25 Years of Service: Deborah Everhart

Editor, Andrews University Press

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We are pleased to celebrate the 25 years of outstanding service rendered to Andrews University by Deborah Lynn Everhart, the longest-serving employee in the history of Andrews University Press, the Adventist church’s primary academic publishing house, of which she has been editor for all those years.

Debi is the epitome of the dedicated Andrews employee: loyal, hardworking to a fault, and yes, longsuffering. Gracefully but persistently avoiding the limelight, she displays a gentle contentment to render her service quietly and faithfully in the perfect order of her small corner office in Sutherland House, performing truly vital work that has influence all around the Adventist world.

The influence of that work was recognized recently at the annual meeting of Adventist scholars in Denver, Colorado. She was honored for these 25 years of overseeing every detail of the content of nearly 90 books from Andrews University Press, many of them authored by a large number of scholars in the hall.

That detail of her work on each of those books includes, among many other things:

• Receiving the manuscript, determining its suitable technical condition in regard to so-called scholarly apparatus.
• Identifying and communicating with peer reviewers and cajoling them to get their reviews submitted on time and getting them very modestly recompensed.
• Getting those peer reviews appropriately presented for consideration by the university press board.
• Communicating with the author about the decision of the Board, and all the follow up for adjustments to content.
• And then the real work begins of getting the work thoroughly edited in painstaking detail, supervising the typesetting and proofreading the same way, registering it with the Library of Congress, supervising the production of the indexes, and getting ready for manufacture as a book.

More than any other individual, Debi Everhart is the agent for getting the book from the author’s mind to the printer. This is true of all those 25 years of titles, and particularly true with the recent publication of the monumental Andrews Bible Commentary.

To accomplish all that, Debi is an expert at methodically using a professional “To Do” list, in a format she developed herself, that tracks every detail of the numerous tasks required by the several projects she is juggling all at the same time. While doing that, she is particularly helpful keeping the office environment running smoothly, reminding the staff of birthdays, keeping the staff’s morning worship Bible reading meaningfully organized, and, more often than should be required, tactfully reminding her supervisor of items that he should have cared for long ago.

It is with joyful obligation that we honor Deborah Lynn Everhart for 25 years of outstanding service to Andrews University, and to Seventh-day Adventist academic publishing worldwide.