Los Angeles

Compton-born Dr. Robin Coste Lewis was just appointed the new Los Angeles Poet Laureate. Winner of the 2015 National Book Award and a Provost’s Fellow in Poetry and Visual Studies…

My parting words for anyone interested in publishing books: always trust your gut; prepare to spend a lot of money and make none in return; assume that you will experience some major setbacks; accept that you will disappoint others despite your best efforts to please everyone. If you still want to publish books after taking all of this into consideration, you are doing it for the right reasons, and you’ll likely be thrilled, just as we are, to publish titles that deserve to be distributed the world over.

We’re interested in literature that is visionary—embracing or interrogating Mystery as it enacts a sense of ecstasy or otherworldly consciousness/experience. But I think that, in terms of aesthetics, there’s such a wide variety of ways to render that, and so many different topics or perspectives could lend themselves to that work. We are also interested in work that promotes interfaith and/or intercultural exchange.

We have everything from political memoirs (on both sides of the spectrum) to a former spy memoir to queer fiction to a book on Studio 54 to a photo book of Washington DC’s famed punk club, The Safari Club. We’re always hoping to publish interesting books on sex work (preferably by sex workers), music, interesting fiction, and memoir. I always look for books by authors that reflect the city of Los Angeles. Writers of color, queer writers, writers that get overshadowed by the New York publishing scene. As much as we’re a publishing house that publishes writers from all over the country (and other countries), we definitely try to make sure we’re representing LA, since that’s our home.

  [stand]   Towering right off Melrose, the thick of Mexican immigrants. A few blocks away – güeros: espresso shots, vintage clothes. The hollywood dream.   * Remember the pews;…

Underground Voices started as an online literary magazine showcasing writing that was hard-hitting and raw. I didn’t see any magazine that embraced that style of fiction and poetry so I wanted to fill the gap and offer a platform to those kinds of writers: a space where their work could be seen and read. I love books, though, so I slowly moved Underground Voices in the direction of a small press: first publishing annual short story collections and finally publishing novels, which is where it’s at now.

Poetics of Location by Mike Sonksen Writ Large Press, 2016 64 pages – Writ Large Press   Los Angeles is one of those hard to pin down places because everyone has…

Ray Bradbury will always be known as one of the City of Angels most famous native authors. Similar to our most well-known poet, Charles Bukowski, Bradbury graduated from Los Angeles…

Thanks to the efforts of Los Angeles Poet Laureate Luis Rodriguez, two poetry anthologies published in the last year and a few recently written histories on Los Angeles Poetry, there…

Note from the Editor: For the 100th (!!!) entry in our Small Press Database, we’re going back in time to the first small press interview we ever conducted, with Writ Large Press…

I never intended to become anorexic. I was surprised and wondering if I should be happy or panic when the scale hit 102 lbs. Between breaking up with my on-again-off-again…

Christopher Soto (aka Loma) is a queer latinx punk poet & prison abolitionist. Their first chapbook, “Sad Girl Poems” was released from Sibling Rivalry Press at the end of January.…

If I were to be incarcerated, I would send away for photocopied pieces of the Sistine Chapel from people who still cared about me. I’d get an outstretched arm from…

So, we have been able to create our own aesthetic—something a little more laid-back, with a vibe closer to, “this is something we’re passionate about that’s also fun as hell,” and less, “this is a very serious business that can only publish from a certain list of writers or we’ll lose all our precious cool factor.” We’re not super obsessed with being perceived as anything other than two Stevie Nicks-wannabes who also like to read good stuff.