For more than twenty years Greg Kosmicki and a tireless crew of volunteers shaped the Backwaters Press into a well-known haven for poets and writers in Nebraska and beyond. Under Kosmicki the nonprofit press won several Nebraska Book Awards and published 115 books by writers such as Lola Haskins, Denise Low, and former Nebraska State Poets William Kloefkorn and Twyla M. Hansen. So when Kosmicki decided last year to step back and focus on his own writing, he wanted to find a publisher to continue the press’s well-regarded work. Poet Kwame Dawes, editor of Prairie Schooner, suggested he talk to Donna Shear, the director of the University of Nebraska Press (UNP). When Kosmicki approached Shear, she didn’t hesitate: In March, UNP announced it had acquired the Backwaters Press as its newest imprint. “Our feeling was that it is something here in Nebraska, it has a good reputation and a lot of history, and we wanted to be able to continue that,” Shear says.
Kosmicki is happy with the decision, noting that it’s difficult for small presses, even those that are nonprofits, to keep going without a steady income stream and dedicated staff of volunteers. “We’re really excited about the legacy of the Backwaters Press continuing on,” he says. “People throughout the United States have known about the press for years, so we’re happy to hook up with UNP to keep it going.”
Those familiar with the Backwaters Press won’t see a lot of changes. The logo remains, as does the popular annual Backwaters Prize in Poetry and the emphasis on publishing quality poetry and prose from the region and beyond. Shear says members of the staff at UNP are currently evaluating the backlist, and some books likely will be made available in electronic format. In November the press will release its first Backwaters title, John Sibley Williams’s poetry collection Skin Memory, winner of the most recent Backwaters Prize in Poetry.
The acquisition of the Backwaters Press is just one of several new ventures for UNP, which publishes about 150 scholarly titles and trade books every year. In March the press started to distribute books by History Nebraska, formerly known as the Nebraska State Historical Society. And in the fall the journals division at UNP partnered with North Dakota Quarterly, a literary and public humanities journal, to expand its regional reach. These recent partnerships reflect UNP’s commitment to telling the stories of the Great Plains, a region sometimes overlooked by large commercial publishers, and carrying on the work of literary organizations and small presses that struggle to stay in business. “We felt a commitment to keeping the Backwaters Press right here in the state,” Shear says.
Rachael Hanel is the author of We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger’s Daughter (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
(Pictured above: Greg Kosmicki)
I had been a fan of Two Dollar Radio for more than a year when I submitted Crystal Eaters on a Thursday afternoon. I had become frustrated being at a large literary agency and a major publishing house—an experience that at its worst resembled answering office e-mail. I occasionally felt like I was doing something wrong when it was impossible to be doing something wrong. My time spent with independent presses in the past (Publishing Genius, for example) was more akin to building a tree house in the dark by candlelight, hoping you create something to stand on. Crystal Eaters was accepted Monday morning and a contract came days later. 
When Shane’s e-mail arrived, it was late in the week and I was sick with a head cold, which typically means I run on the treadmill or watch Dual Survival. After I read the synopsis, I opened the manuscript and didn’t stop. I loved the setting—a village where everyone believes in “crystal count,” that you are born with one hundred internal crystals and when you reach zero you die—which felt to me like Shane had blown life into one of the video games I played growing up. There is a city encroaching on the village, threatening its antiquated life; also, the sun is creeping closer by the day. The allegorical elements, combined with the brave young female protagonist, reminded me of Beasts of the Southern Wild, which I had seen recently and adored. Needless to say, I fell in love, and on Monday I wrote Shane to accept the book.
Independent presses have always appealed to me, and with Kevin, who has worked at Powell’s Books for a number of years and is a published author himself, I knew my book would get the benefit of his knowledge of the traditional publishing world while maintaining an integrity and cutting-edge quality that my favorite kind of independent presses are known for. When he e-mailed me the screen capture announcing my book’s acquisition by him in Publishers Weekly, it was unexpected, lovely, and special. That was only one of many times that confirmed for me I’d made the right decision.
I’m not sure why other publishers didn’t take on Excavation. But when you’re dealing with a big company, there are so many doors to pass through, more people who have to give it their approval. You have editors in charge of other editors, and you have marketing people trying to figure out what the next big thing is, and you have the people who sign the checks, and if one of them isn’t comfortable with representing your book (or maybe its subject matter), you can’t get a deal with them. It’s funny then, when people who work for those big publishing houses order the book from us online. It’s kind of gratifying to go to the post office to mail another copy to another editor at HarperCollins or Penguin Random House. I like to think the fact that Future Tense and other small presses are putting out “difficult” books that then become successful is inspiring the bigger houses to take more chances with authors like Wendy and books like Excavation. 
