain of a project, but that is exactly the challenge and excitement I go for… I see it as a huge step toward what I really want to be doing and I’m really thrilled to have the opportunity!”

Check out some more shots from her works-in-progress below. Support her project here.