Monday, March 23

By the Glass- Chapbook Meet and Greet
The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses

Tuesday, March 31- Saturday, May 23

Seeking the Glyph: The Glyphic Works of Edward Sanders
Poets House- 10 River Terrace, New York, NY 10282

During the course of his long and diverse career as a poet, musician, historian, publisher, activist, and pacifist, Edward Sanders has invented a glyphic alphabet, a colorful script of hand-drawn characters, symbols, and graphemes that represent everything from destiny to the plank unit. In his words: “A Glyph is a drawing that is charged with literary, emotional, historical or mythic, and poetic intensity.” Sanders’ pictographic language occupies a shifting spot on the continuum between text and image; rune and icon; poetry and art. At home on both the page and the wall, his glyphs form a writing system that picks up where known lexicons leave off. Organized in conjunction with Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, Seeking the Glyph is an exhibition of select drawings and daybooks authored by Sanders between 1962 and the present.

Curated by Ammiel Alcalay and Kendra Sullivan, items are drawn from Edward Sanders’ personal archive.

Tuesday, March 31

6PM-9PM
Lost and Found Series V Launch and Opening Reception: Seeking the Glyph
Poets House- 10 River Terrace, New York, NY 10282

6PM
Opening Reception

7PM
A Discussion with Edward Sanders and Lost & Found: Series V editors Alex Wermer-Colan, Gabrielle Kappes, Kai Krienke, and Zohra Saed

Please join artist Edward Sanders as he discusses his both his glyphic works and his personal archive, classified chronologically in banker boxes since the early sixties, and including hand-drawn glyphs, ephemera, magazine layouts, daybooks, and Fugs album covers on view as part of Seeking the Glyph, curated by Ammiel Alcalay and Kendra Sullivan, from Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. In addition, hear from Lost & Found Series V editors: Alex Wermer-Colan, Gabrielle Kappes, Kai Krienke, and Zohra Saed will discuss their own work editing previously unpublished texts unearthed from personal and institution archives around the world. Their forthcoming publications include William S. Burroughs’ cut-ups, Kathy Acker’s letters and an homage to LeRoi Jones, Jean Senac’s manifesto, written during the French-Algerian War, and Langston Hughes’ travelogues from the Near East.

Lost & Found Series V— featuring chapbooks by Kathy Acker, William S. Burroughs, Langston Hughes, and Jean Sénac—will be available at the event for pre-publication purchase!

Wednesday, April 1

10AM – 1PM & 2PM – 5PM
Hands-on Workshops with Barbara Henry and Celine Lombardi
Center for Book Arts- 28 W 27th St, New York, NY 10001
RSVP required: .

To kick off the Chapbook Festival, the Center for Book Arts will host workshops on hand-bookbinding and letterpress printing for writers, taught by artists Barbara Henry and Celine Lombardi. Workshops run 10AM-1PM and 2PM-5PM. You can take either or both, but you must RSVP in advance. Get your feet wet in printing and bookmaking! RSVP required: (212) 481-0295. $20 donation at the door covers materials.

3:15PM-4:30PM
Inside the New York Public Library: Chapbook Collection
New York Public Library – Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street
Margaret Liebman Berger Forum, Room 227

Get a behind the scenes look at the New York Public Library’s chapbook collections with Isaac Gewirtz and Karen Gisonny, including the history of the Library’s collections, the evolution of the genre in Europe and America, and current collecting of chapbooks and zines since the 1970s. Rare chapbooks from the Library’s collections will be on display. Refreshments will be served.

Isaac Gewirtz, Curator of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Karen Gisonny, Helen Bernstein Librarian for Periodicals & Journals

RSVP: 

6:30PM – 8:30PM
Five Years of Lost & Found: New American Poetry & Beyond
Martin E. Segal Theatre, The Graduate Center CUNY

Come celebrate five years of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Archive Initiative with Ammiel Alcalay and Aoibheann Sweeney, along long-time friends of the press: Eileen Myles, Thurston Moore, Anne Waldman, and Dorothy Wang. Each speaker will read from and comment on pivotal texts published by Lost & Found Series I-V, touching upon the works and impact of writers like: Kathy Acker, Amiri Baraka, Nancy Cunard, Diane di Prima, Edward Dorn, Robert Duncan, Langston Hughes, Helene Johnson, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Olson, Jean Sénac, and Jack Spicer, among many others. Over the last five years, Lost & Found has traveled to over 50 archives both in the US and abroad; published 35 chapbooks; released 5 books under the rubric of Lost & Found Elsewhere; curated 2 exhibitions of art and ephemera related to New American Poetry at Poets House; held numerous workshops, readings, and events, such as the powerful reunion of the Umbra Workshop in 2014; and made countless previously unpublished novels, poems, manifestoes, letters, and screenplays available for the first time to the public.  But perhaps most remarkably, Lost & Found has built a sustaining and cross-disciplinary community of scholars, educators, writers, artists, activists, and presses around its radical and recuperative publishing efforts.

Lost & Found Series V— featuring chapbooks by Kathy Acker, William S. Burroughs, Langston Hughes, and Jean Sénac—will be available at the event for pre-publication purchase!

Thursday, April 2

10AM-7PM
Book Fair
C-Level, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Over 60 presses share their publications on the concourse level of the CUNY Graduate Center.

Click here for the full list of publishers.

All events listed below take place on C-Level at The Graduate Center, CUNY, except for the 7pm Award Ceremony.

10AM-6PM
CLMP Advice Dispensary

11AM
Nuts, Bolts, & Beyond: How to Get Your Work into Print 

Melissa Faliveno, associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine, talks with chapbook publishers and authors to discuss the collaborative publishing process, innovative forms and expanding genres, and how to get your work into print. Featuring Shanna Compton and Jackie Clark of Bloof Books, Joe Pan and Dominique Townsend of Brooklyn Arts Press, Bianca Stone and Alina Gregorian of Monk Books, Emily Skillings and Emily Brandt of No, Dear, and MC Hyland of DoubleCross Press.

12:30PM
The Chapbook Across Genres

The chapbook is a platform for experimentation that expands the notion of how publications function and writing performs. Deeply interdisciplinary, the form predicts future hybrid genres. Kimiko Hahn moderates a discussion with Karl Larocca a.k.a. Kayrock from Kayrock Screenprinting, Jacqueline Waters from The Physiocrats, and Rachael Michelle Wilson and Ada Smailbegovic from The Organism for Poetic Research, all of whom combine text and image, digital and print mediums, and poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and critical writing.

