MISSION

Publishing

The Cleveland State University Poetry Center, established in 1962 to promote poetry through readings and community outreach, expanded its mission to become a nonprofit independent press in 1971. 

We currently publish contemporary poetry, essays, and translations with national distribution and reach. We publish two to five books a year, with a backlist of 200+ titles including a remarkable breadth of contemporary literature. We are distributed by The Ohio State University Press through the Chicago Distribution Center. We acquire books through annual contests, open reading periods, and/or solicitation.

Our books appear widely in independent bookstores, college and university courses, and at poetry readings and happenings across the country. Recent titles have been awarded the Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award from the Publishing Triangle, a Firecracker Award from CLMP, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, a FOREWORD Indies Award, the Medal Provocateur Award from the Eric Hoffer Book Awards, and have been named a best poetry book of the year in the New York Times.

In addition to book publishing, we host a digital space, Exclamation’s Gauntlet, which features commentary on poetry, poetics, innovative literature, and small press publishing. Faculty and student staff members contribute together to this space, which offers student writers an opportunity to publish their work and pursue their own editorial interests.


Programming

The CSU Poetry Center offers literary programming that is both local and national in scale. We host the Lighthouse Reading Series, which brings six to eight poets and essayists to our campus each year. We also host and curate the NEOMFA Writers at Work Colloquium, which provides students opportunities to hear from visiting writers about their experiences in editing, publishing, arts administration, journalism, translation, teaching, and/or community programming, offering an expansive definition of literary work and where it takes place. This colloquium series serves as wide-ranging, interactive professional development programming for CSU and NEOMFA students.

Since 2018, we’ve offered the Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Writing and Publishing, a two-year post-graduate fellowship intended to support a creative writer working on their first or second book, provide professional mentorship, and create accessible early career opportunities to join the US publishing and academic workforces. The fellow teaches in the CSU English Department and collaborates with the Poetry Center. This fellowship is supported by the Cleveland-based Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which honor literature that promotes equity and social justice.

We regularly work with local organizations such as Literary Cleveland, the Cleveland Review of Books, Lake Erie Ink, Cleveland Institute of Art, the ID13 Prison Literacy Project, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and others. You can find us at local and national bookfairs and conferences including Lit Cleveland’s Inkubator, AWP, SMOL Fair, the New Orleans Poetry Festival, Lit Youngstown, Mission Creek, and more.


Pedagogy and Community

We view publishing as the making of culture, and our press runs as a “teaching lab.” We hope that the inclusive teaching of editing and publishing, here and elsewhere, helps open the field of literature to a wide range of future writing, writers, and literary workers, ready for the changes in publishing, technology, and bookselling to come. 

The Poetry Center’s pedagogical work takes its major form in multiyear graduate assistantships and semester-long internships for students in the NEOMFA Program, as well as the post-graduate Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship. We also teach literary editing and publishing to both undergraduates and graduate students at CSU (English 497/597), and we offer internships and volunteer opportunities for undergraduates and local community members. Programs such as the NEOMFA Writers at Work Colloquium supplement our coursework and assistantships and help students learn about literary work beyond the academy. We are proud of the work being performed by our former students across their local and national communities. The CSU Poetry Center hopes to offer an empowering idea of what small press publishing is and may be.