Alumni | The Tower

Laura Schmidt

Laura served as the Design Manager and was on the Marketing Committee for the Ivory Tower in the 2014-2015 school year. She still lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and has been working in an array of HR and marketing/communications roles at Land O'Lakes. She currently works in international development & DEI communications and recently started in talent marketing with a focus on employer branding. Outside of work, she still does some playwriting and is starting a children's book project.

“Ivory Tower was an incredible experience for me as a student. Getting to work with a cohort on a large, long-term publication project helped my project management, collaboration, and my editing skills. It's easy to see now how the experience prepared me for many future projects like developing annual reports to critically thinking about end-user experience (i.e. how do we want someone to feel while reading this? What actions do we want them to take?).”

Ben Schroeder

Ben is a poet from Wisconsin currently living in Madrid, Spain, where he works as an English teacher. He attended the University of Minnesota and graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English and a minor in creative writing in 2018. While at the U, he served as a Poetry Editor, Copyeditor, and ArtWords Judge on the staff of The Tower (then still called Ivory Tower) for the 2017 edition of the magazine. He credits this experience with having taught him about the ins and outs of literary magazine publishing and giving him the copyediting skills he still uses for his part-time remote work to this day. He is currently working on several poetry projects, you can find some of his recent work at Bluepepper and in the second issue of & Change.

Mason Nunemaker

Mason lives and writes in Minneapolis and works for the University of Minnesota Disability Resource Center, where he advocates for accessibility and educates the U of M community about issues of equity and diversity. In 2020, he received third place in the Hammond House International Literary Competition for his poem “Dirt.” He has since served as a judge for the competition, hoping to shine a light on unique and powerful voices. In 2021, his poem “Peach” was included in I Sing: The Body, an anthology of poems about body image, geared toward young adult readers. He was a Poetry Editor for The Tower in 2014-2015, where he learned to appreciate the full scope of work associated with the publishing process. As a writer, he feels it’s important to understand this process both as a submitter and also as an editor. While he hasn’t pursued publishing work professionally, the lessons learned through The Tower have served him well creatively and helped him foster artistic community in the Twin Cities and beyond.

Lauren Swee

Lauren served on staff during The Tower 2019-2020 season and graduated that spring, in May of 2020. She now enjoys working as a freelance video content marketer (you can see her work at sweevideosolutions.com). Of course, she still loves to write— she loves to write poems and work on her science fiction novel (with one rough draft under her belt! Woohoo!). Strangely enough, her reading addiction blossomed not before getting an English degree, but after, and these days she likes to keep at least one pile of books in her field of vision at all times. Her time with The Tower continues to bring value to both her professional and personal life. She learned how to effectively communicate creative concepts, how to write copy under constraints, and how to collaborate with others on projects big and small. Her favorite thing she learned was how many people are just like her, living and growing as artists!

Sammy Brown

Sammy served as Co-Editor in Chief and a Fiction Editor of the 2017 edition of The Tower. After graduating with degrees in English and child psychology, she headed to NYC for the Columbia Publishing Course and began her publishing career as a publicity intern at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. She currently works remotely from Minneapolis as a publicist for HarperCollins Children's Books. In her spare time, Sammy is a singer-songwriter and plays guitar in the indie rock band Poorwill. Of all the good decisions she made at the U (and yes, only good decisions were made!), joining The Tower was by far the best. Not only did it give her a taste of the publishing life, but it proved to her that time is best spent creating art with friends.

Hanna Kjeldbjerg

Hanna is the marketing director at Wise Ink Creative Publishing and has worked in publishing for over a decade. Her writing has been published in Paper Darts and Publishers Weekly, as well as featured in Jane Friedman's newsletter The Hot Sheet. Hanna was the co-editor-in-chief of The Tower 2012, where she met some of her favorite creative collaborators and developed a “we can do that!” mindset toward art and writing. With two members of The Tower, she founded Err Artist Collective, a monthly variety show that ran for 6 years and featured 300+ writers, visual artists, performers, and musicians. Err’s special projects include two installations with the Art Shanty Projects, a Risograph residency with The Future MPLS, publishing an anthology, and a weeklong shelf take-over with Subtext Books. You can follow her at @hannakjeldcreates