1:30PM
Lunch Poems with New York City Poets

Recent recipients of fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation, the Poetry Project, and Poets House share their work in this lunch hour introduction to the rising stars.

Featuring:

Poets House: J. Mae Barizo and Vincent Toro

Cave Canem: Adrienne Christian and Jonterri Gadson

Poetry Project: Miriam Atkin, Maxe Crandall, and Morgan Vo

3PM
Raven Press Redux: Chapbook Publishing as a Pedagogical Tool

Last year, the all-girls publishing collective Raven Press from Academy for Young Writers High School was asked to participate in a panel on writing, editing, and publishing as pedagogical practices. There, we asked: How do self-expression and self-publication inspire community-building and inform a sense of personal efficacy? If we produce and distribute our own chapbooks, pamphlets, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, are we taking charge of our own stories? Our own lives? This year, the founders of Raven Press prepare for writing – and life – after high school, while also training the next generation of teenage publishers to take the helm of their press. Come hear poets, publishers and educators Mahogany Browne, Alex Cuff, and Rebecca Gee, and poets and educators Adam Falkner, Camonghne Felix and Jon Sands, carry the conversation with Raven Press forward. The discussion will be followed by a short open mic for students and educators alike. Representing Raven Press is Chris Bardales, Kari Henry,  Jessica Michel, Lnette Smith, Ashaunte Solomon, and Tianna Wells.

4:30PM
The Margins are the Center: CUNY Students Publishing with Chapbook Presses

The Graduate Center has a long history of harboring educators, administrators, and activists who double as poets and publishers. In “Teaching Language in Open Admissions,” Adrienne Rich writes: “I think of myself as a teacher of language: that is, as someone for whom language has implied freedom, who is trying to aid others to free themselves through the written word, and above all through learning to write it themselves.”  Please join poets and scholars Iris Cushing, Tonya Foster, erica kaufman, Maryam Parhizkar, Anna Moschovakis, Sara Jane Stoner, and Simone White as they discuss their experience of working by, through, alongside, because of, and in spite of academic mandates in order to pursue creative projects, publish innovative texts, and establish an longview writerly community outside its architecture.

7PM
PSA Chapbook Fellowship Award Ceremony
Thirteenth Street Repertory Theatre -50 W 13th St, New York, NY 10011

The Poetry Society of America launched the PSA Chapbook Fellowship Program more than a decade ago to establish the template for a community of peers and mentors who encourage and support talented poets who have not yet published a first book. Since the inception of the program we have introduced 44 new voices—next spring, the total will grow to 48. A uniquely supportive publication opportunity, the Fellowship provides exposure, mentorship, and career-building resources for promising poets in the earliest stages of their careers. Six years ago, PSA built on the program’s early momentum by joining with the CUNY Chapbook Festival. Each year, the Festival is scheduled to coincide with the launch of the new set of Chapbooks. This year’s reading will take place at ­include Thirteenth Street Repertory Theatre and readers include the 2015 Chapbook Fellows HL Hazuka, Max Ritvo, Eva Maria Saavedra, and Callie Siskel, alongside this year’s poet-judges Elizabeth Alexander, Forrest Gander, Marilyn Hacker, and Jean Valentine.

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Wednesday April 1 at 10AM – 1PM & 2PM – 5PM
Center for Book Arts- 28 W 27th St, New York, NY 10001
RSVP required: .

To kick off the Chapbook Festival, the Center for Book Arts will host workshops on hand-bookbinding and letterpress printing for writers, taught by artists Barbara Henry and Celine Lombardi.

Workshops run 10AM-1PM and 2PM-5PM. You can take either or both, but you must RSVP in advance. Get your feet wet in printing and bookmaking!

$20 donation at the door covers materials.

Wednesday, April 1, 3:15-4:30

Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street
Margaret Liebman Berger Forum, Room 227

Get a behind the scenes look at the New York Public Library’s chapbook collections with Isaac Gewirtz and Karen Gisonny, including the history of the Library’s collections, the evolution of the genre in Europe and America, and current collecting of chapbooks and zines since the 1970s. Rare chapbooks from the Library’s collections will be on display. Refreshments will be served.

Isaac Gewirtz, Curator of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
Karen Gisonny, Helen Bernstein Librarian for Periodicals & Journals

RSVP:

Come celebrate five years of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Archive Initiative with Ammiel Alcalay and Aiobheann Sweeney, along long-time friends of the press: Thurston Moore, Anne Waldman, and Dorothy Wang. Each speaker will read from and comment on pivotal texts published by Lost & Found Series I-V, touching upon the works and impact of writers like: Kathy Acker, Amiria Baraka, Nancy Cunard, Diane di Prima, Edward Dorn, Robert Duncan, Langston Hughes, Helene Johnson, Lorine Niedecker, Chalres Olson, Jean Sénac, and Jack Spicer, among many others. Over the last five years, Lost & Found has traveled to over 50 archives both in the US and abroad; published 35 chapbooks; released 5 books under the rubric of Lost & Found Elsewhere; curated 2 exhibitions of art and ephemera related to New American Poetry at Poets House; held numerous workshops, readings, and events, such as the powerful reunion of the Umbra Workshop in 2014; and made countless previously unpublished novels, poems, manifestoes, letters, and screenplays available for the first time to the public.  But perhaps most remarkably, Lost & Found has built a sustaining and cross-disciplinary community of scholars, educators, writers, artists, activists, and presses around its radical and recuperative publishing efforts.

Lost & Found Series V— featuring chapbooks by Kathy Acker, William S. Burroughs, Langston Hughes and Jean Sénac—will be available at the event for pre-publication purchase!

Thursday, April 2, 10AM-6pm
C-Level, The Graduate Center, CUNY

This year at the 2015 NYC/CUNY Chapbook Festival, CLMP will be offering free consultations and will be debuting a new chapbook and zine regrant opportunity funded through the New York State Council for the Arts. Stop by the book fair and visit our table and for a free consultation with our staff to learn more or see what opportunities and resources CLMP can offer you.

