The Rise of Lucky Jefferson

LUCKY JEFFERSON First Issue Published: Fall 2019 Location: Chicago

Number of Staff: 5

Number of Issues Published Annually: 4 print issues; 6 to 8 digital

issues

Publishes: Poetry, flash fiction, essays, art, hybrid forms

Submissions: Lucky Jefferson welcomes unsolicited submissions of poetry, prose, flash fiction, art, and hybrid forms 365 days a year.

Website: luckyjefferson.com

WHEN I founded Lucky Jefferson, I hadn’t been published in more than fifteen years. The last time I had shared my poetry in public was during a small reading for a radio station in Birmingham, Alabama, around 2007. It wasn’t until after I began my journey in a master’s program in English and creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University—after a tearfilled conversation with my mother about the publishing industry—that Lucky Jefferson became a reality.

Since I hadn’t been published or read my work in quite some time, my confidence wavered. And because I had studied advertising, art, and communications during my undergraduate years at the

University of Alabama in Birmingham, I didn’t feel like an honest representative of the literary world. I feared no one would take my commitment to the industry seriously if I didn’t dedicate myself to writing, to editing, to assembling a publication. I had begun sending my work to many magazines and presses but experienced repeated rejection, all of which left me defeated. I grew weary of the stories concocted by the media about marginalized people and disliked how publishing still hadn’t made space for my story. I cathartically used my frustrations to build a network to support emerging writers in my position—writers who may have studied law, medicine, or another field but found a calling to literary classics, to poetry; writers who are misled by publishers that hide behind faux commitments to people of color. I declared to reform the publishing landscape and bring communities together through contemporary stories and art. For so long I had held on to a trepidation that prevented me from sharing my work. And in starting Lucky Jefferson, I reaffirmed my commitment to myself and helping others do the same. On August 25, 2019, I built a shabby website on Wix and enlisted the help of an artist to begin creating artwork for “Testament,” our first issue.

Lucky Jefferson’s mission is simple: to engage writers through refreshing contemporary perspectives and the promotion of cultural diversity. Lucky Jefferson aims to generate constructive and interactive conversations around poetry, art, and publishing—and to redefine the way journals are produced and shared with readers and writers. Our vision is to see the publishing and literary world be a more accessible place for all. This intersection of mission and vision is strengthened and preserved through the creation of specific digital and print collections of work on our website.

In 2020, Lee & Low shared results of its Diversity Baseline survey that revealed 79 percent of people who work in publishing identified as non-Black. Being a Black-identifying woman, I knew I wanted to carve out a space for Black authors, and that was how Awake, a digital zine for Black authors, was born. I understood how submission deadlines can create a lot of anxiety and pressure for authors as they make time to write new pieces, so we created the 365 Collection to cultivate flexibility and reduce the constraints of having to constantly submit work or apply for residencies and scholarships. I also made sure to give writers at least two months to submit to any open call. In everything Lucky Jefferson does, we are always thinking of how to make publishing more accessible and engaging.

And that vision is what drives Lucky Jefferson’s strategy—a strategy founded on community and mystery. We love not taking ourselves too seriously and making space for ourselves to simply exist as editors and producers of published work. It is so important, as an editor, to make room for yourself. You have a duty to respond in a timely manner and to produce publications according to the schedules you set, but editors have lives, responsibilities, and work of their own, and it’s important to make space for pause.

Education is also embedded in the fabric of Lucky Jefferson. We work with students at schools like Pratt Institute, Maryland Institute College of Art, and Parsons School of Design to teach students about the intersection of art and publishing. Educational programs are a big part of our larger strategy and are the crux of how we engage with our communities. We are educating, guiding students through artistic leadership, and allowing them to be a part of the publication and production process while driving author rapport and creating a really vivid and eccentric digital persona. And when the Lucky Jefferson staff is not teaching students, we are figuring out how to make content accessible

and inclusive for all. All submissions to Lucky Jefferson are free, and the journal has gone as far as starting a fund to provide aid to students who were affected by COVID and sudden university closures. Lucky Jefferson is also anti-gatekeeping: Writers can enjoy workshops and other opportunities for free or without the hassle of interviewing or taking on daunting expenses for entry.

