The Center for Faulkner Studies, where Southeast Missouri State University's campus houses a collection of rare books and different literary pieces, will release its third book in the Faulkner- Morrison Conference series this spring.

The book, "Faulkner and Morrison," will include several essays that were presented at the 2010 conference. The essays will focus on the two featured authors of the conference, Toni Morrison and Faulkner.

"The focus of this book, as you'll see in the introduction, is inter-texuality," said Dr. Robert Hamblin, the director of the center. "Imagine the books of these authors talking to each other. What can reading Morrison help you understand about Faulkner, and what can Faulkner help you understand about Morrison? So you imagine the books as being a conversation between the two authors."

Hamblin and assistant director Dr. Christopher Rieger began preparing for the book's release shortly after the end of last year's the conference. They began by reading all the essays submitted by the scholars who presented at the conference, choosing which ones would be published and then editing each essay.

"There's a few rounds of editing that all the essays have to go through," Rieger said. "For example, we may accept some of them, but on the conditions that they're revised. We may ask them to add more to a certain section of their essay, expand on part of their argument or alter something that we think needs to be changed."

Katie Markey, a graduate research assistant during fall 2011, also contributed to the book. In addition to working on the book at the center, Markey also was able to see a different side of publishing the book when she took an internship with the University Press.

"So it's kind of interesting to see not just the creative process of making the cover and the actual book, but I got to see what's required when essays first come in and the shape they're in," Markey said.

Markey believes that the experience at the center and the experience creating the book will benefit her in her future career.

"It's definitely eye-opening because I am a graduate student, and I am going to pursue a job in higher education, and so I'll probably have to be published a certain amount of times a year," Markey said. "It's definitely taught me what it takes to get published academically. I've been published creatively, but getting to see how the essays come in and the kind of things they look for, it's shown me what it takes to be published academically."

The center got its start in 1978 after Hamblin was approached by another teacher during his class.

"I was teaching a Faulkner novel in a night class in 1978, an American Novel night class," Hamblin said. "During the break Bob Benham, a teacher from Farmington, came up to me and he said 'Have you ever met the Faulkner collector who lives in Famington?' and I said 'Faulkner collector in Missouri?'"

After meeting with Louis Daniel Brodsky, the two became good friends and worked together over the course of 10 years, co-writing eight books on the collection. The center was born in 1988 when the collection found a permanent home at Southeast.

Today the center serves as literary tool for local and international students that come to use it as a way to benefit their research.

"Faulkner is such a big American voice, but it extends far beyond that because every year they have a visiting scholar and they'll come for a couple of weeks and do their research at the Faulkner center," Markey said. "They're from a completely different side of the world and they come all the time to do this."