CLMP has recently established a new membership for chapbook and zine publishers—to help foster an environment for mutual support within the chapbook and zine community.

CLMP believes that small press publishers play a critical cultural role by connecting the greatest diversity of writers to equally diverse communities of readers, and chapbook publishers are often at the vanguard, often the most representative of the artistic practice of literary publishing.

The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) provides technical assistance to the community of small literary publishers and advocates on their behalf, helping them through the business of publishing and raising the profile of the field. Public programs highlight the work of our community and engage readers and writers. Their members, more than 500 mission-driven, literary small press and magazine publishers, operate with very limited funding and organizational resources. CLMP supports these publishers though a wide roster of programs and resources.

Thursday, April 2, 11AM
C-Level, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Melissa Faliveno, associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine, talks with chapbook publishers and authors to discuss the collaborative publishing process, innovative forms and expanding genres, and how to get your work into print. Featuring Shanna Compton and Jackie Clark of Bloof Books, Joe Pan and Dominique Townsend of Brooklyn Arts Press, Bianca Stone and Alina Gregorian of Monk Books, Emily Skillings and Emily Brandt of No, Dear, and MC Hyland and JenMarie Macdonald of DoubleCross Press.

Participant Bios

Emily Brandt is the author of two chapbooks: ManWorld (dancing girl press) and Behind Teeth (Full Court Books). Her poems have appeared in Sink Review, Coconut, H_NGM_N, The Atlas Review, Epiphany, and others. She earned her MFA from New York University where she facilitated the Veterans Writing Workshop. She has been in residence at Saltonstall Arts Colony (NY) and Elsewhere (NC). Emily is a co-founding editor of No, Dear magazine, the Web Acquisitions Editor for VIDA, and she teaches in Brooklyn.

Jackie Clark is the author of Aphoria (Brooklyn Arts Press) and the chapbooks Sympathetic Nervous System (Bloof), Red Fortress (H_NGM_N), Office Work (Greying Ghost Press), and I Live Here Now (Lame House Press). She is the series editor of Poets off Poetry and Song of the Week for Coldfront Magazine, and can be found online at nohelpforthat.com.

Shanna Compton‘s books include Brink, For Girls & Others, Down Spooky, Gamers, and several chapbooks. A book-length speculative poem called The Hazard Cycle is forthcoming. She is the founder, editor, and designer of Bloof Books, a collective micropress publishing new poetry in both handmade and paperback editions.

Alina Gregorian is the author of Flying Bark (Coconut Books, 2016) and the chapbooks Navigational Clouds (Monk Books, 2015) and Flags for Adjectives(DIEZ, 2015). She curates Triptych Readings, runs a video poetry series on the Huffington Post, and teaches at Rutgers University. She lives in Brooklyn.

Melissa Faliveno is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has worked as an editor for a large trade publisher, a small press, and various literary magazines. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Green Mountains Review, Isthmus, Lumina, and in the book Derby Life: Stories, Advice & Wisdom from the Roller Derby World (Gutpunch Press, 2015).

MC Hyland holds MFAs in Poetry and Book Arts from the University of Alabama and is currently working toward a PhD in English Literature at New York University. She is the author of several poetry chapbooks and the poetry collection Neveragainland (Lowbrow Press) and the founding editor of DoubleCross Press, as well as a Printshop Steward at the Center for Book Arts. Her current academic research focuses on the figure of “the commons” as a representation of spatial and intellectual property in Romantic and postmodern poetry.

JenMarie Macdonald is a writer and bookmaker living near Philadelphia. She’s the author of Sometime Soon Ago (Shadow Mountain) and a forthcoming chapbook from DoubleCross Press in their Poetics of the Handmade series. She has collaborated with Travis Macdonald on chapbooks Graceries (Horse Less Press) and forthcoming Bigger On the Inside (ixnay press) as well as their press Fact-Simile Editions.

Joe Pan is the author of two poetry collections, Autobiomythography & Gallery (BAP) and Hiccups, or Autobiomythography II (Augury Books). He is the publisher and managing editor of Brooklyn Arts Press, serves as the poetry editor for the arts magazine Hyperallergic, and is the founder of the services-oriented activist group Brooklyn Artists Helping. His piece “Ode to the MQ-9 Reaper,” a hybrid work about drones, was excerpted and praised in The New York Times. In 2015 Joe will participate in Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Process Space artist residency program on Governors Island. Joe attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, grew up along the Space Coast of Florida, and now lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Emily Skillings is a dancer poet/ poet dancer. She is the author of two chapbooks: Backchannel (Poor Claudia) and Linnaeus: The 26 Sexual Practices of Plants (No, Dear/ Small Anchor Press). Recent poems can be found in the Phantom Limb, Philadelphia Review of Books, Stonecutter, Maggy, Elderly, Bone Bouquet, Big Lucks and Poor Claudia :: Crush. Skillings dances for The Commons Choir (Daria Faïn and Robert Kocik) and presents her own choreography in New York. She lives in Brooklyn, where she is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective and event series. With poet Adam Fitzgerald, she recently co-curated the exhibit “John Ashbery Collects: Poet Among Things” at Loretta Howard Gallery. She is an MFA candidate at Columbia University.

Bianca Stone is a poet and visual artist. Her books include the poetry collection Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House/Octopus Books 2014), and Antigonick, a hybrid collaboration with Anne Carson (New Directions 2012). She is co-founder and editor of the press Monk Books, and she runs the Ruth Stone Foundation in Vermont and Brooklyn.

Dominique Townsend has a Masters from Harvard Divinity School and a PhD from Columbia University in Buddhist Studies. Her debut book of poetry The Weather & Our Tempers was published in 2013 by Brooklyn Arts Press. Dominique currently works at the Rubin Museum of Art as Head of Interpretation. Her first children’s book, an adaptation of an 8th century Buddhist classic, will be released in July 2015. She is currently working on her second book of poems.

Peter McDonald, still from “Recalcitrant Linen,” Pelt vol. 1 The Skin of Space (2013). Print and Web.

Thursday, April 2, 12:30PM
C-Level, The Graduate Center, CUNY

The chapbook is a platform for experimentation that expands the notion of how publications function and writing performs. Deeply interdisciplinary, the form predicts future hybrid genres. Kimiko Hahn moderates a discussion with Karl Larocca a.k.a. Kayrock from Kayrock Screenprinting, Jacqueline Waters from The Physiocrats, and Rachael Michelle Wilson and Ada Smailbegović from The Organism for Poetic Research, all of whom combine text and image, digital and print mediums, and poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and critical writing.

Participant Bios

Kimiko Hahn is the author of eight collections of poetry, including The Narrow Road to the Interior and Toxic Flora, which is also in the forthcoming Nov/Dec American Poetry Review. She contributed an essay entitled, “Still Writing the Body,” to the new Rankine and Sewell anthology North American Women Poets in the 21st Century, Volume 2.  She has also written for film, most recently Everywhere at Once.  Her awards include a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship and she is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York.

Ada Smailbegović is a poet and critic. Her writing explores relations between poetics, non-human forms of materiality, and histories of description in the field of natural history. She a PhD Candidate at New York University and a co-founder of The Organism for Poetic Research. Critical and poetic work includes Avowal of What Is Here (JackPine Press 2009), Of the Dense and Rare (Triple Canopy 2013), “Cloud Writing” (Art in the Anthropocene 2015) and a forthcoming article on animal architecture and the affective ethology of Monk Parakeets (Angelaki 2015).

Jacqueline Waters is the author of One Sleeps the Other Doesn’t (Ugly Duckling Presse) and A Minute without Danger (Adventures in Poetry). Recent poems have appeared in Little Star, Dreamboat and Chicago Review. She edits The Physiocrats, a pamphlet press.

Rachael Wilson is a Ph.D. candidate at New York University, where she writes on postwar poetry in English, and collaborations between writers and visual artists. She is a senior editor and co-founder of the Organism for Poetic Research, and she co-authors an occasional arts anti-blog, Most Perfect World. Her work has been published most recently in the Brooklyn Rail and in the Reanimation Library’s Word Processor series.

Thursday, April 2, 1:30PM
C-Level, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Recent recipients of fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation, the Poetry Project, and Poets House share their work in this lunch hour introduction to the rising stars.

Featuring:

Poets House: J. Mae Barizo, Vincent Toro and Stephen Boyer

Cave Canem: Adrienne Christian and Jonterri Gadson

Poetry Project: Miriam Atkin, Maxe Crandall, and Morgan Vo

Participant Bios:

Miriam Atkin is a writer and performance artist based in New York City.  Since 2010, she has collaborated with artist Kurt Ralske on various multimedia experiments combining poetry with the moving image. Their 2011 artists’ book, Rediscovering German Futurism: 1920-1929, accompanied a series of performative lectures which were presented in New York at ​The Poetry Project, Soloway Gallery and Spectrum Performance Space, as well as in Providence at the Empire Black Box Theater and the Granoff Center at Brown University. In 2013 the collaboration expanded to include improvising musicians Jonathan Wood Vincent and Daniel Carter, generating performance pieces which were staged at Outpost Artists Resources and Spectrum Performance Space in New York. Miriam regularly contributes art criticism to Art in America and ArtCritical, and her poetry has been published in the Boog City Readerand This Image journal. She is pursuing a PhD in English at CUNY Graduate Center and teaches writing and literature at Lehman College.

J. Mae Barizo  is a poet and cultural critic, born in Toronto,. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, Paris Review Online, Denver Quarterly, among others. A classically-trained musician and a champion of cross-genre work, J. Mae has performed sound/text collaborations with musicians from The National, Bon Iver, and the American String Quartet. Her first book, The Cumulus Effect is forthcoming.

Stephen Boyer is the author of Parasite (2013), Ghosts (2010), and was a lead compiler of the Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology. Currently they’re diligently working on a series of nature-related poems. Their work can be found online, in many zines and an assortment of publications.

Adrienne Christian is a Cave Canem fellow and a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective. Her poetry has been featured in frogpond, Alimentum, Silk Road, Falling Star, Miller’s Pond, Cliterature, and other journals. She is the recipient of the University of Michigan African American Alumni Council’s Five Under Ten Young Alumni Recognition Award. She is the author of 12023 Woodmont Avenue, a coming-of-age poetic memoir.

Maxe Crandall’s first chapbook, Together Men Make Paradigms, was published this summer by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. The play premiered at the Hot! Festival at Dixon Place. A 2014 Poets House fellow, Maxe teaches in the undergraduate writing program at Columbia University and is at work on a critical biography calledGertrude Stein and Men.

Jonterri Gadson is the author of the chapbooks, Interruptions (MIEL, 2014) and Pepper Girl (YesYes Books, 2012). She is the recipient of scholarships/fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, University of Dayton and the University of Virginia’s Creative Writing MFA program. Her poetry is forthcoming or published in Los Angeles Review, Callaloo, The Collagist, PANK and other journals. She is an Assistant Professor of English/Creative Writing at Bloomfield College in New Jersey.

Vincent Toro is a Sorta-Rican poet, playwright, and educator living in The Bronx. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Rutgers University. Toro is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a finalist for the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize, recipient of an associate artist residency with the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and a member of The Macondo Writer’s Foundation. His poems have been published in Word is Bond,Rattapallax, Vallum, Bordersenses, Kweli Literary Journal, The Buenos Aires Review, and in the anthologiesColoring Book: An Anthology of Multicultural Poems and Stories, CHORUS and The Waiting Room Reader 2.

Morgan Vo​ was born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1989, to a Vietnamese father and an American mother.​  He moved to New York in 2​008 to attend the Cooper Union, where ​he​ studied in performance and design, graduating in 2012.​  He has published work in The Brooklyn Rail and Pelt. He puts out paper giveaways under New Pinky and lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Thursday, April 2, 3PM
C-Level, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Last year, the all-girls publishing collective Raven Press from Academy for Young Writers High School was asked to participate in a panel on writing, editing, and publishing as pedagogical practices. There, we asked: How do self-expression and self-publication inspire community-building and inform a sense of personal efficacy? If we produce and distribute our own chapbooks, pamphlets, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, are we taking charge of our own stories? Our own lives? This year, the founders of Raven Press prepare for writing – and life – after high school, while also training the next generation of teenage publishers to take the helm of their press. Come hear poets, publishers and educators Mahogany Browne, Alex Cuff, Adam Falkner, Camonghne Felix, Rebecca Gee, and Jon Sands carry the conversation with Raven Press forward. The discussion will be followed by a short open mic for students and educators alike. Representing Raven Press is Chris Bardales, Kari Henry,  Jessica Michel, Lnette Smith, Ashaunte Solomon, and Tianna Wells.

