Sundress: First, can you tell our readers what the Tandem Reader Awards are and what you and your team hope to accomplish with this launch?

April Bratten: Tandem Reader Awards are a post-publication chapbook award and a new nonprofit organization. President Rhiannon Thorne and I are passionate about chapbooks and the hard work that goes into creating them. We created TRA with the intention of honoring the collaboration between authors of chapbooks and their editors/publishers. However, our purpose for TRA quickly evolved into a larger concept as we researched the field of post-publication awards. We found that most reader awards were charging in the ballpark of $25 for submissions—a fee that many cannot afford, resulting in a very abrupt gatekeeper to awards in our creative community. Likewise, the publishers for chapbooks are often small publishers who may not be making a profit from their press, let alone have additional funds…