In our rapidly changing world, it takes more than a catchy name, website, and distributor to launch a publication. It takes a deep commitment to people or a specific cause. I wanted to publish a journal that was fun, radical, and deeply engaged with its community. There’s a lot of comparing and impostor syndrome that happens in the publishing industry. To make it, you’ll not only need to have a joy for serving the writers who are eager to see their words in your pages and the readers who purchase their work, but you will need to be technically fluent, whether that’s building or managing a website yourself or connecting with someone who has that skill. You’ll need to be able to set up submission infrastructures like Submittable or Duotrope and create a pipeline for writers to share their work with you. You’ll need to create editorial philosophies that help guide you as you read people’s work; that will preserve the integrity of your publication and generate an aesthetic or a body of work that people can come to expect. And you’ll need personality and a basic understanding of marketing.

We work to raise the bar for engagement by creating experiences for readers to reengage with their published works over and over again. I didn’t want to create print publications that would just collect dust, but rather publications in which readers could be challenged and learn something new. So I made it a point to have different activities and prompts in each issue. Lucky Jefferson also prides itself on creating themes that challenge writers to explore new genres and styles of writing. When Lucky Jefferson is not curating print conversations, we are building an empire online. After Lucky Jefferson first launched, I made community the No. 1 priority and wanted art to be a large part of our culture. I focused on building our social media footprint by sharing calls for submissions in Facebook groups and by following a mix of artists, publishers, and indie journals. We didn’t care if we didn’t have ten thousand followers; we just wanted the followers we had to be meaningful and aligned with who we are.

But social media isn’t the only way to expand awareness about a publication. Distribution plays a big role. Honestly, we didn’t really explore distribution until the pandemic set in. In a weird way we had finally found the time to think of how to get our magazine into the hands of not just people, but businesses and bookstores. Through our membership with the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), we were able to connect with hundreds of other publishers, and learn about different avenues for distribution like IngramSpark, Lulu, and Barnes and Noble Press. Resources like this also helped us gain access to more local channels, like a beautiful arts store called Buddy as well as Quimby’s Bookstore. Accessibility and discoverability are important, allowing us to deepen our work in the community and unearth new readers and writers to submit to our publications. It’s critical to research anyone who becomes involved with your project, because not everyone will care about the same things as you do.

Lucky Jefferson has been successful so far because we don’t exist primarily to do business—selling subscriptions, merchandise—but rather to do good and bring people together. And that’s all that I need to make a difference.

Western world as a non-white-passing, Indigenous woman who says “dang” and “um” too much. I was not groomed to be a writer, poet, publisher, zinester, intersectional feminist, or middle-class member of society. But I did know how to put together a book, and if I didn’t know a book-art-related skill, I taught myself. I can’t say I’m a master, but I am proud to say that at Abalone Mountain Press we make our books, zines, and stickers in house. One day I would love if we made our own paper, but my imagination tends to be bigger than my time these days.

Our mission is to create a space for Indigenous voices to be heard without having to accommodate the white gaze. We strive to create books for Native people by Native people. We hope to create a press that supports Native artistry in all forms. We hope to bring quality work to Indigenous literature and create a world for Indigenous voices to thrive as genuinely and true to form. We encourage works such as poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid works. We are an indigiqueer, trans, nonbinary, Black Indigenous, Indigenous, feminist-friendly press.