Participant Bios

Mahogany L. Browne is a Cave Canem and Poets House alumnae, and is the author of several books including Dear Twitter: Love Letters Hashed Out On-line, recommended by Small Press Distribution & About.com Best Poetry Books of 2010. She has released five LPs including the live album Sheroshima. As co-founder of the Off Broadway poetry production, Jam On It, and co-producer of NYC’s 1^st Performance Poetry Festival: SoundBites Poetry Festival, Mahogany bridges the gap between lyrical poets and literary emcee. Browne has toured Germany, Amsterdam, England, Canada and recently Australia as 1/3 of the cultural arts exchange project Global Poetics. Her journalism work has been published in magazines Uptown, KING, XXL, The Source, Canada’s The Word and UK’s MOBO. Her poetry has been published in literary journals Pluck, Manhattanville Review, Muzzle, Union Station Mag, Literary Bohemian, Bestiary, Joint & The Feminist Wire. She is anticipating the release of several poetry collections in 2015: Smudge (Button Poetry), Redbone (Willow Books) & the anthology The Break Beat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Harcourt). She is an Urban Word NYC mentor, as seen on HBO’s Brave New Voices and facilitates performance poetry and writing workshops throughout the country. Brown is also the publisher of Penmanship Books, the Nuyorican Poets Café Poetry Program Director and Friday Night Slam curator and currently an MFA Candidate for Writing & Activism at Pratt Institute.

Alex Cuff is a poet and teacher living in Brooklyn. She began teaching at Academy for Young Writers, a public school located East New York, in 2006 and started Raven Press with a small group of students in 2013. Her writing can be found online in Apogee Journal, Sink Review, Leveler and Two Serious Ladies and is forthcoming in 6×6 and the Poetry Project Newsletter. She’s a graduate of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College and co-founding editor of magazine.

Camonghne Felix is an MFA Candidate at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, a 2012 Pushcart Prize nominee, the 2013 recipient of the Cora Craig Award for Young Women and was featured on the HBO Documentary Brave New Voices, and other television projects. You can find her work in various spaces, including Youtube, and publications like Pank Magazine, Specter Magazine, Bayou Magazine with work forthcoming in Union Station and Callalloo Journal. She is also the author of the chapbook Yolk, set to release in Spring 2015 via Penmanship Books.

Adam Falkner is an artist, educator and scholar. He is the Founder and Executive Director of the Dialogue Arts Project, and an Arthur Zankel Fellow at Columbia University’s Teachers College, where he is a PhD student in the English Education program. Twice-nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Adam’s work has been published in a range of both literary and academic journals, and has also been featured on HBO, Michigan and New York Public Radio, Upworthy, in Time Out New York, the New York Times, and elsewhere. A former high school English teacher in New York City’s public schools, Adam tours the United States as a featured artist, lecturer and trainer, and was the keynote speaker at President Obama’s Grassroots Ball at the 2009 Presidential Inauguration. He is currently an instructor of English and Education at both Columbia University’s Teachers College and Vassar College.

Rebecca Gee is an award-winning artist, poet and teacher. She co-founded The Writers Studio KW (“kids write”), a nonprofit branch of The Writers Studio, with Monica Banks & Phil Schultz in 2009. Gee serves as Director and Teacher for these innovative writing workshops for high school students at a community center in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. KW celebrates its 7th Anniversary this year and has grown to incorporate creative writing workshops for high school students with language-based learning disabilities. Her webinar “Teaching Creative Writing to Dyslexic Students” forced her to learn PowerPoint and is available at .

Jon Sands is a writer known for electric readings, and the author of (2011, Write Bloody Publishing). His work has been featured in The New York Times, published widely in various journals, and anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2014. He starred in the award winning web-series from Rattapallax Films, is the co-founder of, and a facilitator with the. He is a Youth Mentor with Urban Word-NYC, and teaches creative writing for adults at both Bailey House in Harlem (an HIV/AIDS service center) and the Positive Health Project (a syringe exchange in Manhattan). He tours extensively, but lives in Brooklyn.

Raven Press is:

Chris “Poetic Prince” Bardales  is a 10th grader at Academy for Young Writers in Brooklyn. He’s a poet, actor, rapper, entrepreneur, and political activist in the making. His first chapbook of poems was published by Raven Press in 2015 and is titled A River That Flows Forever.

Kari Henry is a senior at the Academy for Young Writers. She was born here in Brooklyn, but her family is from St. Lucia, so she identifies herself as a “St. Lucian American Brooklynite”. She mostly writes poems, and in the past has written plays and short stories. She is a co-founder of AFYW’s book binding club, also known as Raven Press. Through Raven Press, she published three chapbooks; Subject Matter (2013), Kari’s Story Hour (2014), and a collaboration with Stephanie Martinez entitled Black and White and Read All Over (2015).

Jessica Michel

Lnette Smith is a 17 year old poet who lives in Brooklyn. She has created and published three books with Raven Press: Cracks in the Glass (2013),  Fairytale Junction (2014), and Rock the Cradle (2015). Shes a senior at Academy for Young Writers and wants to study psychology and one day open up her own business.

Ashaunte Solomon is a writer who lives in Manhattan. This 17 year old girl has been writing most of her life and is all about poetry. She also likes to write short stories, read books, and play the piano. Ashaunte’s first publication,a combination of poems, journal entries and short stories, is titled The Biggest Fool Of Them All (Raven Press, 2015).

Tianna Wells is a poet and a young writer. She has been writing stories and poetry since 2009 and expanded her writing skills throughout the years. She has a passion for writing and wishes to continue on her work from the teachings she received from Alex Cuff and Adam Falkner, Mahogany L. Browne and many other different poets. She began abstract painting in 2014 and wishes to continue on painting as well. Tianna’s Raven Press publications include the poetry collection “Lil Angel” (2013), the short story “The Demon Life Part 1” (2014) and “The Demon Life Part 2” (2015). She is currently writing “The Demon Life Part 3.”

