Index for Continuance

On September 12, 2025 we sat down with Eric Obenauf, founder and Editorial Director of Columbus-based indie press (and bookstore and vegan café and bar)  Two Dollar Radio  to talk about publishing. Recorded live at the Cleveland Public Library during Literary Cleveland’s Inkubator Conference, our conversation spanned the history and guiding spirit of the beloved Ohio imprint, their stead...

What kind of poetry did Jeffrey Epstein support? In this ep (we’re back!) we explore Elisa New’s Poetry in America , a PBS TV series (2018–2025) and suite of educational programs that received funding and other support from Jeffrey Epstein. New, a scholar of American literature, is married to Larry Summers and exchanged a number of emails with Epstein that you can find over at jmail.world. We dive...

Join us for a heartening discussion of Where It’s All Going and Why There’s Not A Lot of Good Reason to Believe It’s Going to Turn Out Well. Sounds like another publishing conversation, right? Close, but this one’s about the actual end of the world. Which is also publishing, turns out. Our guest is friend of the pod and beloved apocalypse harbinger Roy Scranton, Associate Professor of English at t...

Join us as we talk to literary hero and former camp counselor Alicia Wright, editor of the magazine Annulet and Annulet Editions, and author of the just-released poetry collection You’re Called by the Same Sound , out on Third Hand Books. Annulet is a vital site for new poetry, poetics, and criticism that’s structured to be inclusive, public-facing, and non-hierarchical. In this conversation we di...

We spend a killer ep. 24 with Callie Garnett, poet and editorial director of fiction and memoir at Bloomsbury Publishing. (FYI Callie acquired and edited Hilary’s 2025 novel State Champ .) Callie pulls back the curtain on acquisitions at a thriving mid-sized independent, sharing some actual sales points, talking comps and their pitfalls, how publishing is a business of consensus and “getting peopl...

In this ep Hilary talks to the writer and editor Youssef Rakha, whose novel  The Dissenters  is just out this spring from Graywolf.  The Dissenters  is Youssef’s first novel to be written in English—you may know his previous  The Book of the Sultan’s Seal: Strange Incidents from History in the City of Mars , translated by Paul Starkey (and which Hilary edited back in the d...

Join us for a cool milestone in our first-ever transatlantic episode. We interview Kirsty Dunlop and Maria Sledmere, Glasgow-based post-internet poetics prophets and editors of the heroic UK online and IRL publisher SPAM Zine & Press . The origins of this convo are in ZP’s infatuation with UK pamphlet culture, where, one day, he noticed that the unit of literary-cultural production we usually...

In this ep we get into “arts administration”: how to do it well, why maybe it should be called something else, and what small presses can offer literary programs of all sizes. We talk with one of the best in the field, literary organizer Sony Ton-Aimé, currently executive director of Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures and formerly director of literary arts at the Chautauqua Institution. Sony talks abo...

In this episode we talk with poets Noor Hindi and George Abraham about  Heaven Looks Like Us , a new anthology of Palestinian poetry they co-edited, forthcoming from Haymarket Books in May 2025. We discuss their process and priorities for this project, which began in 2020 and continues amid the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Noor and George share ways they’ve framed and responded to the chall...

We sit down with Kate Kremer, playwright and publisher of  53rd State Press , which now also houses  3 Hole Press and Plays Inverse , making it an essential hub of independent and radical writing for performance today. We discuss how one challenge in publishing plays could be that “nobody likes to read plays,” how to think about the relationship between text and production, publishi...

Ever wonder what literary orgs have to do with the state? Nonprofits with the CIA? Your own poems with military operations on the other side of the planet? Of course you do. Luckily, so does Buffalo’s own poet laureate of waste collection and public transit Joe Hall , whose recent essay  “PEN America: Cultural Imperialism’s Avant-Garde”  is a veritable syllabus on the ways arts and cultu...

Strap in as we spelunk some of “indie” publishing’s murkiest and most nutrient-rich depths. Zach talks with Ryan Skrabalak: poet, teacher, cheesemonger, Deadhead, cool punk, and founder of the lively and exciting Spiral Editions. Spiral is a p ublisher of (chap)books, cassettes, a newsletter, and other pleasure-inducing printed objects and ephemera. As such, we had natural occasion to apply our fo...