I was born on the Navajo Nation and had my best childhood years in reservation trailer parks ranging from Black Mesa to Tuba City. But little did most know, I was born with the blood memory to tell a story. At the age of seven, our family permanently housed ourselves in a small reservation border town called Flagstaff, Arizona. Growing up, I didn’t think anyone cared about what I had to say or think, because in a place where Natives’ voices don’t matter, I bought into small-town ignorance. In my late teens I eventually left that small town and moved to Phoenix. As an undergrad I took classes in American

Indian studies, political science, and women’s studies, which shaped my understanding of the anger and confusion I felt in my past life. My last year as an undergrad, I finished a summer internship in West Africa, and I found myself relating more to non-Western stories through Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I eventually ended up traveling through parts of Asia in my midtwenties and found myself becoming friends with strangers from all over the world who were interested in my story and experiences as a Native person. Traveling helped me realized I have a story to tell. Blood memory gave me the courage to finally speak on it.

By the end of my first year as an MFA graduate student, I was asked to teach a zine workshop for a summer program called Emerging Diné Writers’ Institute (EDWI), through Navajo Tech University on the Navajo Nation. I packed up my dinged-up Subaru and headed to Diné Bikéyah (Navajo land). I met beginning, emerging, and established Diné writers of all ages. Although I had been around famous writers and MFA graduate students all year, this summer program was different. It answered every culturally specific question I had asked myself as a writer: “Who am I writing for?” “Is my writing Native enough?” “Am I a fake Native writer?” Each workshop and presentation managed to answer my questions as a Native writer. When I taught the nightly zine workshop in the campus hogan with the Diné youth, it solidified what I had always felt, which was to work for the Native community for the rest of my life. I always knew about the latter, but I never really knew how. After creating our zine anthology for the EDWI fellows and seeing how happy they were to try something new and how happy they were to tell their stories—this is where the idea of creating a small press for Native writers started.

The following year I was asked back to teach at EDWI as the lead author.

I was honored even though that year it was going to be online. I had much more responsibility as a lead author. I whipped up presentations on subjects I wish I could have seen growing up or wanted to address as a Native person such as anti-Blackness in Navajo country, Indigenous love, sexuality, grief, blood memory, and rez humor. Because of this program I truly felt what it was like to not accommodate some sort of white gaze. The desire to galvanize Native empowerment through storytelling had me by the hand and heart—that was the moment I knew I wanted to start a small press for Indigenous writers.

By this time we were deep in the pandemic. I was hired to teach English classes at a local community college, but the job never came due to low enrollment. The COVID numbers were at their highest on the Navajo Nation, and I worried about my grandma and Nalí every day. I couldn’t visit either of them because the reservation was on lockdown. I also worried about my parents, who lived just off the reservation. So I sank into myself (and my bed) and fell into a deep depression. I had no use for anything; all the tools I had developed and was so passionate about didn’t seem to matter. Or at least that’s what I told myself. I’ve struggled with depression my whole life, and it is not something I am scared to talk about, especially as a Native woman.

After a couple of months, I finally crawled out of my depression and sought a Native therapist. With her help and a partner who never judged me, I was ready to get back up and try again. I reached out to David Pischke, the chief operating officer of Tolsun Books, a small press in Flagstaff. They had recently released a chapbook of mine titled Electric Deserts! I shared with David that I was thinking of opening a small press for Indigenous writers. He was more than supportive and gave me the push I needed to cancel out all my insecurities—of not being good enough, smart enough,

literate enough, grammar-worthy enough, or educated enough.

The unromantic part of my small-press journey was starting a GoFundMe campaign. I calculated my start-up expenses at $15,000, which included printers, paper, toner, a Submittable membership, Adobe software, the fee required to become an LLC/small business, shipping fees, packing costs, prize money for a poetry contest, rent for a small office, and gas money to travel to and from the office. I clicked that Share button and asked my ancestors for a nod of approval. With over two thousand shares, interviews from local newspapers, radio stations, and museums, and a fundraising poetry reading event, Abalone Mountain Press managed to raise $18,000 for start-up funds.