Thursday, April 2, 4:30PM
C-Level, The Graduate Center, CUNY

The Graduate Center has a long history of harboring educators, administrators, and activists who double as poets and publishers. In “Teaching Language in Open Admissions,” Adrienne Rich writes: “I think of myself as a teacher of language: that is, as someone for whom language has implied freedom, who is trying to aid others to free themselves through the written word, and above all through learning to write it themselves.”  Please join poets and scholars Iris Cushing, Tonya Foster, Maryam Parhizkar, Anna Moschovakis, Sara Jane Stoner, and Simone White as they discuss their experience of working by, through, alongside, because of, and in spite of academic mandates in order to pursue creative projects, publish innovative texts, and establish an longview writerly community outside its architecture.

Participant Bios

Iris Cushing is the author of Wyoming (Furniture Press Books, 2014). In 2011, Iris was a writer-in-residence at Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, her former home.  She has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Fence, the Boston Review and the Barrelhouse, and her critical writings on art and literature can be found on Hyperallergic, Jacket2 and the Poetry Project Newsletter. Iris is a founding editor for Argos Books, an independent poetry press, and currently studies mysticism and counterculture in postwar American poetry in the English Ph.D. program at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Tonya M. Foster is a New Orleaninan living in Harlem, NY. A co-editor of Third Mind: Teaching Writing through Visual Art, her first full-length collection of poetry, Swarm of Bees in High Court is forthcoming from Belladonna*. She is a recipient of fellowships from NYFA, Macdowell, the Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and The Graduate Center, CUNY where she is enrolled as a PhD student in English.

Maryam Parhizkar is an MA candidate in the Liberal Studies Program at the CUNY Graduate Center, concentrating in American Studies. Her current interests explore the ways in which experimentation in American music is informed by poetics, performance practices, racial experience and politics. Also a poet and violist by musical training, by day she manages concerts for the series Music Before 1800 and publications for Litmus Press.

Anna Moschovakis is the author of two books of poems, I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone and You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, and several chapbooks. Her translations from the French include texts by Henri Michaux, Claude Cahun, Theophile Gauthier, Pierre Alféri, and Blaise Cendrars, as well as the books The Jokers by Albert Cossery, The Possession by Annie Ernaux, and The Engagement by Georges Simenon. Currently a freelance editor and a visiting professor in the Writing department at Pratt Institute, she has been working with Ugly Duckling Presse since 2002 as an editor, designer, administrator, and printer.,

Sara Jane Stoner is a writer, performer, and teacher at Brooklyn College and The Cooper Union. She has an MFA in Fiction from Indiana University and is currently a PhD student in English at CUNY Graduate Center. Her writing and criticism can be found in DIAGRAM and the St. Mark’s Poetry Project newsletter, among other places. Currently she is working on a book of ekphrastic fictions based on the life, paintings, and critical writings of Piet Mondrian, and an autocritical novella on the pleasures of myopia, detail, and objecthood.

Simone White is the author of Of Being Dispersed (forthcoming from Futurepoem Books), House Envy of All the World (Factory School/Heretical Texts) and the chapbooks Dolly (Q Ave Press, with the paintings of Kim Thomas) and Unrest (Ugly Duckling Presse, Dossier Series). She is a Cave Canem fellow and was selected as a New American Poet for the Poetry Society of America in 2013. She works as Program Manager at The Poetry Project and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Thursday, April 2, 7:00PM
Thirteenth Street Repertory Theatre -50 W 13th St, New York, NY 10011

The Poetry Society of America launched the PSA Chapbook Fellowship Program in 2003 to encourage and support talented poets who have not yet published a first book. Each year, four distinguished contemporary poets select and introduce a chapbook by a new poet. Since the inception of the program, the PSA has introduced 44 new voices—next spring, the total will grow to 48. The inaugural and enduring design for the chapbooks was honored with an award from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and the chapbooks are copyedited by a poet who was a longtime New Yorker copyeditor.

A uniquely supportive publication opportunity, the Fellowship provides exposure, mentorship, and career-building resources for promising poets in the earliest stages of their careers. Six years ago, PSA built on the program’s early momentum by joining with the CUNY Chapbook Festival. Each year, the Festival is scheduled to coincide with the launch of the new set of Chapbooks. This year’s reading will take place at the Thirteenth Street Repertory Theatre. Readers include the 2015 Chapbook Fellows along with the judges who selected them,  HL Hazuka (with Forrest Gander), Max Ritvo (with Jean Valentine), Eva Maria Saavedra (with Marilyn Hacker), and Callie Siskel (with Elizabeth Alexander).  A reception with all with follow the reading.

Shanna Compton on Bloof Books

Shanna Compton is the author of the poetry collections Brink, For Girls & Others, Down Spooky, and several chapbooks. The Hazard Cycle, a book-length speculative poem, is forthcoming from Bloof Books in 2015. She is the founding member of the Bloof Books collective and works as a freelance book designer and editor.

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What is your own personal history with chapbooks? How did they first catch your interest?

When I was in third grade, our Language Arts class made a chapbook of poems and drawings, called Poems from the Unicorn’s Kingdom. Our teacher had them printed and stapled and we distributed them to our families and I think sold copies as some kind of fundraising for our school (but I’m fuzzy on that part). I wrote my first poem for this prestigious publication. I never stopped making books after that. I used my mom’s government-issue IBM Selectric III typewriter (which despite her lugging it home on weekends was not meant to be portable) and other filched office supplies. In college, I published a zine. My boyfriend at the time worked at Kinko’s so I had access to desktop publishing software and the repro equipment there. This was in Austin, so  was a big influence. The whole DIY thing has always seemed natural to me—I just thought everybody did it. I realized later how lucky that made me.

What made you first decide to start  publishing chapbooks?

Other than these early forays and some randomly timed one-offs, I started again seriously in the early 2000s, post-grad school. I had a little press called Half Empty Half Full to make chapbooks and broadsides for and with friends, and in conjunction with a reading series I was cohosting in Brooklyn. At the same time, I was editing the lit journal at the New School and editing books for , so I was making books in various ways, and learning a lot more about production and design. When I moved on from Soft Skull, I took two poets I’d published there and started Bloof.

Could you talk a little bit about your own process of making and publishing chapbooks?

