Indie Lit Fair, Vol. Three

Artemis Journal has been publishing for 43 years out of the Appalachian region of the Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains. The journal began as a result of writing workshops for women who had been victims of domestic violence. For the first few years, Artemis showcased the work of women from this group, and in 1979, expanded its scope to include men as well. This year’s journal, Artemis Journal 2020, will be our 27th published journal to date and will include poetry from two Virginia Poet Laureates, Ron Smith and Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda, and a U.S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey. Artemis 2020’s theme is “Season of Women” and will be a centennial celebration of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave women the right to vote.

Promotion: 20 percent discount for all orders.

Website: artemisjournal.org/store

Autumn House Press is a nonprofit publisher based in Pittsburgh, PA, whose mission is to publish and promote poetry and other fine literature. We concentrate on publishing the work of excellent contemporary writers who have a following among readers, but whose work has been overlooked by commercial publishers. We see our relationships with our authors as partnerships, and believe that a book is not only a readable text but also an object of art.

Promotion: 25 percent off our Spring 2020 releases (use the code HEREANDNOW20) and 15 percent off preorders on our Fall 2020 releases (use the code SOON20) ordered through our website!

Website: autumnhouse.org

Barrelhouse is a pop culture-obsessed nonprofit literary organization. We started in 2004 as a literary magazine that sought to bridge the gap between high-brow literary tastes and the mid-brow appreciation of daily joys like good music, bad television, and a decent hot dog. Nowadays, we’re a print and online literary magazine, a small press bringing good books and chapbooks into the world, an organizer of cool literary events, and curators of a lovely website. 

Promotion: Our most recent book is Mercy, the debut memoir by Marcia Trahan, which interweaves the author’s harrowing experiences under a surgeon’s knife with an exploration of her lifelong obsession with true crime stories. Carolyn Murnick calls it “a painful reckoning with the realities of living in a female body under the specter of the male gaze.” Get it at a preorder discount.

Website: barrelhousemag.com

The Common is a literary organization whose mission is to deepen our individual and collective sense of place through our award-winning biannual print magazine and open-access online platform. We publish works that embody particular times and places—literature and art powerful enough to reach from there to here—and feature new and underrepresented voices from around the world. Issues of The Common include short stories, essays, poems, and images that embody a strong sense of place, and The Common Online publishes original content four times per week, including book reviews, interviews, personal essays, short dispatches, poetry, contributor podcasts and recordings, and multimedia features.

Promotion: 20 percent off a print or digital subscription. Use the promo code spring20.

Website: thecommononline.org

Deep Vellum is a nonprofit literary arts center and publisher. Our mission is to bring the world into conversation through literature. We build community around the literary arts by hosting conversation-driven events and foster inclusion in the literary arts by publishing works by writers from around the globe and from our home base in Texas.

Promotion: 20 percent off all Deep Vellum titles on our website: All titles across our Deep Vellum, Phoneme, A Strange Object, and La Reunion imprints are on sale online!

$20 Digital Care Packages: Send a pack of four Deep Vellum eBooks to a friend for up to 70 percent off list price. Choose from a variety of themes or pick your own.

Website: deepvellum.org

Four Way Books is dedicated to producing and promoting excellent literary publications and to creating opportunities for writers of merit. We believe that the work of writers brings good to the world—understanding, empathy, curiosity, wisdom—and that if we can be the conduit for connecting writers and readers, for making a writer’s life more meaningful by bringing validation to the artist and fine work to public attention, we are spending our days nobly. Four Way Books publishes 16–18 collections of poetry and short fiction a year by emerging and established writers. Don’t miss our electronic literary journal, The Four Way Review!

Website: fourwaybooks.com/site

McPherson & Company is an independent, eclectic, unaffiliated, occasionally avant-garde, and even to ourselves unpredictable book publisher. Founded (under a typically zany small-press name, since retired) in 1974, McPherson publishes literary fiction, belles lettres, translations, anthologies, memoirs, poetry, and even the occasional book on gardening or music.

Promotion: To celebrate the Indie Lit Fair, we are offering a pair of buy-one-get-one free specials to help you share your passion for reading through the summer doldrums.

• Jaimy Gordon’s National Book Award-winning novel Lord of Misrule: a gritty, funny, heartbreaking tale of bottom-end horse racing told in the American tradition of Steinbeck and Damon Runyon.
• Margaret McMullan’s stellar anthology Every Father’s Daughter: Twenty-four women writers remember their fathers, including Jane Smiley, Maxine Hong Kingston, Alice Munro, and so many more equally amazing authors.

Website: mcphersonco.com

Nightboat Books, a nonprofit organization, seeks to develop audiences for writers whose work resists convention and transcends boundaries, by publishing books rich with poignancy, intelligence, and risk. The name Nightboat signifies travel, passage, and possibility—of mind and body, and of language. The night boat maneuvers in darkness at the mercy of changing currents and weather, always immersed in forces beyond itself. It is our goal at Nightboat Books to shed enough light, so the writer and reader can find one another.

Promotion: Free shipping if you order off our website, and early shipping on preorders!

Website: nightboat.org/books

The Rumpus strives to be a platform for marginalized voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere, and to lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers we love. We work to shine a light on stories that build bridges, tear down walls, and speak truth to power.

Promotion: Get 20 percent off merchandise when spending over $25 on select Rumpus merchandise with code IndieLitFair20. Merchandise includes all mugs and our popular Dear Sugar poster! And, save 10 percent on domestic one-year Letters in the Mail and Letters for Kids subscriptions, and six-month Book Club and Poetry Book Club subscriptions with code RumpusProgramsRock.

Website: therumpus.net and store.therumpus.net

Shade Mountain Press is a feminist publisher committed to literature by women authors, especially women from underrepresented groups (women of color, disabled women, LGBTQ women, women from working-class backgrounds). We aim to make the literary landscape more diverse and more truly representative of the nation’s artistic voices.

Promotion: Get a 30 percent discount (and free shipping) off purchases of our June title, Teresa Milbrodt’s Instances of Head-Switching, directly from our website.

Website: shademountainpress.com/books.php

Tiferet’s mission is to foster peace through literature and art. We publish writing from authors of many faiths. Our hope is that Tiferet will help foster cultural pluralism, help us all in our own search for and communion with divinity, and be a stable center within our modern lives—a place where the flames of creativity burn brightly.

Promotion: Get our current digital issue free when you sign up for our newsletter.

Website: tiferetjournal.com/subscribe

Tupelo Press is an independent literary press devoted to discovering and publishing works of poetry, literary fiction, and creative nonfiction by emerging and established writers. We seek to foster the literary arts by publishing works of both high literary and artistic merit. Our titles are not only full of beautiful writing, but have stunning book designs to match.

Promotion: Sign up for our Tupelo Press 2020 Subscription series: 10 books for $90! With a Tupelo Press subscription, you’ll receive a year of poetry books, delivered to your door, with free shipping!

Website: tupelopress.org

Two Lines Press is an award-winning press committed to publishing outstanding literature in translation. With the rich publication history of the Two Lines journal serving as its foundation, Two Lines Press specializes in exceptional new writing and overlooked classics that have not previously been translated into English. With books such as Naja Marie Aidt’s Baboon (translated by Denise Newman), which won the 2015 PEN Translation Prize, and Marie NDiaye’s Self-Portrait in Green (translated by Jordan Stump), which won the 2015 CLMP Firecracker Award, Two Lines Press seeks to publish daring and original voices in striking editions.

Promotion: Order our Spring 2020 titles through Bookshop to support the work of Two Lines Press and independent booksellers:

• Lake Like a Mirror by Sok Fong Ho (translated by Natascha Bruce)
• On Lighthouses by Jazmina Barrera (translated by Christina Macsweeney)
• Echo on the Bay by Masatsugu Ono (translated by Angus Turvill)

Website: catranslation.org/books-journals

Ugly Duckling Presse is a nonprofit publisher for poetry, translation, experimental nonfiction, performance texts, and books by artists. Through the efforts of a volunteer editorial collective, UDP was transformed from a 1990s zine into a mission-driven small press that has published more than 300 titles to date, and produced countless prints and ephemera.

UDP favors emerging, international, and “forgotten” writers, and its books, chapbooks, artists’ books, broadsides, and periodicals often contain handmade elements, calling attention to the labor and history of bookmaking.

UDP is committed to keeping its publications in circulation with our online archive of out-of-print chapbooks and our digital proofs program. In all of its activities, UDP endeavors to create an experience of art free of expectation, coercion, and utility.

Promotion: All UDP publications are always on sale for 15 to 20 percent off list price on our web store.

Our latest titles include the first issue of our new poetry periodical Second Factory and the first five entries in our 2020 Pamphlet Series, 20 pamphlets of commissioned essays on subjects close to UDP’s commitments—collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing. Each offers a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present.

You can subscribe to the pamphlet series to receive all 20 pamphlets for only $100.

Website: uglyducklingpresse.org/publications

Words Without Borders is the Whiting Magazine Prize-winning digital magazine for contemporary international writing. Founded in 2003, WWB seeks to expand cultural understanding by giving readers unparalleled access to contemporary world literature in English translation while providing a vital platform for writers and translators around the world. To date, the free digital magazine has published work by more than 2,600 writers from 137 countries, translated from 117 languages. WWB’s free online education program, WWB Campus, brings this eye-opening international literature into the classroom.

Promotion: Sign up for a free digital subscription to Words Without Borders.

Website: wordswithoutborders.org
Check out past articles and issues:

• Urdu Feminist Writing issue
• Chilean issue
• “Voices from the Pandemic” feature