About
Founded in 2006 by Eula Biss, Stephen Cope, and Catherine Taylor, Essay Press publishes artful, innovative writing that questions convention and explores issues of significant contemporary relevance. EP publishes essays that extend or challenge the formal protocols of nonfiction, including, but not limited to: lyric essays and prose poems or poetics; experimental biography and autobiography; innovative approaches to journalism, experimental historiography, criticism, scholarship, and philosophy. EP considers the essay as a form to be rooted in its etymological origins: as a trying, as an attempt, as a process.
Essay Press operates primarily in Buffalo, NY, on the territory of the Seneca Nation, a member of the Haudenosaunee/Six Nations Confederacy. This territory is covered by The Dish with One Spoon Treaty of Peace and Friendship, a pledge to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes. This territory is also covered by the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, between the United States Government and the Six Nations Confederacy, which further affirmed Haudenosaunee land rights and sovereignty in the State of New York.
The Editors
Travis Sharp
Executive Editor
Travis Sharp is the author of the poetry collections Monoculture (Unicorn Press 2024) and Yes, I am a corpse flower (Knife Fork Book 2021) and the hybrid poetry/essay chapbooks Behind the Poet Reading Their Poem Is a Sign Saying Applause (Knife Fork Book 2022) and Sinister Queer Agenda (above/ground press 2018). He co-edited a collection of essays about the 2016 US Presidential election, Radio: 11.8.16 (Essay Press 2017). He has published numerous artist’s books, including one plus one is two ones (Recreational Resources 2018), FEARHEAR GESTHARE URESHARM HEREHIRE (aether inK 2015), and The Cargo Pants Pocket Anthology of Peer Reviewed Articles (Letter [r] Press 2015). His critical work focuses on textual and materialist sociopolitics and history and has appeared in Criticism and Discourse and Writing (Rédactologie). He has a PhD in English from the Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo and an MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from the University of Washington, Bothell. He is currently a Lecturer in the Department of English at Howard University.
Meagan Wilson
Managing Editor
Meagan Wilson holds a PhD from the Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo, where she completed her dissertation on the presence and persistence of grasses in contemporary American poetry. She also holds an MA from Colorado State University, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work can be found in Modern Language Studies, Colorado Review, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. Meagan currently lives in Annapolis, Maryland where she works in academic publishing.
Brooke Bastie
Assistant Managing Editor
Brooke Bastie holds a Ph.D. in English from the University at Buffalo. Her academic work focuses on contemporary Indigenous and Latinx poetry. She co-organizes ecopoetics workshop, a two-week residency, and co-edits col-, a journal that emphasizes collaboration.
Katie Naughton
Senior Editor
Katie Naughton is the author of the chapbook Study (above/ground press, 2021) and “a second singing” (forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press). Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Jubilat, and elsewhere and she is at work on two collections of poems, “Debt Ritual” and “The Real Ethereal.” She is the publicity editor for Essay Press, an editor at the HOW(ever) and How2 Digital Archive Project (launching in 2022), and founder of Etcetera, a web journal of reading recommendations from poets (www.etceterapoetry.com). She is currently living in Vancouver, BC, as a recipient of a Fulbright Canada student research grant at Simon Fraser University and is a doctoral candidate in English and a member of the Poetics program at SUNY Buffalo.
Katie Bennett
Publicity and Outreach Editor
Katie Bennett is a writer and musician based in West Philadelphia. She’s published work in Lit Hub, received support from Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and Monson Arts, and she runs the reading series Personal Velocity. She also spent a decade touring North America and Europe with various bands and her songwriting has been featured in Pitchfork, SPIN, Rolling Stone, and NPR.
Fani Avramopoulou
Outreach Editor
Fani Avramopoulou is a Philadelphia-based writer with roots in Baltimore and Athens, Greece. She studies and teaches poetry at Temple University. Her work is concerned with the intersections of poetry and science and the poetics and politics of (mis)translation.
Blair Johnson
Design and Web Editor
Blair Johnson is a poet and PhD candidate in the Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo, based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. Her poems have been published in Diagram, Boston Review, and Best American Experimental Writing. In collaboration with her partner Luke Williams, she makes code poems and handmade books.
Natalie Mannino
Editorial Assistant
Natalie Mannino (she/her) is a writer and creative currently enrolled in UWB’s MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics. Her work centers around the complexity of memory, time, and death and how they relate to one another. Originally from Michigan, Natalie enjoys hiking, gothic lit, the company of her cat, and a good pasta dish.
Press Financing and Funding
Essay Press is an independent small press, run entirely by volunteers and funded largely through book sales. We have a long-running collaboration with the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington, Bothell, who co-administrate our annual book contest, and who generously assist with funding contest book printing costs when possible. We charge a $20 reading fee for contest entry, or $25 to receive a copy of an Essay Press book. Reading fees are used in part to compensate our guest editor(s), who also judge(s) the annual contest, but are mostly used to pay publication awards to the contest winner and any editors’ selections from the contest submissions. We also run occasional chapbook reading periods and contests, which have reading fees ranging from $5 to $15, depending on whether EP books are included as part of the fee. Again, reading fees are used to compensate judges (if any) and to pay publication awards to selected authors. Book printing and press operational costs are covered through book sales and, occasionally, external grants. In 2021, we were awarded a grant through the New York State Council on the Arts in order to expand our new print essay chapbook series and to cover some of the costs of running the press.
In short: book contest fees are used solely to compensate the contest judge for their labor in reading and commenting on manuscripts and authors whose books are selected. External funding, such as grants and awards, are a very minor part of our overall funding. In 2021, we anticipate book sales to be over 80% of our overall budget. As a result, we greatly encourage our readers to buy directly from the press, which maximizes our income and allows us to better support our authors.
We also understand that reading fees can be exclusionary, especially since they are never singular: a writer submitting a book is almost certainly submitting to many places, so a $20 reading fee for one press quickly becomes a $500 fee for a writer trying to get their book published. For this reason, we are allowing fee waivers for writers who cannot afford the reading fee. We also allow book proposals and publishing inquiries for books that fall outside of our contest parameters. If you have any questions about press funding and financing, please email us.
Desk and Review Copies
To order desk or review copies, please contact our Promotion and Outreach Editor at p.essaypress@gmail.com.
Desk copies, review copies, print chapbooks, and preordered books are shipped by USPS media mail. Please note that, due to COVID-19, USPS has been experiencing shipping delays, and books and chapbooks shipped by the press might take up to two weeks to arrive. Please contact our Managing Editor at m.essaypress@gmail.com for questions or concerns about shipping.
Publishers for Palestine
Essay Press is a signatory of the Publishers for Palestine statement of November 2023 which reads, in part:
We call on our comrades, friends, and colleagues across various publishing industries to sign this letter and support the following demands:
Read more, and become a signatory, here.
- Stop the genocide and bring an end to all violence against Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank, across historic Palestine, and in the diaspora.
- Hold Israel and its allies accountable for the war crimes they have committed.
- Assert the demands of Palestinian people to freedom, resistance, and return.
- Uphold the call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israeli apartheid.
- Assure that Palestinian voices should not be silenced from future international book fairsand literary festivals across the world. Instead, they should be invited as guests ofhonour to share their stories.
- Commit to making the publishing industry a genuine site of learning and freedom of speech. As publishers we are dedicated to creating spaces for Palestinian voices and those who stand in solidarity against the war machine.
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