Category Archives: Publishing

Goodbye Drunken Boat, Hello Anomaly!

May 18, 2017 by Erica Mena

[Note: All documents quoted in this post are public record, comprising parts of the public non-profit corporation’s minutes, filed with the New York Secretary of State in accordance with state law and the corporation’s bylaws. All minutes of the corporation are available for public review upon request.] This is a post I really didn’t want to have to write. I believe firmly in restorative justice, and the possibility for healing and recovery within a community, despite harm done. But I also […]

Categories: Publishing, Uncategorized • Tags: abuse, Anomalous, Anomalous Press, anomaly25, drunken boat, drunken boat journal, ravi shankar, ravi shankar arrests, ravi shankar poet

The Making of the Covers

March 20, 2015 by Erica Mena

7 runs, 9 hours, 4 days, 3 different presses, 3 different covers. Maybe only another letterpress printer will understand the insanity that felt like, getting three of the four handmade letterpress covers for the Anomalous Press 2015 season done in the past week. (The fourth is being printed by the phenomenal Lee Marchalonis, and I don’t even know what it looks like yet, but she’s one of my favorite printers ever!). I started out last week with the cover for The All-New by […]

Categories: Chapbooks, Publishing • Tags: anatomy of a museum, Anomalous Press, creative nonfiction, drown/sever/sing, fiction, ian hatcher, iceland, kendra greene, lina maria ferriera cabeza-vanegas, nonfiction, penis museum, phallological museum, poetry, rosmarie waldrop, the all-new, third person singular

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My Week In Books

March 13, 2015 by Erica Mena

Featherbone. from Featherbone: Searshut your throat & open soundless: again—it pierces your back— spins—you lurch and plummet— light is: to blame you: unother. The light is already bleaching your veins metasomatized —blooming in the cracks the fissures. This is my book, Featherbone. It’s a cyborg feminist retelling of Icarus, driven by compound neologisms. The cover art is by Wangechi Mutu, titled “Love’s a Witch, Orfeo’s Underworld Coronation for Euridice,” 2006. Mutu is a Kenyan-born artist and sculptor who resides in […]

Categories: Publishing, Uncategorized • Tags: Anomalous Press, arrowsmith press, askold melnyczuk, cole swenson, collier nogues, drown/sever/sing, drunken boat, erica mena, featherbone, frank andre jamme, ian hatcher, jorie graham, la presse, lina maria ferriera cabeza-vanegas, melissa green, poetry, the all-new, the ground i stand on is not my ground, to the secret

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What do Rosmarie Waldrop, a penis museum, columbian legends, and code poetry have in common?

March 4, 2015 by Erica Mena

The new season of Anomalous Press titles is nearly upon us, and I spent the whole day getting these amazing things off to the printer. (I’m so spacey that I just wrote titles, then it looked wrong so I tried titels, but no, its, definitely titles…) [update: you can now pre-order the whole 2015 season!] And seriously, I say this every year, but these books are so so good! As always, we’re doing super-limited runs of 100, with digital (but beautifully designed) […]

Categories: Chapbooks, Publishing • Tags: a kendra greene, all-new, anatomy of a museum, Anomalous, Anomalous Press, chapbook, columbian literature, creative nonfiction, drown/sever/sing, experimental, experimental nonfiction, experimental poetry, ian hatcher, iceland, keith waldrop, kendra greene, lina maria ferriera cabeza-vanegas, lyric essay, phallological society, poetry, rosmarie waldrop, third person singular

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Small Press Publishing Goals: Making Future People's Heads Explode

February 27, 2015 by Erica Mena

“My mission is to create beautiful, strange little books that a grad student studying the small press movement of the early 21st century will find in a special collections somewhere and they will make her head explode. Can you give us a preview of what’s current and/or forthcoming from your catalog, as well as what you’re hoping to publish in the future? Well, last season we only put out three titles, and they were all poetry. Outer Pradesh by Nathaniel […]

Categories: Publishing • Tags: Anomalous Press, experimental poetry, keith waldrop, nathaniel mackey, outer pradesh, poetry, publishing, rosmarie waldrop, small press

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Judging A Book By Its Cover (And Interior!)

February 11, 2015 by Erica Mena

Form fixed, or flowing? That’s the question I think about a lot in terms of new book forms. Is a particular text flowing, like water, able to shape itself without losing anything to many different containers (page sizes, margins, font faces, leading, etc.) depending on the preference of the reader. Or is a text, like many poems, fixed. The line has to end where it ends or the meaning and artistry of the text are compromised. There’s clearly room in […]

Categories: Publishing • Tags: book design, design, poetry, poetry design, poetry publishing

Funding for the Virtual Arts NonProfit

February 11, 2014 by Erica Mena

Running an online literary journal is a lot of work. I’ve been doing it for a few years now, and just started as the Managing Editor for Drunken Boat, an awesome and well-established journal for literature and arts entering its 15th year of continuous online publication (wow!). One of the things I’m doing a lot of is infrastructure building, which includes researching and applying for grants and other kinds of funding. And one of the things that keeps being a […]

Categories: Publishing • Tags: arts management, drunken boat, literary journals, literary publishing online

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Chapbooks Resources

September 4, 2013 by Erica Mena

**I drafted this post a few weeks ago, and wanted to have more in my spreadsheet before publishing, but CLMP just announced a new chapbook/zine membership which you can read about here and I figured I should just get this posted.** I’ve been into chapbooks for a long time. Pretty much since I started working in literary publishing as the senior editor for the fascinating Arrowsmith Press, edited by Askold Melnyczuk. There’s a lot to love about them. One of the things I love […]

Categories: Chapbooks, Publishing • Tags: chapbook, poetry, publishing

Vanity Presses, Self-Publishing & The Antigone Poems by Marie Slaight

August 26, 2013 by Erica Mena

I just received an advance review copy of The Antigone Poems by Marie Slaight, forthcoming in January from Altaire Productions & Publications. I wasn’t surprised that I hadn’t heard of the poet or the press, they are in Australia and it’s a sad reality that very few books published outside the US gain any real attention here. There are a handful of UK presses I know and love, because I lived there briefly, and I’ve worked hard to gain expertise in […]

Categories: Poetry, Publishing, Reading Journal, Reviews • Tags: altaire productions, marie slaight, poetry, self publishing, self-published, terrance hasker, the antigone poems, vanity press

Ch-ch-changes, a talk on publishing for emerging writers

June 7, 2013 by Erica Mena

This is the draft of a talk I’m going to be giving on publishing later on tonight. I wasn’t given any particular parameters, except that I was expected to talk for about 20 minutes, and this is clearly longer than that and kind of rambling. But I figured I’d just get down some of the things I’ve been thinking about, and see what the audience wanted to explore. ——– Many, if not all, emerging literary writers get their start by […]

Categories: Publishing

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