Steven Ford Brown - Publishing, Old Town Music Hall

Publishing, Old Town Music Hall

He left The Paperman in 1975 to become editor of Aura Literary Arts Review at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, publishing work by Yukio Mishima (Japan), Diane Wakoski, and features on Robert Bly, Howard Nemerov, the American Prose Poem and Southern culture and literature. The same year he also founded a small literary press, Thunder City Press, which eventually became Ford-Brown & Co., Publishers, and continued to publish books until 1995. Over a twenty-year period his two publishing houses published anthologies, broadsides, chapbooks, books and magazines that included literary work by John Beecher, Richard Brautigan, Pier Giorgio DiCicco (Canada), Bei Dao (China), Mark Doty, Odysseus Elytis (Greece), Charles Gaines, Andrew Glaze, Günter Grass (Germany), Gail Godwin, Enrique Anderson Imbert (Argentina), Carolyn Kizer, John Logan, Larry McMurtry. Vassar Miller, Pablo Neruda (Chile), Sonia Sanchez, Gerald Stern, Georg Trakl (Austria), Tomas Tranströmer (Sweden), Yevgeny Yevtushenko (Russia) and Paul Zimmer.

With Birmingham writer Danny Gamble in 1980 he founded the Old Town Music and Reading series on Morris Avenue off of 20th Street North in downtown Birmingham. The founding of this performance series was the culmination of a number of years of sponsorship by Brown of conferences, readings and music performances by Birmingham artists. Brown and Gamble coordinated with Drew Tombrello, owner of The Old Town Music Hall, to present performances to packed audiences three times a year. Performers included many local musician and writers, such as The Broken Hearts, Johnny Coley, Lolly Lee, Charles Muse, The Ray Reach Group, Dale Short, Michael Swindle and Macey Taylor. There were also periodic performances and readings by such notable musicians and writers as Mose Allison, Michael Harper, Philip Levine, Larry Levis, Shirley Williams and Larry Jon Wilson.