If timing and luck isn’t an artist thing, I don’t know what is, but timing and luck play another big role with Abalone Mountain Press. As I was starting all the groundwork of creating social media accounts, flyers, and the logo, figuring the identity of the press, and starting the Abalone Mountain Press podcast, a friend of mine, Chawa Magaña, reached out to me at the beginning of 2021. Chawa was relocating her Phoenix bookstore,

Palabras Bilingual Bookstore, to a new location in downtown Phoenix that had room for three other small businesses to share the space. So in February 2021, Nurture House was born. Nurture House is a DIT (do it together) space that believes in the power and necessity of working in community to consciously cultivate and nurture a collective understanding and movement of solidarity, liberation, and joy through the elements of words, earth, art, and imagination. Nurture House is home to five local businesses: Pachanga Press, Wasted Ink Zine Distro, Abalone Mountain Press, Por Vida Bakery, and Palabras Bilingual Bookstore.

So far Abalone Mountain Press has published two titles, Portals of Indigenous Futurism: A Zine Anthology of Indigenous Futurism and Plants & Animals of Diné Bikéyah Coloring Book, and we are in the process of printing and packing orders on a daily basis. Soon we will be adding two poetry books by Native authors and Plants & Animals of O’odham Jewed· (Pima), a coloring book.

The hardest part of my journey— and why I had always been hesitant to start a small business—was the financial part. Before officially opening Abalone Mountain Press, I sought a business coach from a Navajo nonprofit company called Change Labs. Soon I was accepted into its cohort for a year of biweekly business meetings about finance, marketing, and the 101s of starting a small business. I may be one person running a business, but there are many hands involved with building the press.

I am still in the baby steps of this project, but it has much spirit. I would call it an auntie spirit. According to wickedfierce1 on Reddit, an “auntie takes care of everybody and stops short of calling herself mom. I grew up on a rez, and everyone is related. She may actually be their auntie too. Ha.” When the undergrad Native girls at Mills College started calling me an auntie, I was slightly offended because I thought I was still young, but now I realize I’m more than happy to take on the role of a caretaker for stories and poems for my people. In this next phase of my life, I am a Native auntie who just wants the best for the younger generation to tell their stories and for the elders to know it’s not too late for them to preserve their knowledge through books, photos, and stories. Maybe I should’ve have named my press Auntie Spirit Press. Aye.

I will either find a way, or make one.

—Hannibal

WE FIND ourselves in a time of pressing need similar to that which ignited the activist energies of the Black power and Black Arts movements and provoked the long-overdue demand for Black studies at U.S. universities. These same energies inspired the late poet Alvin Aubert to envision and found Obsidian in 1975 and publish it with his own money and impelled poet Sonia Sanchez and other writers, artists, and scholars to strategize and agitate, to labor and to lead, to reach into their purses and pockets to champion Obsidian and other Black arts publications as the necessary foundation for and companions to Black studies. As such, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, expanded in 2015 from a journal to a full publishing platform, is a manifestation of a collective vision to affirm and sustain Black people through literature, art, and scholarship composed by Black people, to Black people, for the edification of humankind.

I was born into the energy of these movements; under my mother’s tutelage I was shaped by them. Since childhood I have been anchored and invigorated by brilliance: the literature, music, art, and expression of Black cultural workers. To reflect upon Obsidian’s endurance in this current moment is, for me, to consider the endurance and perseverance of Black people and Black culture in the context of capital. At what cost? To what end? For how long?

But let us not look to the future just yet, only to the present and its perpetual unfolding within and alongside joy and hardship, imagination and disaster, innovative necessity and persistence.

Nearly fifty years since Obsidian’s founding, its narrative continues as one of triumph and struggle. A narrative of creativity and resilience, the archive and repertoire of a diverse and innovative people joined in the integrity of struggle and determined to thrive despite adversity, state-sanctioned violence, institutional racism, structural inequalities, and countless markers of present obstacles and uncertain futures. As Obsidian’s editor I recognize my role as the steward, the trustee of this legacy as Obsidian persists, creating and holding space for critical and creative Black thought, literature, and arts—critical and creative Black culture in this moment amid the twin plagues of white supremacy and the COVID-19 global pandemic.