Hilary talks to friend of the pod Lucy Biederman to get her updated thoughts on the presence of Koch money in literary publishing—specifically, how the independent press  Catapult , which has also acquired the great indies Soft Skull and Counterpoint, belongs to co-founder and CEO Elizabeth Koch, who is the daughter of Charles Koch (truly not a “black sheep” of the Koch family, though yo...

Join us for a raw one as we respond in the moment to some real-time small press world-historical events ( the end of SPD ). With minimum filtration and maximum range, it’s an occasion to revisit one of our all-time favorite recurring topics in particular depth: Distribution. To us, distribution—the way a book gets from publisher to reader—exemplifies the whole matrix of logistics, politics, and ae...

We finally sit down with Caryl Pagel (director of the CSU Poetry Center) and talk about her other job as publisher of Rescue Press . Caryl sheds light on the idea of “generative publishing” and on her approach to editing as a dynamic, open-ended process, a site of relation and the possibilities of form. We hear about starting a press maybe because you have a coupon at Kinko’s, and the contribution...

In this ep we got to sit down with Ali Black , who inspires us (and many people) as a poet, writer, educator, and administrator from Cleveland. We talk to Ali about her new writing program for youth, “The Most Promising,” her 25 years of nonprofit work, taking young people seriously, the craft of organization, the role of honesty in collaboration, specifying community, the relationship between poe...

Here we go with comics artists, educators, and publishers Daryl Seitchik and Dan Nott, founders and operators of Parsifal Press , a comic and graphic text imprint based in White River Junction, Vermont. Our discussion centers on independent comics publishing, where we examine its prevailing attitudes, aesthetics, and practicalities with curiosity about whether they differ from their counterparts i...

We gotta say, this episode is really useful for anyone who wants to learn about publicity and marketing outside the Big Five (or even inside the Big Five, for that matter). We talk to Jeremy Wang-Iverson of  Vesto PR  and Samara Rafert of the  Ohio State University Press , who shed light on both the grunt work and the big uplifting moments of book publicity and marketing. We go pret...

In this episode we talk with Janaka Stucky and Carrie Olivia Adams: poets, editors, and founders of Black Ocean , an independent publisher based in Boston and Chicago. We inquire about the press’s early success and how they manage to keep such lasting power under the tenuous conditions of the indie book market, sustaining multi-title relationships with authors and making moves that include a recen...

Join us for an inspiring session with Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson, editors and founders of Action Books —as well as poets, translators, and critics who have given us books like Toxicon & Arachne and The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (McSweeney), Summer and Transgressive Circulation (Göransson). We talk about the storm-born origins of Action Books, its thinking of the avant...

Time to chat with Joseph Earl Thomas, a writer from Frankford. Joseph is the author of the memoir  Sink , the Director of Programs at Blue Stoop , an associate faculty member at the  Brooklyn Institute for Social Research , and the current  Anisfield-Wolf Fellow  in Writing & Publishing here at the Poetry Center (among other things). Our conversation centers those othe...

We spend this episode with the inimitable Suzanne DeGaetano of Mac’s Backs Books on Coventry , the beloved indie bookstore in Cleveland Heights (and popping up all over the city) that just celebrated its 40th anniversary. Suzanne shares invaluable insights into the workings of an independent bookstore; welcoming people and sustaining community; paying the bills; changes in the industry over the pa...

This ep is for anyone who ever wondered how to host a good reading or read from their own work because there is just not a lot of info out there. Join us for a fast-paced conversation with the writer and cultural worker Sarah Rose Etter, who may or may not be the best reading series host of all time (we say yes but she’s modest). We use the beloved series TireFire in Philadelphia as a case study t...

Join us for an hour-plus with Rebecca Wolff, founder and long-time editor of Fence the journal as well as Fence Books (disclosure: Hilary is a Fence author, we’ll get into it). We talk about the promise and problems of the ‘90s, “indie” structures and dreams, and the elusive concepts of “weird” and “cool.” Also discussed: professionalization, idiosyncrasy, money, obstinacy, being a “public art per...

In this episode, we talk to the writers, editors, publishers, translators, publicists, librarians, & brilliant commentators Peter Dimock, Eugene Lim, and Ian Dreiblatt. We explore the future of the book, the form of the novel, the political potency of experimental writing and publishing, the monetization of attention, and how to value reading over books, reading beyond the commodification of c...