Coffee House Press began as a small letterpress operation in 1972 and has grown into an internationally renowned nonprofit publisher of literary fiction, essay, poetry, and other work that doesn’t fit neatly into genre categories. Following the small press movement of the 60s and 70s, the 80s saw an emergence of professionalization among small publishers. CHP’s late-founder Allan Kornblum saw an opportunity to create the sort of publishing house that he wished existed in the world.

Since CHP’s founding, our authors have received and been finalists for numerous nominations and prizes, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. We’ve had the honor of publishing books by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Brian Evenson, Saeed Jones, Ben Lerner, Valeria Luiselli, Dawn Lundy Martin, Eimear McBride, Ron Padgett, Justin Phillip Reed, Patricia Smith, Anne Waldman, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Kao Kalia Yang, among many other writers whom we are proud to publish.

As a nonprofit, CHP has also received recognition and funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, the Lila Wallace Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, McKnight, Bush, and Jerome Foundations. These honors and awards, along with book sales and the crucial support of individual donors, keep Coffee House going and create new opportunities for our authors, readers, and program audiences.

Remaining independent has allowed us to take meaningful risks and broaden our focus. Over the past few years, we’ve started to identify as both a publisher and an arts organization.

We’ve long recognized there are many possibilities for reader/writer exchange beyond (and even without) the page. Through our Books in Action publications and programs, we’ve become interdisciplinary collaborators and incubators for new work and audience experiences—not just with Coffee House Press authors, but with visual, performing, and social practice artists, and others whose ideas and work engage and inspire. CHP’s vision for the future is one where a publisher is more than a company that packages books. We are catalysts and connectors—between authors and readers, ideas and resources, creativity and community, inspiration and action.

From 2011-2020, Kornblum’s successor, Chris Fischbach, continued to foster CHP’s early commitment to publishing work that falls outside the mainstream. Recent initiatives have included establishing ourselves as a publisher of literature by Spanish and Latinx authors in English and in translation. From 2016 to 2020, Brooklyn-based imprint Emily Books curated bold feminist books. The Spatial Species Series, curated by Ken Chen and Youmna Chala, investigates the ways in which we activate space through language. 

In 2021, Anitra Budd served as our new Executive Director and Publisher.

In 2023, Linda A. Ewing joined as Interim Executive Director and was hired as our Executive Director in 2024. Linda is a highly experienced consulting professional and senior nonprofit executive with a deep love for Minnesota's nonprofit community.

In 2024, Jeremy Davies joined Coffee House Press as Editor-in-Chief. Davies was previously an editor at Dalkey Archive Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and And Other Stories. With Linda he is focused on leading our press into an exciting future.

With your support, we’re able to make experimental, creative choices rather than react solely to sales algorithms and trends. Adventurous readers, arts enthusiasts, community builders, and risk takers—join us.

PAST PUBLISHERS:

ALLAN KORNBLUM, FOUNDER Allan studied poetry at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and published poems in a wide variety of little magazines in the 1970s and early 1980s. During that period he served as the editor, designer, printer, and publisher for Toothpaste Press. From 1984–2011 he served as editor and publisher at Coffee House Press. In recognition of his work at these two presses, Kornblum received an American Book Award for Special Achievement as an Editor and Publisher in 1997. Allan passed away on November 23, 2014.

CHRIS FISCHBACH

Publisher of Coffee House Press from 2011 to 2020, Chris had started working for the press as an intern in 1994. Over the course of his career at CHP he acquired and worked with authors including Valeria Luiselli, Ben Lerner, Laird Hunt, Patricia Smith, Karen Tei Yamashita, Marjorie Welish, and many others. He has served on the board of the Friends of the Hennepin County Library and as a board member of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.

ANITRA BUDD

Served as Executive Director and Publisher in 2021.