When the SOS alert from then–editor in chief Sheila Smith McKoy arrived in my inbox in early spring 2014, warning of the certain end of Obsidian at North Carolina State University, I was pensive and alarmed. The journal had already been losing ground due to budget cuts, and the North Carolina legislature’s decision to withhold funding from public institutions of higher learning forced a budget rescission late in the fiscal year.

Meanwhile, I was negotiating tech details for Black Took Collective’s performance at the University of Notre Dame’s Digital Visualization Theater, scheduled to be the grand culmination of our residency/visit, and grappling with and theorizing about the material impact of experimental literature and the efficacy of liberatory arts praxis in U.S. society while teaching a graduatelevel poetics course called “Beyond the Body in Pain: Making Against Unmaking” for Illinois State University’s English department, where I was an associate professor of creative writing.

I was disturbed by mainstream media attention to and dominant discursive trends regarding recent events delivering mounting evidence of flagrant disregard, willful indifference, and apparent fascination with, if not utter delight in, the spectacle of Black pain—a kind of pornography of pain— showcasing the ongoing vulnerability of Black bodies, Black people, in the U.S. by wide swaths of the populace. I had just presented an iteration of my one-woman show Thingification at the University of Missouri Corner Playhouse for a Black History Month celebration cosponsored by Cave Canem Foundation and the Mizzou Black Studies department.

I had also been composing a folio for the March 2014 exhibition stereoTYPE curated by C. Davida Ingram at Seattle’s LxWxH Gallery. Recording some bit of the understanding that served as the context for the design and making of my poems and their graphotexts, that February I wrote an accompanying statement for the exhibition catalogue. Its introduction reads:

While creating the psychic space to engage the work of this exhibition I found myself particularly struck by the fixity, constructedness, and dehumanizing reductiveness of stereotype and the gross oversimplification and deliberate distortion of experience that it represents. The stories of recent car accident/shooting victims Jonathan Ferrell and Renisha McBride remind us that to be identified with a historically stereotyped group in the USA can be violently disabling, even deadly. The perpetual target of stereotype is both hypervisible—as a “known” and knowable fiction—and invisible—as a complex and evolving self. Stereotypes function philosophically as simulacra—distorted images of reality—standing in for truth. Yet, even as we call them by name, we accept them as inherited, make them our own, and depend on them as if they are reliable.

Unsettled by this dis-ease, I received the warning of Obsidian’s impending doom as a call to action. If it could be

saved, I was determined to steward the legacy of Obsidian, to preserve it as a space for ever-necessary critical and creative Black thought and expression toward the transformation of the larger social world.

Propelled by this inheritance entrusted to me in crisis, over these past seven years I have rebuilt Obsidian to continue to hold space for those who are here and those who are coming. There is nothing romantic or glamorous in this endeavor. This is necessity. And there is no magic potion, no secret mantra, no mystery to the method. How? Short answer: sweat equity.

On the daily grind. Beyond the tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth of administration and grant writing: playlists, long phone calls, dancing, tears of gratitude, laughter, prayer and meditation, audits, gathering resources, strategizing, experimentation, difficult conversations, reflection, forging new alliances, dropping old habits and belief systems, “leav[ing] what cannot be carried,” acknowledgment of the frailties of human flesh, radical openness, purpose, unknown unknowns.

