Spring 2012
Dear Friends of Books,
Each time you make a contribution to Coffee House Press, you help to put tomorrow’s classics into the hands of an eager and curious reader. By opening one of our books, they will undergo an experience that will change the way they think about what language and story can do, and what a few words strung together can do to change the way we see the world. I write today to ask you to please help us put our books into the hands of that reader.
If you’re a long-time supporter of Coffee House, you know that we’ve always been a lean operation, stretching our resources in order to maximize our ability to publish exciting, beautiful, groundbreaking books, and to publish them well. It hasn’t always been easy, but it has been rewarding. Thank you for making our books possible.
These efforts have paid off. Over the past few years, we’ve had some tremendous successes. Our authors and their books have:
- Been named finalists for the National Book Award (Karen Yamashita and Patricia Smith) and Pulitzer Prize (Ron Padgett).
- Won the Believer Book Award (Ben Lerner), Asian/Pacific American Library Association Award (Karen Yamashita), the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets (Anna Moschovakis), and many more.
- Received major media attention in the New York Times, NPR, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, O Magazine, the New York Review of Books, Newsweek, Poets and Writers, Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times.
- Been translated and published in Spain, France, China, Holland, Italy, Russia, Japan, Korea, Portugal, Brazil, Poland, Romania, Israel, Turkey, and more.
Because of all this, we are currently in the position to turn the next page, to leverage these successes in order to strengthen our core program, expand our reach, and prepare for the rapidly changing world of books and literature through innovation around the very idea of what a publishing house can be.
With a gift today, you will allow us to take advantage of all the opportunities that have been knocking on our door. It’s exciting to be able to take advantage of these opportunities, and not have to regret them passing us by.
With your help, we will continue to strengthen our program by:
- Publishing new work by Coffee House veterans Laird Hunt, Sam Savage, Kenneth Koch, Eleni Sikelianos, Norah Labiner, Karen Yamashita, Anselm Hollo, and more.
- Continuing our commitment to discovery by presenting first and second books by T. Geronimo Johnson, Sun Yung Shin, Sarah Fox, Lightsey Darst, and still more.
- Increasing our focus on readers, and on reading as an active, imaginative, productive act. We are already known as an artist-centered publisher; it’s high time the publishing industry actively engaged readers, and we want to lead the way.
With your help, we will continue to expand our program by:
- Continuing to attend the Frankfurt and London International Book Fairs, solidifying our relationships with foreign editors and expanding the worldwide audience for our books.
- Increasing the size of our staff with additional artistic and programmatic positions.
- Publishing new kinds of books: international titles, nonfiction, and books that engage communities through art and collaboration.
Innovation. A board member recently made a crucial and game-changing gift of a $15,000 fund specifically meant to seed new initiatives to expand the scope of our programming. We hope you will supplement this effort, which will help us:
- Engage artists from different mediums to collaborate with our authors and books. Together we will discover new ways of delivering the work of our authors, finding new audiences in the process.
- Forge important new relationships and collaborations like the ones we have fostered with Room to Read, Little Free Libraries, the Walker Art Center, the Library as Incubator Project, and a collective of independent bookstores from around the country.
- Present the work of our authors in a spectrum of ways: video, audio, chapbooks, albums, e-books, performances, visual art, compositions, graphic novels, happenings, and more.
Our founder, Allan Kornblum, was recently honored at the Minnesota Book Awards for his lifelong commitment and contribution to literature in publishing. In his speech, he said that he was proud to be a part of the “community of the book,” which “stretches back five thousand years into the distant past, and will continue into a future we cannot imagine.” By making a contribution today, you can join us in imagining that future and help make it happen.
Thank you,
Chris Fischbach
Publisher
PS: Please visit coffeehousepress.org today to see our new catalogue, and to make your secure donation now!