The chapbooks I tend to make fall somewhere between basic and fussy. Though I’m trained in letterpress printing, I don’t have the space or a local studio out where I live, so I use office equipment mostly, plus some hand-applied printing methods like linocut, stamping, appliqué, etc. But also, I prefer these methods for the work we’re putting out right now. I don’t want the chapbooks to be more than $10. (Right now they’re all $8, except one was intended to be more economical as part of its theme, and it was $5.) The accessibility and ephemeral feeling of chapbooks are two of the things I’ve always been attracted to, and I while I appreciate the other stuff too, it’s just not what I’m most interested in making at this time.

The process goes basically like this: Bloof holds an open reading period to select several chapbooks. We’re a collective, so all poets who’ve published with the press are invited to read submissions and help choose. Once we’ve chosen the series for the year, I work with each of the authors to come up with a design approach, and we talk about materials, etc. The goal is to find not just a unique expression for the work in the chapbook, but also the best one, within our constraints of budget, time, equipment, materials.

What is unique about the chapbook form, or why chapbooks and not book-books?

I think the shorter format is conducive to showcasing (or inspiring) work that doesn’t necessarily fit (or get shown to best advantage) in other formats. For instance, Jennifer Tamayo’s chapbook, , is a standalone work. (That’s the link to the the free digital release.) An excerpt did appear in Poemeleon, but the work is not included in either of her longer books. It also has typographical elements and illustrations that would maybe be harder to accommodate in a magazine or integrate into a longer book with other work. Kirsten Kaschock’s book is another example of this. Windowboxing: A Dance with Saints in Three Acts is something she wrote specifically as a chapbook-length standalone work. It’s also illustrated, by one of her sons.

There are other ways in which chapbooks are great, and lots of ours turn out to be later included in longer books by the poets. In those cases, they function as a sort of midway point between (or alternative to) magazine publication, before the longer book comes out, or as a way to document its development in progress. An example of this would be  (free digital version)—she’s been publishing in magazines but doesn’t have a longer book yet, so the chapbook was really fun to do with her, as a way to draw some attention what she’s doing, in a focused way. The same was true of Natalie Eilbert, when we did  (free digital version), and several of the others we’ve done.

Obviously I also really like the variety of approaches that come out of the DIY practice: constraints of budget and materials and distribution make us all creative by necessity. Every time I look at a collection of chapbooks or go to a bookfair, I see new ways of printing and image-making, materials pressed into new uses, experimental and ad-hoc binding techniques—many nontraditional and innovative ideas. And for the most part they’re not slick, not primarily commercial objects, even though they’re for sale or swap. I don’t know—there’s something magic in the way all these handmade objects feel simultaneously ephemeral and ultra-concrete. It’s a wonder they exist when they don’t have to.

Do you have recent favorite chapbook from another press?

Two of my recent favorites: Patricia Spears Jones’s Living in the Love Economy from Overpass Books (). And Danielle Pafunda’s When You Left Me in the Rutted Terrain of Our Love at the Border, Which I Could Not Cross, Remaining a Citizen of This Corrupt Land, from Birds of Lace. I also just got a great batch from Nous-Zot, but haven’t had a chance to read them yet.

What does it mean to the chapbook and experimental publishing community to come together and compare projects once a year at the CUNY Chapbook Festival?

Bloof’s been to Chapfest twice now, though the first year I didn’t get to attend myself because I had a schedule conflict. When I went last year, it instantly became one of my favorite bookfairs, among the few dozen I’ve attended as either vendor or visitor. It’s the only one I know of that’s exclusively focused on chapbooks, and just walking around looking at everything is inspiring. The panel discussion I participated in last year introduced me to Adam Robinson (who I knew of but hadn’t actually met) and we’re now collaborating, in the sense that we’re sharing info and resources and I’m writing for Amy McDaniel’s and his new lit site .

So, you know, people as well as objects and techniques. I also bought or swapped for cool stuff I wouldn’t otherwise have known about. I’m really looking forward to this year’s, and plan to keep coming as long as they keep having it.

Bianca Stone on Monk Books

Bianca Stone is a poet and visual artist. Her books include the poetry collection Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House/Octopus Books 2014), and Antigonick, a hybrid collaboration with Anne Carson (New Directions 2012). She is co-founder and editor of the press , and she runs the Ruth Stone Foundation in Vermont and Brooklyn. The Selected Poetry Comics is forthcoming from Pleiades Books. 

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What is your own personal history with chapbooks? How did they first catch your interest?

I’ve always I loved making little books. It gave me endless pleasure growing up. My family were writers and I wanted to copy them. And the book form was always deeply revered. I never stopped loving making books. I was really into making zines in high school and college. I started making poetry chapbooks and poetry comic chapbooks more regularly as an adult, just to give at readings before I had a book out.

What made you first decide to start publishing chapbooks?

In grad school I started to really get a taste of the “professional” chapbook publishing world. Poets love slim volumes of things. And a chapbook is the slimiest of the slim volume of poetry. It’s comforting to us to have it be tight, and quick. My friend Adam Fitzgerald and I wanted to start a press so we could publish some of Mark Strand’s letters, but then I convinced him to let us publish some of his prose poems. We started making chapbooks because we loved the poetry that was happening. We wanted to see what it would be like to edit, to create someone else’s books. To push forward the poetry we loved–from established AND unestablished poets. Both sides need attention sometimes. Now working with Ben Pease, my husband, it’s really great. Because the communication between us is constant.

Could you talk a little bit about your own process of making and publishing chapbooks?

Unlike a lot of other cool presses, we actually don’t hand-make our books. We get them perfect-bound from a small printer. So really the process is a lot like a full-length book; layout, design, etc. We end up publishing people whose work we know and love.

What is unique about the chapbook form, or why chapbooks and not book-books?

The chapbook will always be conscious of its size, and availability. It embraces smallness, brevity, and care. It is humble, and beautiful.

Do you have recent favorite chapbook from another press?

I loved the Rachel B. Glaser and John Maradik’s prose chapbook, PEER CONFESSION, from New Herring Press. Brilliant.

What does it mean to the chapbook and experimental publishing community to come together and compare projects once a year at the CUNY Chapbook Festival?