When I assumed the responsibility of Obsidian as editor in chief, I didn’t know the half of what awaited me, the teams I inherited, and those I newly assembled. I didn’t know the degree to which I would need to wear so many hats or even which hats they’d be. I had no idea how much of an editor’s job in independent publishing is fundraising, public-facing communications and appearances, mountains of paperwork, details that have nothing to do with literature and everything to do with the business of the industry. With publishing’s digital turn, the rise of social media, and the explosion of online content, Obsidian had to evolve. Early in my tenure I understood that we’d not survive, much less thrive, clinging to old models of academic publishing. As the state of Illinois languished long after the devastation wreaked by budget impasse and the crisis in the humanities threatened to colonize my creative mind, I felt myself (and Obsidian) floundering and went back to school. Lessons learned and connections made at Yale School of Management’s Publishing Course on Digital Media has helped me reimagine the endgame—turning distress to eustress.

Endeavoring to risk and embrace change, we have worked to find in every challenge opportunities for growth—be they hidden or even painful. Bringing to fruition my vision of Obsidian’s expansion from print journal to full publishing platform, our team of volunteers and independent experts, led day to day by our NEA CARES Act–funded managing editor, is able to provide opportunities to writers and artists working across media, whose innovation would be constrained by the print format, while broadening the conceptual scope of the book as a delivery system/literary technology. Reaching more readers and writers by engaging audiences and ideas via multiple platforms and accessibility points, Obsidian is building on its legacy to carry forward as an agent of change.

Leaning into the digital turn, Obsidian is also reaching audiences via robust campaigns for our three series. Each one serves a particular need— @Salon connects a multicultural public allied in support of Black creativity; #ObsidianVoices celebrates newly created work; and the pedagogical initiative O|Sessions, funded in part by the Poetry Foundation, focuses on the cultivation of works yet to be created.

In the intensely collaborative venture of independent publishing, it takes a village to support a publishing platform, as managing one is more like running a start-up than one might imagine. Obsidian is a living, evolving organism that requires nourishment and investment to foster its contribution and realize its promise of uplifting Black thought and creativity. Sweat equity.

at 40 percent off and sold only the most mainstream of titles. Within walking distance, there were two excellent used bookstores—one of general literary titles and another that specialized in modern first editions—as well as an emporium of fantasy and science fiction books, both used and new, where you could sit in a plastic chair and smoke while you read. I learned the basics of the business, including the fact that every book in the store could be returned to the publisher for credit. I was responsible for ripping the covers of the mass paperbacks for return and depositing the text in the trash. These handful of stores illustrated the book ecosystem, high and low, new and used, literary and commercial.

I became aware of Amazon in the summer of 1996, when I was interning at a now-defunct book publishing company, and that began a shift in the landscape of books and bookselling over the past twenty-five years. The book ecosystem I came of age in no longer exists. Books are selling well, but in countless ways, many of them through online outlets, including a robust direct-to-consumer business for many presses, large and small. The contemporary publisher, whether small or large, uses technology—metadata streams, social media, e-commerce—to reach the broadest audience in an effort to gain reviews and other press coverage, endorsements and photo opportunities, awards attention, and sales for each book they publish. From the day I became publisher of Nightboat Books in 2007, I knew that getting our books into the world had to be a priority. That has been a focus of ours over the past fifteen years.

When I came to Nightboat, we had two books in print, and our cofounder, Kazim Ali, who was the publisher at the time, was trying to figure out what to do with the press. Kazim’s own career as a writer and teacher had taken off, so he needed to either find someone to take over Nightboat, merge the press into another publisher, or close it. I was adamant that Nightboat continue, so the job came to me, and I was keen to grow the press. In the early days I did everything, from mailing books to Amazon to sending review copies. I took seriously issues of distribution, marketing, and publicity, since I wanted to create a press that booksellers, as well as poets and academics, would love. We moved to a university press distributor with field sales reps in 2009, which helped me focus my attention on editorial, publicity, and marketing efforts. Our first book to make a splash was A Fast Life: The Collected Poems by Tim Dlugos (2011), edited by David Trinidad, which received over a dozen glowing, visible reviews, so that we sold out of the first printing and had to go back for a second. We finally had a book in stores, but as is common when you forward a lot of books to stores based on reviews, we got returns: Some of that stock came back to us.

