Chicago

[Photo by Liena Vayzman, Untitled Self Portrait (Eye to Eye), 2018.] By Liena Vayzman   1. Anagram of Alien 2. Rhymes with Siena or Vienna. Take your choice: the sun-saturated South…

Megan Stielstra is the author of three collections, most recently The Wrong Way to Save Your Life from Harper Perennial. Her work appears in the Best American Essays, New York Times, Poets…

Image Credit: Edwin Carmona    “Every dictatorship, whether of man or party, leads to the two forms that schizophrenia loves most: the monologue and the mausoleum.” —Octavio Paz   Joe…

Will any of this change? Possibly, but I cannot predict what kind of outcome a potential change might result in, and there are certainly no easy solutions. Regardless of these issues, as publishers we have do whatever it takes to get our books in the hands of readers, and help create a competitive marketplace.

Helene Achanzar is a Kundiman fellow and a John and Renée Grisham fellow at the University of Mississippi. Her poetry is forthcoming in jubilat. Her other writing can be found…

We hand-bind all of our books. The covers for our journals are made from 6-packs of local breweries. We’ll gather friends to help us, buy some beer and pizza, and spend a lot of time cutting boxes, and sewing our books.

There is a small party who are actually of this opinion and who try to show us that, if any law exists, it can only be this: The Law is…

Ruben Quesada (PhD, MFA) is a poet and editor. His writing and media have been featured at The Art Institute of Chicago, The Poetry Foundation, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, The American Poetry Review, Southern Humanities…

I just didn’t have that kind of patience or will to wait. I just wanted to do. That need for immediacy and something new is something that I really instilled into Maudlin House. I wanted to created something was fresh and real.

Melt is a poet and artist who was born in Chicago. Their work proudly documents Chicago’s queer and trans communities. Their writing has been published in many places including Lambda…

We are as delighted to publish a single sentence as we are in publishing a novel-length work. What matters is language, playfulness, openness to the encounter, the way it creates a space that’s very much its own. In this way we envision the process of bookmaking as creating a physical space for the words, where the book is not just a repository or vehicle for these words but is considered just as essential to the work. The materials at hand (whatever we can afford), the printing process, and the text itself are the major influence on the aesthetic of our projects.

Website Submission Guidelines Interview with Joshua Young, Founder & Editor; Abigail Zimmer, Poetry Editor; and Ian Denning, Prose Editor How did The Lettered Streets Press start? Joshua: My father and I wanted…

Gint Aras’s second novel The Fugue is an ambitious, 500-plus page saga about Eastern European families who settle in the Chicago suburb of Cicero following WWII. Both the musical and psychological…

I want the press to have a sense of immediacy vital to a small-ish, specific contemporary reading audience that seeks literature with a what I call a visceral-mystical aesthetic—work that seeks a way to engage the big questions by examining the particular leaky, fleshy, grotesque difficulties, embarrassments, and traumas of being embodied.

co•im•press’s closest influences are Action Books, Black Ocean, Noemi Press, Spork, Birds of Lace, Fence, and Tarpaulin Sky. The editorial perspective of the journal Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas is also a significant influence (Roberto Tejada, Kristin Dykstra, and Gabriel Bernal Granados, editors). I worked on production and marketing/distribution for Mandorla from 2009 to 2013 via Illinois State University’s Publications Unit, and through that work, I also learned of its forerunner in spirit, El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn (Margaret Randall and Sergio Mondragon, editors; there is a really great documentary on The Plumed Horn, too). I admire the way Mandorla’s editors and contributing editors created an open, networked community of writers across languages, borders, hemispheres, which can be divisive elements if we let them. Working with Kristin Dykstra when she was at ISU, I learned: that publishing can be a political act, to respect translators as much as authors, and the importance of translation as an art and practice. I also became attuned to the shameful dearth of translated works published in the US.