Everything. Since chapbooks, given their virtually universal small-print-run-status, don’t get the same advertising. So there has to be outlets in which to share them. There’s camaraderie, a sisterhood, to the community of chapbook makers and buyers. It’s very important to have events where you can show what you’ve made in the flesh, to be able to touch the books. Writing and publishing is a private act. This allows for the very needed extroversion of the clans.

Linnaeus: The 26 Sexual Practices of Plants by Emily Skillings
Artwork by Nicole Heffron

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Emily Brandt and Alex Cuff on No, Dear

Alex Cuff is a poet and public school teacher living in Brooklyn. Her writing can be found online in Apogee Journal, Sink Review, Leveler and Two Serious Ladies and is forthcoming in 6×6 and the Poetry Project Newsletter. She’s a graduate of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College and co-founding editor of  magazine.

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What is your own personal history with chapbooks? How did they first catch your interest?

We’ve both been reading and admiring chapbooks for over a decade. The form is so inviting and accessible, and such a perfect way to be introduced to a writer whose work you don’t know. A chapbook is like that first conversation at a party – it can be super amazing, or fall a little flat. When it’s amazing, it opens up a totally new relationship with a writer’s work. One of our favorite things is reading the first book of someone who’s chapbook blew us away.

What made you first decide to start publishing chapbooks?

When  was born, almost eight years ago, we discussed eventually publishing chapbooks in addition to the journal. The conversation always came back to this form. We chatted about it with the brilliant Jen Hyde from Small Anchor Press a few years ago, and decided to collaborate on one. Now we’re working on our fourth. We see it as an extension of the work we’re already doing to publish emerging poets in New York City. It also deepens our relationship to a particular poet’s work—our first three chapbooks were written by poets who we’d previously published in No, Dear.

Could you talk a little bit about your own process of making and publishing chapbooks?

The three of us (Alex, Emily, and Jen) read submissions via Submittable, ensuring that everything gets read by at least two of us. We come up with a short list of finalists to discuss in person, and then meet up and read each collection aloud, discussing the work’s impact on us. The hardest part is narrowing it down to just one manuscript. Production is definitely a collaboration between us three, the poet, and any artist(s) we bring in for visuals.

What is unique about the chapbook form, or why chapbooks and not book-books?

A chapbook often represents a singular moment or obsession for the writer. Unlike a full-length book, it can be a small handful of poems placed in intimate relation to the design of the chapbook. Similar to the journal we publish twice a year, we like that a chapbook can be read and reread over the course of a subway ride.

Do you have recent favorite chapbooks from another press?

A few favorites: Nature Poem, self-published by Tommy Pico, Wifeby Caitie Moore (Argos Books), For Love or Money by Sarah Jaffe and Melissa Gira Grant (Guillotine), The Happy End by Mónica de la Torre (The Song Cave), A History of the Human Family by Sasha Steensen and (Ir)Rational Animals by Steven Karl (Flying Guillotine), Mala by Monica McClure (Poor Claudia), POEMS by Joshua Beckman (Brother in Elysium), Legal Pure by Eric Amling (Greying Ghost).

What does it mean to the chapbook and experimental publishing community to come together and compare projects once a year at the CUNY Chapbook Festival?

It’s a chance to stock up, experience writers whose books haven’t come out yet, and talk to other publishers. And it’s a validation that the love for book-making and poetry is alive and that the community is pouring resources into making sure that poets are read.

  Carl Annarummo on Greying Ghost Press

Carl Annarummo is the author of The Soft War (Poor Claudia, 2014) and is managing editor of t. He currently resides in the Boston area with his chubby black cat, Roxanne.

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What is your own personal history with chapbooks? How did they first catch your interest?

I can’t quite remember when I first discovered chapbooks. I do remember going to the Grolier Bookshop in Cambridge when I was in college and picking up books by Burning Deck and Ugly Duckling and a handful of others. I think I spent something like $25 for all that poetry which for a broke student was amazing. And they were so beautiful looking!

A few years later gears started turning and eventually Greying Ghost was born.

What made you first decide to start publishing chapbooks?

It was just a perfect storm. I knew a lot of great writers who had work they wanted to share. I had a printer and some ink. I was curious and willing to learn. I’ve been around printed matter most of my adult life so it just seemed like the logical next step. Also I couldn’t get my own poems published so I figured it’s be a good way to sneak in a few of my own inventions here and there. No but really, I had the basic tools at hand, I had a great group of writerly friends, and the time to put it all together. So why not, you know

Could you talk a little bit about your own process of making and publishing chapbooks?

My process usually involves me sitting on a crowded bus after work with a copy of the poems in my hand. I’ll read for a bit and then get lost in thought while staring out the window or at the back of someone’s head. Maybe I’ll make notes about layout or covers. But mostly I spend a lot of time just thinking about the works themselves. Like an ungodly amount of time. I have trouble with deadlines because I think too damn much! The actual making of the books themselves is pretty standard affair: Cheap beer. Late nights spent formatting text on the computer. Later nights spent folding and cutting everything by hand. Everything is done by me by hand. From printing to shipping to distributing. The covers typically come last. Ideas one through three usually never pan out so the forth option is the one that people see. It’s not glamorous but it is fun as hell.

What is unique about the chapbook form, or why chapbooks and not book-books?

With chapbooks, I feel that writers can take chances that they couldn’t otherwise do with a full length. Or they can at least work around an idea that they can realistically only sustain for a short time. With chapbooks you get to cut excess fat and really produce a work that is focused and singular. But then also, while working with this singular idea or theme, you can really go nuts and really explore every crevasse in its facade. Chapbooks are like what music EPs were when I was a kid. The full length albums always had those 3 or 4 songs that were pure stinkers but the EP was typically a solid collection of 5 or 6 tracks. And every track was a banger.

Do you have recent favorite chapbook from another press?

I’ve been a bit out of the loop lately so I haven’t been buying much but I’m really liking what Argos Books and Rye House are doing. The chapbook fest is always my yearly re-entry into the chapbook world. It’ll be good to get back up to speed.

What does it mean to the chapbook and experimental publishing community to come together and compare projects once a year at the CUNY Chapbook Festival?

It means a lot. It’s a great time to catch up with old comrades and make new alliances. For me personally, because I don’t have a lot of contact or interaction with publishers and consumers, it’s awesome to be able to shake someone’s hand or hear some words of encouragement first-hand.