Other books have a slower start and build over time. I like to say that a book of poetry is a new book for two years, since many things can happen for a book after it has been out for a year or more, especially awards nominations. We think of a certain profile for each title we publish—a vision of how it will be received—and while not every book matches what we hope for it, many do get there after the first couple of years. We publish a wide array of books, including reissues and reprints, so the publicity and marketing team works hard to create an original outreach plan for each title.

Nightboat Books is not a project press—we aren’t defined by an overarching program, our books don’t all look the same, we don’t publish one type of book exclusively. That makes our lives both easier and harder. People love things that are defined, comprehensible, so when someone asks me, “What does Nightboat do?” I often feel blank, like

the best answer might be “What don’t we do?” I often say that we’re a poetry press, because the tenets of the poetry world are where we started and where we return to. I also often say we’re a queer press, since we publish a lot of gay books as well as books that don’t fit neatly into any category. But our elasticity may be the most important thing that defines us, since the entity that is Nightboat will always reflect the vision of its editors, authors, and community.

We publish books because we think that we should bring them into the world, not because they worked on a profit and loss statement. Some of these books sell well, others barely sell at all. Several of our best-selling titles are anthologies, including Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queers Poets of Color (2018), edited by Christopher Soto, or reprints, like The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions (2019) by Ned Asta and Larry Mitchell. We collaborate with our authors and designers to make a physical object that best represents the writing inside while still making sure we can keep our costs within a manageable range.

For many years I ran Nightboat as a part-time volunteer, working full-time for the New York City poetry library and literary center Poets House. That job put me in a valuable place, where I met many poets, from emerging to established. This, along with our poetry prize and Kazim’s editorial efforts, brought in many books. The list ballooned, from four to eight to twelve to eighteen books a year. There was, in time, more and more work to do, so we added our first paid staff position to assist with the books. Three years ago I came on full-time, along with a full-time publicist. We also moved distribution again, this time to Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, part of Ingram Content Group, and deepened our engagement with metadata and marketing. The pandemic saw an increase in direct sales and the centrality of social media, so we added a staff position to support that work.

The BLM protests of last summer also brought questions about our own editorial work and outlook. We realized we needed to do more to diversify our staff, so we are in the process of growing the editorial board to be broader and more inclusive under the leadership of our editorial director and our managing editor. They are leading our efforts to develop a new BIPOC editorial fellowship and inviting a diverse group of editors to contribute to helping Nightboat define its editorial identity and new publishing initiatives, as well as new efforts on social media and on our blog. We are a nonprofit organization, so we are also in the process of redefining the institution, its mission, vision, and values.

There is also a lot of operational work to do—to build the infrastructure to support a press of Nightboat’s size, from managing metadata, press lists, reprints, and royalty statements to the mailing lists and contacts for the press, donors, subscribers, and friends. Nightboat is a publisher but also representative of writers and readers with a shared set of interests, from queerness to liberation politics to climate change. We are, in our midlife stream, trying to keep on top of a lot of demands while also staying open and listening to whatever transmission comes our way.

The book ecosystem that Nightboat is a part of in midlife is very different from the one I might have imagined as a teenager, but connecting to readers is still at the heart of the work. At a recent outdoor small-press book fair, the first since the pandemic shutdown, I met so many readers, writers, and people passionate about our books. They picked up our titles and many walked home with one, two, or more. Nearly all our books will be read, passed on, and make their way through the world in a way no one can possibly know. The book, over five hundred years old, belongs in its own time and space, a conveyance for knowledge, pleasure, revolution, or revelation. It can’t track or be tracked; it can still be gifted, stolen, or shelved. It can’t be hacked and is likely to be as clear and legible in fifty years as it is today. It’s what Nightboat offers to the world.