PUBLISHING FROM THE GROUND UP: A SYMPOSIUM ABOUT INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING AND THE CREATIVE COMMUNITIES IT SUSTAINS
Saturday, April 25
9:30 AM - 3:00 PM
Tulsa Artist Fellowship Flagship
112 N. Boston, Tulsa, OK 74103
The University of Tulsa, in partnership with Tulsa LitFest, Art Directors Club, and Tulsa Artist Fellowship, presents Publishing from the Ground Up, a symposium about independent publishing and the creative communities it sustains. Join us on Saturday, April 25, for two roundtable conversations and a workshop with creatives who are working at the forefront of literary and art publishing across the US.
All events are free and open to the public. This symposium is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the TU College of Arts & Sciences.
9:30–10:50 AM | Panel 1: Promoting Translation & Building Readerly Communities
Matt Carney (editor-in-chief of The Pickup) will moderate a panel about publishing and promoting literature in translation, organized by Boris Dralyuk and featuring Will Evans (founder of Deep Vellum, Dallas), Shook (poet, translator, and founder of Phoneme Editions), and Daniel Simon (editor-in-chief of World Literature Today).
11:00 AM – 12:15 PM | Panel 2: The Art of Publishing & Community Solidarity
The second panel, moderated by M. Wright, will feature graphic designers who publish in collaboration with artists and activists: James Ewald (partner at Velvet Jam Press, publisher of Meta Flop, and co-organizer of the Oklahoma City Art Book Fair), Eric Von Haynes (founder of Flatlands Press, president of Chicago Printers Guild, and co-owner of Quimby’s Bookstore, Chicago), Emily Larned (founder of Alder & Frankia Press, co-founder of Impractical Labor in Service of the Speculative Arts, and book arts instructor at the Women’s Studio Workshop, Bridgeport, CT), and Jimmy Van Luu (co-founder of the design studio Group Project, and its publishing division Riso Riso, Austin). The two panel discussions will be followed by a hands-on bookbinding workshop.
1:30–3:00 PM | Bookbinding Workshop
All materials provided, no experience necessary.
ABOUT THE MODERATORS
M. Wright is an associate professor of graphic design and creative director of TU’s Third Floor Design Studio. She received her MFA in visual communication design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, following an undergraduate degree in comparative literature from Princeton University. Over the past 20 years, she has built a creative practice that specializes in collaborations with artists and cultural institutions. Her design work has garnered national and international awards and has been exhibited in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Toronto, Montreal, Mexico City, and Barcelona. Her work is in permanent collections, including the National Design Archives, the Rare Book and Manuscript Collection at Columbia University, and the Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is co-founder of the queer-feminist art and design collective AK/OK, whose work has been presented at venues including the Brooklyn Museum, Oakland Museum of California, Bishopsgate Institute (London), SOMA (Mexico City), and Stockholm University of the Arts. As co-director of OK Stamp Press based in Tiotià:ke, Montreal, she investigates artistic publishing practices with an emphasis on social justice and sustainable production methods.
Matt Carney is the Editor-In-Chief of The Pick Up. He was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and has worked as an editor, reporter, and nonprofit manager since earning his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Oklahoma. He has contributed writing to Outside, This Land, The Tulsa Voice, KOSU, Oklahoma Gazette, Tulsa World, and The Oklahoman. He now lives in Midtown Tulsa with his wife, daughter, and son.
ABOUT THE HOST
Boris Dralyuk is a poet, translator, and critic. He holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA, and has taught there and the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. He currently teaches in the English Department at the University of Tulsa. His work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New Republic, London Review of Books, The Guardian, Granta, and other journals. He is the author of My Hollywood and Other Poems (Paul Dry Books, 2022) and Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907-1934 (Brill, 2012), editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (Pushkin Press, 2016), co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015), and translator of Isaac Babel, Andrey Kurkov, Maxim Osipov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and other authors. He received first prize in the 2011 Compass Translation Award competition and, with Irina Mashinski, first prize in the 2012 Joseph Brodsky / Stephen Spender Translation Prize competition. In 2020, he received the inaugural Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing from the Washington Monthly. In 2022, he received the inaugural Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize from the National Book Critics Circle for his translation of Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees. In 2024, he received a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the 2024-2026 Tulsa Artist Fellowship. Formerly the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, he is currently the editor-in-chief of Nimrod International Journal.
ABOUT TULSA LITFEST
Tulsa LitFest brings together diverse literary artists and writers to collaborate and inspire, enriching the Tulsa community. Tulsa LitFest is presented by the Center for Poets and Writers at OSU-Tulsa, Tri-City Collective, and Magic City Books.