Canarium had published Ish Klein, whose messy, sometimes feverish work inspires me. I am also a huge fan of editor Robyn Schiff’s poetry. Since joining up with Canarium, I’ve watched the other editors, Josh Edwards, Lynn Xu, and Nick Twemlow, publish books as well, and it’s pretty cool how gorgeous their poems are in completely different ways. They kept a pretty light hand with Madame X—I was surprised and grateful at how messy they let me keep the poems. At the same time, Josh helped me improve upon the original title and organization, and he did some awesome things with the book design. When I asked if we could use one of my husband’s drawings for the cover, he said, “Of course! We like to keep it in the family.” That also is typical of Canarium: It’s a family affair, and the editors have a talent for making you feel like you’re part of something that doesn’t have to be separate from your other life. Josh is always inviting writers to come with their families and set up a tent on his land in Marfa, Texas. Last fall, Nick organized a mini book tour in the Midwest for me and Farnoosh Fathi (whose book came out the year after mine but whose work I had loved and followed since 2008), and he and Robyn were so kind about my mom and three-month-old baby tagging along too. If they’ll have it, I want Canarium to publish my next book too, but not just because I feel an affinity for its editors. I need a publisher committed to not only publishing books but also to helping those books find their way in the world by organizing readings and putting books in the hands of great reviewers, and Canarium is absolutely terrific at that. 
become Madame X arrived. We all thought that besides being an absolutely fantastic manuscript, it would contribute greatly to the conversation (or constellation) of the other books on our list. In June we let her know we’d be thrilled to publish her collection. One of her first questions was if she’d be able to have input in the cover art, since some of the poems in the book were the result of collaborations with her husband, the artist Carl Dimitri. We were happy to oblige. As a small press, it seems the only viable measure of success is the happiness of everyone involved. To this end, we try to make the whole process as personal as possible. Each book is assigned to one primary editor, with all of us helping out. Because of my particular interest in the themes of Madame X, I worked with Darcie. At the end of February 2012, the book was ready, and I had the pleasure of watching Darcie read with Anthony Madrid at the Empty Bottle in Chicago. There’s a distinct pleasure to seeing the resonance and texture we find in editorial work come to life. Each year two Canarium authors read together for the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, and we also try to organize at least one extensive tour. We try to stick with our authors, and I’m thrilled that Canarium gets to publish Darcie’s third book.
My “career” was kept afloat by a new French publisher, Oliver Gallmeister, translating a book of mine every other year. While a keen businessman, he still worked only with books he truly believed in, books he was passionate about. In the United States I found nothing similar until I read a chapter of If Not for This at the 
and those titles are their focus. They love Pete’s book, and even more important, they love working with Pete. What an indie press brings to the table is a small group of people the author can wow with kindness, and that kindness causes them to work hard, and that creates the numbers. At a big press, big sales numbers might create respect and kindness. At a small indie, it’s the other way around. An author like Pete is going to get a lot of marketing-and-sales attention from a small press because he’s working so hard for the book and because he’s so easy to work with. I’ve personally handed out galleys of his book all over New York. Pete is part of the Red Hen family. We didn’t get into books for fame and fortune; we stumbled into books for love of great stories and storytellers. We like stories of the West where the sky meets the water because that’s where we live. And that’s what we have with Pete Fromm. 
For the most part, I worked with publicity director Jennifer Abel Kovitz, who decided I could handle being included on every rejection and acceptance. The spreadsheet she seemed to update hourly lifted a curtain I’d never bothered to acknowledge, and I learned how books get ignored or reviewed. She paired me with Mike Meginnis, the winner of the 2013 Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize, for readings in the Midwest. I wrote essays for the Millions and Tin House’s blog. I spoke on the radio and did interviews. I did book giveaways and Skyped into a book club and read throughout the Northeast with famous writers and unfamous writers and alone in bookstores and bars and an assisted living facility. It all felt like one great blessing because I’d always understood nobody needed to read what I wrote, that the moment a reader converted my words into a private experience in his or her mind, I was the lucky one.
And that is what we do for our authors: We break the rules. After all, great writing itself is inventively defiant and thus deserving of an equally bold publisher. My colleagues and I work from the premise that the best (and thus most necessary) storytelling discards conventional thinking, language, and distinctions to reveal underlying truths in a raw, fresh, and invigorating way. So our model of book publishing should rise to the ambition and example of the voices we seek to publish. As an independent publisher, we are not a mere gatekeeper or curator. Instead, we exist to discover and champion talents like Kevin Clouther. As long as writers continue to produce great (read: rule-breaking) work, independent presses like Black Balloon can succeed by forging equally revolutionary strategies to share these stories with readers. 
Before this I’d spent a couple of years sending the collection to small-press contests. It earned a closetful of bridesmaid dresses: finalist for the Bakeless Prize, for the Flannery O’Connor Award two years in a row, and four more finalist placements from the Sarabande and Black Lawrence contests. People kept telling me this was a great sign; it meant the book was publishable. I just kept wondering what made my book stand out consistently, yet without ever reaching the top. Now I realize how in love with a book—really—a publisher needs to be to do right by it, and though it’d be disingenuous to say I’m glad I didn’t win those prizes, there’s something special about the book being chosen outside the parameters of a contest. 
