The Economy Press originated from The Economy Magazine, an online literary journal that ran from 2012 to 2015. Each issue featured the work of one poet, one fiction/nonfiction writer, and one visual artist. From the start, my focus has been on publishing writers and artists as individuals rather than just showcasing specific pieces.
Over the course of the magazine’s three-year run, we published original work from established writers such as Rae Armantrout, Fanny Howe, Douglas Kearney, and Christian Wiman, alongside emerging (at the time) writers like Chloe Honum, Nate Klug, and Brooklyn Copeland. One of my favorite photographers, Irina Rozovsky, contributed a photo spread for an early issue, as well as over art for an anniversary issue (still one of my favorite photos, “Bastille Day”). I decided to stop publishing the magazine in 2015, during a busy time in my life when I knew the magazine’s quality would inevitably suffer without the needed time and attention.
In 2020, due to the pandemic, I started to feel a renewed desire to reach out and be in contact with the poetry and arts community. At first, I considered bringing the magazine back, but this didn’t feel complete. After some more thought, I decided that my interest was in producing something physical - pamphlets, as it turns out, booklets.
I’ve been drawn to the pamphlet tradition for a while as a way of presenting poetry that’s brief, focused, and happens to align with the minimalist, ‘economic’ aesthetic that began with the online magazine. I found myself wanting to work with the physical page, which I find essential to the life of many poems - the navigation of positive and negative space that can be difficult to communicate digitally.
So, about five years ago, I founded The Economy Press. Since then, much like the magazine, the press has published both established and emerging writers. Our catalog includes New and Selected Poems by Nicolas Behr (“Brasilia’s Poet”) in both Portuguese and English, experimental collections by Joshua Edwards and Jon Woodward, folios by Julian of Norwich (the first woman to publish in English), archival papers by Walt Whitman with facing pages of the original manuscript and typed text, and an ongoing Haiku Pamphlet Series, among other titles. The Economy Press catalog is now available in bookstores, university archives, and museums both in the U.S. and internationally.
As an editor and publisher, my hope is that each new title we release contributes something fresh - in its own small way - to the world of poetry and its readers.
