The Cleveland State University Poetry Center was established in 1962 to promote poetry through readings and community outreach, and expanded its mission to become a nonprofit independent press in 1971. We currently publish contemporary poetry, essays, and translations with a national distribution and reach. We publish two to five books a year, with a backlist of over 200 titles including a remarkable breadth of contemporary literature. We primarily acquire books through open reading periods and contests, and we occasionally publish solicited book projects, for example Cleveland-based avant-garde poet Russell Atkins’s selected volume World’d Too Much. Our authors include the acclaimed writers Shane McCrae, Philip Metres, Lily Hoang, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, Wendy Xu, Tim Seibles, Rebecca Gayle Howell, Oliver Baez Bendorf, and many others we are honored to publish.
Our books appear widely in independent bookstores, college and university courses, and at poetry readings and happenings across the country. Recent titles have been awarded the Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award from the Publishing Triangle, a Firecracker Award from CLMP, the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur Award, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, a FOREWORD Indies Award, and were named among the year’s best books of poetry in the New York Times.
In addition to book publishing, the CSU Poetry Center hosts the podcast Index for Continuanceand the digital space Exclamation’s Gauntlet. Our programming includes the Lighthouse Reading Series, the NEOMFA Writers at Work Colloquium, and the Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Writing and Publishing. Our press is a “teaching lab,” offering graduate assistantships and semester-long internships for students in the NEOMFA Program, as well as an affiliated literary editing and publishing course, and internship opportunities for undergraduates and local community members.