Spork Press is a small press in Tucson, Arizona edited and constructed by Richard Siken and Drew Burk. Beginning in 2001, it began publishing a quarterly literary magazine called Spork, which is often bound hardback, and which should not be confused with the spork, a novel eating utensil.
Spork Press also produces chapbooks and novels. Some of the books they've published include Roderick Maclean's Tropic/of/Cubicle. Beth Toener's A La Recherche Du Petit Pseudo-Rockstars Perdu (Split E.P.) has been released in serial form.
In 2010 Richard and Drew decided to take a break from the regular publication of a literary magazine, choosing to instead publish issues of the journal when they had an idea they were excited about (Issue 9.1 "The Middles Of Things", was the first along these new lines. 5 authors were tasked with writing the middle of a novel, but were not allowed to write the beginning or the end, they were instructed to treat it as though they'd walked into the middle of a movie, and to simply describe what they saw. Sharon McGill provided the illustrations for each piece, and Amelia Gray ordered the pieces, writing interstitial bits, creating a loose impression of a continuous narrative through the book ). In the absence of the regular magazine, they've been publishing a chapbook series, though the term "chapbook" is applied loosely: "This here, this mixtape? It's a chapbook. This novel? It's a chapbook. Everything we do is a chapbook." <--- Drew said that, and it's how things are done.(Chapbooks have traditionally been throwaway items -- the guys at Spork subvert this idea with letterpressed hardback hand-bound books, and an inattention to the rest of the things chapbooks usually are.)
Most recently, Joyelle McSweeney's the Necropastoral (Spork Press, 2011) and Zach Schomburg's, From the Fjords (Spork Press, 2011) have received buzz throughout the internet for their quirky design and the text itself.
The Spork team consists of Drew Burk (Production/Editor), Andrew Shuta (Design/Production), Richard Siken (Editor), Jamison Crabtree (Editor), Jake Levine (Editor), and numerous others that help out.
Read more about Spork Press: Some Writers Appearing in Spork Magazine, Spork Press Chapbook Authors, Beard Hierarchy of The Editorial Staff At Spork Press
Famous quotes containing the word press:
“Whenever [Leonard Bernstein] entered or exited a country he would fill in on his passport form not composer or conductor, but musician. Of course people in the press spent a lot of Lenny’s life telling him what he should have done; he should have been a concert pianist, he should have composed more.... And people wouldn’t let him live his own life. But he created his own career, in his own image.”
—John Mauceri (b. 1945)