Tom Trusky

Trusky died on November 27, 2009. He willed his collection of artists' books, including by James Castle, to Boise State University.

In 1993, Trusky became interested in the life and work of James Castle, a self-taught artist born in Garden Valley. Trusky authored and self-published James Castle: His Life & Art (2004), and contributed to the documentary film Dream House: The Art & Life of James Castle (2008).

In 1991 Trusky was named Director of Boise State University's Hemingway Western Studies Center and led a two-year effort that, in 1993, resulted in the Library of Congress designating the Hemingway Western Studies Center as the home of the Idaho Center for the Book (ICB) and in Trusky's appointment as the ICB's director. Trusky published now out of print projects including Idaho by the Book (a literary map of Idaho) and an Idaho Authors card game. He mounted exhibits on topics ranging from pop singer Madonna to zines to "refrigerator art," and published books including Some Zines: American Alternative & Underground Magazines, Newsletters and APAs (1992) and Missing P ges: Idaho & the Book (1994).

The Council for Advancement and Support of Education named Trusky Idaho's Professor of the Year in 1990, 1991, and 1993.

A collector of artists' books, Trusky attended courses on book arts, including a sabbatical in New York City spent studying at Columbia University and the Center for Book Arts. Beginning in the 1990s, Trusky taught book arts courses at Boise State University. Former student Andrea Scott recalls that Trusky "promoted my graduate [M.A.] thesis, 'I'm Not Perfect Anyway.' The book combined my interviews and photography of women who had facial scars and how it affected them. Tom saw my vision and said 'Go for it,' even though others thought the project was 'weird' and didn't fit the norm for a graduate thesis. Later, he secretly took my project to New York, where it appeared at an art gallery."

In 1975, Trusky began publishing Poetry in Public Places (PiPP). Each year, nine poems by Boise State University students were printed on posters and distributed to schools, metro buses, and other public venues. Said Trusky: "My goal was to break the neck of rhymed poetry and slap sentimentality useless, and to bring diversity in all its senses: literary, social, political, philosophical, and nonsensical."

In 1974, Trusky, Orvis Burmaster, and Dale Boyer founded Ahsahta Press, which appropriated an indigenous word for bighorn sheep as its name. Under Trusky's editorship, Ahsahta published or reprinted texts by Peggy Pond Church, Genevieve Taggard, H.L. Davis, Hazel Hall, Gwendolen Haste, Haniel Long, David Baker, Katharine Coles, Wyn Cooper, Gretel Ehrlich, Cynthia Hogue, and Linda Bierds. Trusky edited the anthology Women Poets of the West (1978). After Trusky's editorship and under the direction of Janet Holmes, the press' focus shifted from regional to national submissions, publishing poets such as Dan Beachy-Quick, Anne Boyer, Jonah Mixon-Webster, and Paige Ackerson-Kiely.

In 1970, Trusky began teaching at Boise State College (formerly Boise Junior College, now Boise State University). Trusky taught freshman composition, poetry writing, and book arts. He repudiated the role of imagination in poetry; one student remembers, "I was taking a poetry class and the first thing he said was, 'If anyone wants to write about unicorns, they should consider another class. Unicorns aren't real and shouldn't be read about in poetry," a claim which contradicts the long history of poets writing poems about things that "aren't real," such as Beowulf, The Epic of Gilgamesh, "Ozymandias," William Blake's The Book of Urizen, Milton's Paradise Lost, Rossetti's Goblin Market, Homer's The Odyssey, Keats' Endymion, Byron's Don Juan, and Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red.

In 1970, Trusky founded cold drill, an annual literary journal published loose-leaf in a box, rather than bound. Cold drill was intended, in Trusky's mind, to "destroy the elitist, old-girl, old-boy networks." With student editors, Trusky produced scratch-and-sniff poetry, paper crafted from Idaho native plants, and an 1985 "All Idaho" edition which featured graphics inspired by graphics on burlap potato sacks. cold drill entered and won first place awards from elite institutions, including the Associated Collegiate Press/National Scholastic Press Association, the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, and the Rocky Mountain Collegiate Press Association.

Trusky was born in Portland, Oregon, the oldest of four children. He attended high school in Newport, Oregon, then the University of Oregon (B.A. 1967) and Northwestern University (M.A. 1968). In 1969 he attended Trinity College as a Rotary International Fellow in the Anglo-Irish Literature Program.

Anthony Thomas Trusky (14 March 1944 – 28 November 2009) was an American professor, writer, editor, film historian, and book artist. He was known for promoting poetry of the American West, recovering the films of Nell Shipman, and rediscovering and promoting the work of Idaho outsider artist James Castle. Trusky was a Professor of English at Boise State University (1970–2009) and Director of the Hemingway Western Studies Center (1991–2009).

After learning that she had shot films at her Lionhead Lodge studio on Northern Idaho's Priest Lake, Trusky began researching the work and life of Canadian born silent screen actor, screenwriter, and producer Nell Shipman, spending over twenty years attempting to promote Shipman's work and recover her extant films. Shipman films began in the former Soviet Union. Trusky recovered and restored Shipman's 1919 film Back to God's Country. Trusky published Shipman's autobiography The Silent Screen and My Talking Heart (1987) as well as Letters from God's Country (2003), a collection of Shipman's correspondence. Kay Armitage, professor of film studies at the University of Toronto and Shipman scholar, credits Trusky with bringing Shipman "back to life". Shipman's extant films are only available on DVD, though a few may be viewed online.