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When Sheryl Monks lost her father this summer to a long and painful battle with pulmonary fibrosis, she decided to shift the priorities in her life.

"My father is the reason I became a writer," says Monks. "I've had a lot of personal goals I've put on the back burner, but after my father passed away, I realized I wanted to get back to them."

To do that, Monks will be stepping away from her duties at Press 53, a small publishing house in Winston-Salem, to pursue her own writing.

"I'm leaving the press so I can pull back and work on a collection of short stories I've been working on for a number of years," she said.

Her departure will be marked by a celebration of Press 53's third anniversary Saturday at the WhiteSpace Gallery in downtown Winston-Salem. Local authors Quinn Dalton, Denzil Strickland and Joseph Mills will read from their works.

For Monks and Watson, the celebration will be bittersweet.

"(Sheryl) is going to be missed," Watson says. "She handled 99 percent of our marketing. She coordinated that with the authors. She had great relationships with the bookstores. She was able to get our writers to open up and share things with her that she could use when she promoted their work. ... She was very good at (what she did)."

Saturday's event will be a celebration of the authors that Monks and Watson have published over the past three years and it will be her swan song.

When the party ends, she'll leave the gallery and no longer be a part of the business that she has devoted nearly every waking hour to since the fall of 2005.

When asked what she'll miss most about Press 53, Monks says, "Everything," and you can tell from the tone of her voice that she means it.

She'll miss reading new manuscripts and struggling to get her writers' books reviewed. She'll miss the long conversations with booksellers throughout the Southeast, the painstaking attempts to get her writers' books stocked on their shelves, or better yet hand-promoted by the store managers. But most of all, she'll miss the books she and Watson published.

"I really love our books," she says. "I'll miss being able to say, 'We had a hand in that. That was something that should have been published and we were there to do that.'"

Publishing exceptional books is one thing that Press 53 has excelled in over the past three years. In this short time, the regional book publishing juggernaut has released more than 20 short-story collections, poetry books, novels and nonfiction books. They've built a brand with instant name recognition in every literary community in the Southeast.

Over the past three years, Monks and Watson have reintroduced thousands of readers to classic Southern writers like John Ehle and Marjorie Hudson. And they've helped strengthen the careers of the Triad's newest writers of record: Greensboro's Quinn Dalton and Winston-Salem's Joseph Mills, Denzil Strickland and Amy Knox Brown.

And none of it has been easy.

While book publishing for Simon & Schuster, Penguin and Scribner may be a game of million-book print runs, for small presses such as Press 53, selling every single book is a challenge.

"Every bit of it is pulling teeth," Monks says. "It's hard work to get people to take interest. We publish great work, but we have to do a lot of arm twisting to get people to take a chance on it."

But Monks believes that the hard work, in the end, is worth it.

"Lots of great books are published by big publishers," she says, "but too many aren't. That's what we're here to do - to be here to pick up the slack."

Alongside that hard work, though, the small Winston-Salem press has seen its fill of good luck.

In 2006, Forsyth County Public Library chose John Ehle's literary tour de force "The Land Breakers," - the historical story of the first pioneers to settle in the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina - for its community reading program, "On the Same Page." First published by Harper & Row in 1964, the best-selling novel by the N.C. Literary Hall of Fame member had long been out of print. But one of the library's representatives had shown up for Press 53's launch party earlier that year at a local bookstore and thought that Watson and Monks would be the perfect pair to reprint Ehle's book.

"Reprinting John Ehle's book brought us to a whole new place we hadn't depended on," says Kevin Watson. "That gave us instant recognition; instant respectability. That relationship with John, having him say, 'I trust you guys, I like what you're doing and want to be a part of it,' that put us at a whole new level."

After publishing Ehle's book, other projects came easily to Press 53. There was Marjorie Hudson's retelling of the Lost Colony in "Searching for Virginia Dare." There was Joseph Mills' poetry collection, "Somewhere During the Spin Cycle." And there was Amy Knox Brown's award-winning short story collection, "Three Versions of the Truth."

"(Amy's book) was one of the nicest victories we've had," says Watson.

Brown, in many ways, is Press 53's ideal author. In the world of literary fiction, authors have to do much more than write their book - they have to play an active role in marketing it, too.

"With Amy, you know that at every event she does, she's going to be a professional," says Monks. "She's going to be a great reader, she's going to connect to the audience and she's going to speak to the booksellers .... And it's helpful when you have writers that will use their connections to help promote their book."

Back in 2005, Watson and Monks imagined that Press 53, at its best, would be a modest endeavor, that they'd publish one or two books a year. But since the publication of Brown's book, Press 53 has continued to exceed the publishers' early expectations.

They recently published Quinn Dalton's third book, "Stories from the Afterlife," her first outside of the world of major publishing houses. They released a collection of surreal short stories, edited by Pinckney and Laura Benedict. They published their first annual Press 53 Open Awards Anthology, a collection of stories submitted by emerging writers across the country to the press over the past year.

And two months ago, they put out their first full-length novel, Denzil Strickland's "Swimmers in the Sea."

"Denzil's book has the potential to be a very good selling book for us," Monks says. "It has market appeal, but it's also literary and the bookstores really like it, too."

Last month, Strickland, on his own dime, headed south toward Louisiana for a 10-day book tour, set up by Monks and Watson. With boxes of his novel in his trunk, he set out for Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana, where he read in bookstores, at festivals and on local public radio stations.

"With small presses, we have no budget," says Monks. "People have the idea that you're going to get published and you're going to have an editor take you into their bosom and everything is going to be Cadillacs and limousines. But selling your book means you have to be creative and be a very hard worker."

Press 53 receives dozens of manuscripts each month from hopeful new writers. Monks and Watson read every single one. They look for a strong narrative and riveting prose. And they look for writers who are as committed to marketing their books as the press will be.

But in just a few days Monks will put down those manuscripts of other writers and will, instead, pick up her own. She'll become one of those emerging writers. She'll take with her the bounds of experience she has gained from the writers she's represented and from the battles she's fought on their behalf. And she'll leave the press with her own advice for up-and-coming writers:

"Don't focus too much on publishing. Publishing is just the beginning of a whole new role you're going to have to step into. Do the writing first."

Vishal Khanna is a freelance contributor. He lives in Winston-Salem. Contact him at vckhanna@juno.com.