Callie and I came from a national literary magazine, so we examined the stories on their individual merits first. We studied Kelly’s stories one by one and cut a few repetitive pieces, slimming the collection down to ten. In our first of several editorial passes, we gave Kelly detailed notes—we asked her to change the endings of several stories, to be a little messier in spots, and nipped and tucked in order to plunge the reader right into the weird action. Together we tightened up dialogue and stripped out flourishes of explanation in order to provide more “give”—that is, readers draw their own deductions and imagine into the story.
Finally, I finished the novel and found an agent, the indefatigable Seth Fishman, who sent the manuscript out. I spoke with three editors, and ultimately the decision was between two publishers, Algonquin and Bloomsbury. The Bloomsbury editor was nice, enthusiastic, and didn’t seem to require a lot of edits—all good things. But as a native of North Carolina, I confess I’ve always had a soft spot for Algonquin. I knew its stellar reputation when I was a UNC undergraduate and would haunt bookstores and search for Algonquin titles, especially the annual New Stories From the South anthology. Also, how can you not love a publisher that started in a woodshed with a sign that asked to keep the gate closed for the dog?
But every year there are books I love that I don’t end up publishing. Were I still at one of the big “all-purpose” houses, I could buy pretty much anything I wanted, cost permitting. But at Algonquin, where we publish only ten to twelve original works of fiction a year, love is just the beginning. Next, we have to feel confident that our readers—more loyal than most, I believe—will respond to this writer and this novel. Then we have to have a strong sense that in this author we have found someone who can grow over time, that there will be a next—hopefully “bigger”—book that we will want to publish.
By the time I sent Ghost Horse to Gival, it had already gone the rounds of New York agents. Even those who had courted me before now showed no interest. This was in 2010. At the end of that year, I was diagnosed with cancer. When I returned to Ghost Horse in 2012, I saw it in a radically different way. It’s a novel that mixes the personal and political, and the worlds of childhood and adulthood, in a prickly, idiomatic, very local way—in other words, the kind of novel I like, but not the kind, I realized, that is likely to sell to a trade press.
work and not who wrote it. I narrow the pool to the top five entries, then pass the entries to our judge, who also reads the works anonymously, and he or she chooses the winner.
I knew they’d recently signed Samantha Irby, who writes Bitches Gotta Eat (the greatest blog in the history of ever), and I read through their catalogue and was blown away: intelligent, gutsy, ballsy stuff, and so diverse, in part due to form and genre—fiction, nonfiction; short stories, essays, and novels; experimental stuff and work in translation—but also a wide variety of voice and background and life experience, gender and race and orientation. As a reader, I want that variety of human experience, and as a writer, I want to be a part of publishing and producing that counts diversity among its primary goals.
I’m still new to the publishing world, so I only met Megan a few years ago at a reading series called Reading Under the Influence. She was an amazing performer. I later learned how much of an avid performer and teacher she was, and kept on following her progress. One of our editors at the time had developed a relationship with her, and over drinks broached the subject of our publishing her next book. We all agreed, and the rest is history, as they say. I’m so proud to have published Once I Was Cool, Megan’s debut essay collection composed mainly of pieces that were written for live performance but translate extremely well to the page. What I love most about the book is how inspiring it is, without being some sort of self-help book. Megan’s optimism and hopeful view of her life and work compels you to feel better about yourself, all the while bringing you to tears and making you laugh out loud. I dare anyone to read it and not feel the same way. 
Adam and I became artistic supporters of each other, and friends. He read at my New York City reading series, Polestar. He published my work in his online journal, Everyday Genius. I don’t remember who broached the subject first, but when the time came for me to publish my second book, Meat Heart, I decided to change publishers and go with Adam. I remember being at a chapbook festival and one of us saying, “Should we do it?” and the other one saying, “I don’t know, should we?” And then I remember being on a train and receiving an e-mail from Adam that said, “We should do it. Let’s do it.”
Then I met Melissa at AWP, at a party hosted by HTMLGIANT. There were hundreds of people crammed into a small bar, and as I squeezed past her down a tight hallway, we introduced ourselves. I told her I was a big fan of her work—but that she’d never returned my e-mail about Polestar. After that we kept in touch. I continued following her poetry, and she ended up hosting lots of Publishing Genius writers at her series after all.
In 2012, I left a teaching institution for a research-focused university without a contract for my second book. I did this with the knowledge that being published by a trade house would make a difference to a tenure committee at that research-focused university. (Both of my current poet colleagues are published by such houses, and I thought my doing the same might be an expectation.) When those publishers didn’t respond, or responded with rejection, I feared losing my job, my one chance to finally live near the man I loved while doing what I love. 
And with Jericho Brown, as long as one has a pulse and a breath and the ability to read, how could one not want to publish a book like The New Testament? Formally insistent and engrossing, it is so smart, and loving, and tender, and alive. I read it and immediately shared it with my colleagues here at the press: the first act of publishing. As with many of the manuscripts we receive—even those we don’t publish—we became passionately engaged. The acquisition of Jericho’s book then became the result of an entire team that believes in the mission of connecting poetry with readers.