An Internship Stipend for Les Éditions Tintamarre

Centenary College, a tiny liberal arts school in Shreveport, LA, houses one of the most important organizations fighting for the cultural revival of Louisiana’s French and Créole history. Les Éditions Tintamarre is the United States’ only publishing house that exclusively prints non-English American texts. The printing house has focused, in the past, on finding and publishing out-of-print or never-printed-before pieces from 18^th and 19^th century Louisiana French speakers. Authors like Alfred Mercier and Sidonie de La Houssaye are well represented within the catalogue. Recently, Les Éditions has been a primary publisher of 21^st century Louisiana French and Créole authors. Released last year, Zachary Richard’s novel Les Rafales du carême is the first French book published by a Louisiana author since 1894.

Les Éditions Tintamarre provides amazing opportunities to undergraduate students to work on texts. In my freshman year of college, I transcribed several stories for an anthology of créole short stories from the 19^th century, which were later compiled into a completed book. The house’s Editor in Chief, Dr. Dana Kress, approached me with a more intense project for my junior year. I would be compiling, from start to end, a complete works of Michel Séligny, perhaps the most prolific antebellum créole author of color. I excitedly accepted.

Starting in summer 2024, I began slowly searching through news archives and previously published individual stories, searching for Séligny’s work. I found dozens of full texts—and mentions of even more. I was already familiar with transcription work, but many of these newspapers were poorly scanned and maintained, and the antiquated French language is difficult to decipher. When the school year began, I had recurring meetings with Dr. Kress to track my progress. His help was vital in correctly transcribing Séligny’s works.

Dr. Kress also wanted to teach me InDesign, the Adobe program the press uses to configure individual texts into book format. InDesign had the sharpest learning curve, and I often found myself asking questions or researching Adobe forums in order to perfect my text. French has a different set of typography than English, and I had to learn the punctuation and spacing rules before I could put anything in the book file.

By the end of the semester in which I was enrolled in my internship with Les Éditions, my book was not finished—but we never expected it to be. Despite hours dedicated to the work every week, we knew that a full, correct, edited, and reviewed book couldn’t be completed in a semester. I will continue working on the project throughout the next three semesters of my undergraduate career, albeit at a slower pace than this semester, where a majority of the labor on the compilers part was finished. Once all the stories are correct and reviewed by my editor, I will work under him to write the foreword before sending it to a revision committee. We expect the foreword to go through several rounds of editing before approval. At its earliest, Michel Séligny Anthologie Complète is expected to release in late 2025.

This project has been absolutely wonderful. The skills I’ve learned—transcription, archival research, collaboration with librarians and scholars, typography—are all so vital for my future goals in the English field. This internship would not have been possible without the support from Sigma Tau Delta’s Internship Stipend.

Jo Hoffman
Internship Stipend Recipient, Fall 2024
Kappa Epsilon Chapter, President
Centenary College of Louisiana, LA

Internship Stipend

Sigma Tau Delta offers funding for current undergraduate and graduate student members accepting internships for which their expenses exceed what they will be paid. Sigma Tau Delta will not cover expenses related to tuition and/or student fees. The Internship Stipend is a competitive program providing a limited number of stipends of up to $1,500 each.

The internship must involve working for an “organization” while being directed by a supervisor/mentor within that organization, and the intern’s duties must be consistent with the applicant’s level of education, area of study, and career goals. Financial need will be taken into consideration in addition to internship length. Applicants are responsible for obtaining and providing verification of the internship. Check out BestColleges’ Ultimate Guide to Internships for advice in finding and applying for internships.

The internship stipend does not apply to activities that are part of a student’s pre-professional degree requirements, such as student teaching or capstone internships in journalism/technical writing, and cannot be used to supplement a graduate assistantship. Students are eligible for the internship stipend award one time per internship.