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 a national distribution and reach (we are distributed by Small Press Distribution). We publish two to five books a year, with a backlist of over 200 titles including a remarkable breadth of contemporary literature. We primarily acquire books through annual contests and open reading periods and have collaborated with guest judges who are esteemed writers across many aesthetics and forms. Recent poetry or essay contest judges include Shane McCrae, Brenda Hillman, CA Conrad, Brian Blanchfield, Renee Gladman, and Randall Mann. We also occasionally publish solicited book projects, most recently Cleveland-based avant-garde poet Russell Atkins’s selected volume World’d Too Much.
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, and have been named a best book of poetry in The New York Times.
In addition to book publishing, the Poetry Center hosts a digital space, Exclamation’s Gauntlet, which features commentary on poetry, poetics, innovative literature, and small press publishing, with textual, visual, audio, and/or video content appearing regularly.
In 2022, in recognition of the Poetry Center’s 60th anniversary, Exclamation’s Gauntlet launched three new series: “And Could They Hear Me I Would Tell Them”: interviews with small press authors about their newest books, publishing experiences, and the social aspects of their writing and reading lives; “Arch(d)ives”: artifacts and ephemera plucked from our press’s dust, placed in personal, contemporary, and historical contexts; and “Index for Continuance”: a podcast series featuring conversations with workers at independent, small press, and DIY literary presses and projects, and offering grassroots knowledge about how to edit, collaborate, reach readers, and build community.
Programming
The CSU Poetry Center offers literary programming that is both local and national in scale. We host the Lighthouse Reading Series, which brings eight poets and essayists to our campus each year. We run the NEOMFA Writers at Work Colloquium, which provides students opportunities to hear from contemporary writers about their experiences in editing, publishing, arts administration, translation, and/or community programming and outreach, offering an expansive definition of literary work and where it takes place. As part of our commitment to inclusivity and representation, we offer the Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Writing and Publishing, a two-year post-graduate fellowship intended to support a writer’s creative work, provide professional mentorship, and address the longstanding lack of diversity in the US publishing and academic workforces. This fellowship is supported by the Cleveland-based Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which honor literature that promotes equity and social justice.
We regularly collaborate with local organizations such as the Cleveland Drafts Literary Festival, Lake Erie Ink, the ID13 Prison Literacy Project, and Literary Cleveland. You can also find us at local and national bookfairs and conferences such as Lit Cleveland’s Inkubator, AWP, SMOL Fair, Loganberry Books’ Author Alley, Lit Youngstown, and Mission Creek, among other literary gatherings.
Pedagogy and Community
We view publishing as the making of culture, and we consider our press a “teaching lab.” We believe that the teaching of editing and publishing is a meaningful intervention into the larger structural biases that perpetuate a troubling lack of diversity in the US publishing industry. We hope that the inclusive teaching of editing and publishing, here and elsewhere, helps open the field of literature to a diverse range of future writing, writers, and literary workers.
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 undergrads 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. In all these endeavors, we hope to help students envision the many forms of cultural activity in which they may participate. Our digital space, Exclamation’s Gauntlet, extends our conversations about small press practice, difficulty in literature, and the politics of publishing, inviting in new readerships and offering a platform for our staff to pursue their own visions.
It is our hope that this focus on teaching helps train and support future readers, writers, editors, teachers, and workers in the arts across our local, national, and global communities. We hope that the Poetry Center helps cultivate an inclusive and empowering sense of what publishing is or may be.
Place
As an arts organization in Cleveland and part of Cleveland State University, the CSU Poetry Center hopes to honor and be responsible to this land and its history. This includes understanding the structures of settler colonialism that continue to shape it. We recognize the indigenous people who live and have lived here, including the Erie, Haudenosaunee, Kaskaskia, Missaussauga, Lenape (Delaware), Wyandot, Chippewa, Potawatomi, Ottawa, Shawnee, and Osage, among others. We hope that cultural work in Cleveland, including our own, may help foster engaged understandings of this history as well as envision futures of justice and equality.
