Omnidawn Press Feature, November 9, 2013

Omnidawn Publishing was founded in 2001 by wife and husband team Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan because of their conviction that the small, independent press is an important way to disseminate fresh, lively, culturally pertinent, and provocative literature.  They believe that our society needs many small presses so that widely diverse ideas and points-of-view are easily accessible to everyone. Just as Omnidawn’s name suggests: “omni” (in all ways and places) and “dawn” (the first appearance of light), so they believe that each of Omnidawn’s books teaches one how to read it in all its layers and how to see anew the landscape of language in its newly dawning light.

Introduction by Omnidawn publisher Rusty Morrison.

Paul Hoover (Poems in Spanish & desolation : souvenir, Omnidawn) is the editor of the influential anthology Postmodern American Poetry, co-editor with Maxine Chernoff of the literary magazine New American Writing, and author of twelve previous poetry collections. His prizes include the Frederick Bock Award from Poetry, the Jerome J. Shestack Award from American Poetry Review, an NEA Fellowship in poetry, and the GE Foundation Award for Younger Writers. The Hölderlin volume that he co-translated with Maxine Chernoff (and that was also published by Omnidawn) won the PEN-USA Translation Award in 2009. Born in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and raised in the rural Midwest, he lived and taught for many years in Chicago. He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.

kathryn l. pringle (fault tree, Winner of the 2011 Omnidawn First/Second Book Award) is a graduate of the MFA program at San Francisco State University. Her book, RIGHT NEW BIOLOGY, is just out from Factory School/Heretical Text Series. She is the author of The Stills (Duration Press) and Temper & Felicity are Lovers(TAXT). Her poems can be read in The Denver Quarterly, Fence, 14 hills, 580 Split, and Sidebrow, among others. She is an editor at the literary magazine minor/american, and the co-founder of the minor american reading series in Durham, N.C., now funded by Duke University.

Bin Ramke (Aerial, Theory of Mind: New & Selected Poems, Tendril, Omnidawn), former editor of a book series for the University of Georgia Press, current editor of the Denver Quarterly and holder of the Phipps Chair in English at the University of Denver, studied mathematics in college before turning to poetry. Prior to that he spent a summer at age sixteen studying with topologist (and famously racist teacher) R.L. Moore at the University of Texas. He continues to see similar patterns arising from language and mathematics in all aspects of human consciousness and human behavior. His childhood in rural Louisiana and east Texas is also a part of the central concerns and beauty that his work tries to engage. But along with the beauty he experienced a particularly virulent ugliness, the racial hatred that was part of the American experience of the 1960s. The American South was an explicit and obvious force and subject in his first several books of poems but Ramke was never an easy fit into the “southern writing” category—probably for lack of adequate narrative. And yet in the last several books he has written extensively out of, or around, the devastations of hurricane and flood, especially Katrina and Rita, on the region.

Elizabeth Robinson (Harrow, Three Novels. Omnidawn) is the author of twelve books of poetry. Robinson was educated at Bard College, Brown University, and the Pacific School of Religion. She has been a winner of the National Poetry Series for Pure Descent and the Fence Modern Poets Prize for Apprehend. The recipient of grants from the Fund for Poetry and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Robinson has also been a MacDowell Colony Fellow. Her work has been anthologized in the Best American Poetry (2002) and American Hybrid, along with many other anthologies. Robinson has taught at the University of San Francisco, the University of Colorado, Boulder, Naropa University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She co-edits EtherDome Chapbooks with Colleen Lookingbill and Instance Press with Beth Anderson and Laura Sims.

Tyrone Williams (On Spec, Omnidawn) is the author of many books of poetry including C.C., and most recently Howell. His poetry chapbooks include Pink Tie, a prose eulogy, published by Hooke Press. His poems have been published in magazines, including Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, Caliban, Colorado Review, and Xcp. And his poems have been anthologized in anthologies, including Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry (Miame University Press 2005) and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner 2003). He received his Doctorate of English from Wayne State University. He teaches at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan.