Noemi Press has gone through major transition this year as our founder, Carmen Giménez, accepted the job as publisher of Graywolf Press and appointed Suzi F. Garcia and Anthony Cody as new co-publishers. Suzi and Anthony, in turn, asked me to become the press’s executive director. At this crossroads, it feels like an enormous accomplishment to have made that transition together and to continue to publish the work that excites us.
Suzi, Anthony, and I have worked together for years in our previous positions (them as poetry editors, me as managing editor), so we weren’t starting from scratch, but the weight of Noemi Press’s history and wanting to uphold its legacy has been at the forefront of our minds. After all, 2022 is the 20-year anniversary of the press’s founding, with Carmen (and co-founder Evan Lavender Smith) making chapbooks at their kitchen table in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Since then, Noemi Press has published over 100 titles, often taking on experimental work that challenges the status quo. As a brand new leadership team, we gathered in August to talk about the press’s past, present, and future—one that feels bright and full of possibility.
I’ve promised to write about Noemi Press for months now, and kept getting delayed and delayed, which may be the most illustrative example of what small press life is like these days. In the midst of this heart work, we’ve adjusted to new day jobs, family changes/challenges, and the struggles of the day-to-day we all face in what feels like a strange and tenuous time. At Noemi, we’ve been feeling overwhelming gratitude for our authors, editors, designers, and community throughout the changes of this year.
We’ve been working behind the scenes on a new website design that will be more accessible and user-friendly, and held a successful IndieGoGo campaign to fund it. We’ve been writing grants and finding ways to make the press sustainable work for us as we lean into our own artistic practices. All of this takes time and imagining, and it’s all in service of the work we love and want you to read.
This year, we published five titles. PLACE by Alexei Perry Cox is a discussion
of language and poetic usefulness, specifically how collective discourse
survives the unimaginable through personal recourse. Gorgoneion, Casey
Rocheteau’s latest book, was the winner of the 2021 Noemi Press Book Award in
Poetry, weaving biting wit and tender moments into its critique of American
society. In prose, we published marcus scott williams’s damn near might still be
is what it is: part autofiction, part memoir and travelogue, part
road novel, part journal entry, confronting what it means to be American, to be
Black, to be a tourist and penniless and to fall in love.
A big part of Noemi Press’s story this year was the publication of AKRÍLICA, Juan Felipe Herrera’s 1989 book newly translated by a bevy of talented folks and edited by Anthony Cody, Carmen Giménez, and Farid Matuk. This book has long lent its name to our Akrilica Series, which publishes innovative Latinx lyric poetry, and so to publish it anew under the series’ banner has been a privilege and honor. Also as part of the Akrilica Series, we were thrilled to publish City Without Altar, Jasminne Mendez’s poetry collection and play-in-verse amplifying the voices and experiences of victims, survivors and living ancestors of the 1937 Haitian Massacre that occurred along the northwest Dominican/Haitian border.
With forthcoming work in 2023 from Nawal Nader-French, Angela Peñaredondo, Sandra Simonds, Catherine Chen, and Raquel Gutiérrez, we know what the immediate future holds and can’t wait to share it with you. As for twenty years from now, your guess is as good as mine, but I’ve got a feeling it’s going to be as spectacular and vibrant as ever.
Sarah Gzemski is a poet. She is the executive director of Noemi Press and the financial coordinator at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. She is an editor and book designer living and working in Tucson, AZ, the ancestral and current home of the Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui people. Her current manuscript about growing up an evangelical pastor's daughter grapples with fundamentalism's effects on her girlhood/womanhood and confronts its nationalist rhetoric and roots. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Bone Bouquet, Four Chambers, and Cartridge Lit, among others.
