National Poetry Month

Each year, Aquarius Press is proud to celebrate National Poetry Month. We are particularly fortunate to have some of the best poets in the country within our ranks. One shining beacon is of course Karen S. Williams, author of Elegy for a Scarred Shoulder, which has earned international acclaim and a multiple award nominee. It is also now a part of the Beinecke Library Special Collection at Yale University alongside the likes of Jean Toomer. Other award nominees are Felecia Studstill, author of Speaking No Evil, a passionate treatise on the landscape of human emotion, and the hard-hitting John Jeffire, prolific author and teacher, whose Stone+Fist+Brick+Bone is both memoir and 1960's social commentary.

We are excited to have some new poetry superstars joining our ranks this year. Get ready for: Tara Betts, creative writing Lecturer at Rutgers and author of the upcoming Arc and Hue; Curtis L. Crisler, Professor of Creative Writing at Purdue University-Ft. Wayne and author of the upcoming Pulling Scabs, and Antoinette Brim, a Harvard DuBois Fellow and Professor in Arkansas and author of the upcoming Psalm of the Sunflower.

If we all ever needed poetry, it is definitely now.

Aquarius Press Joins Technorati

Technorati Profile

We are always searching for new ways to extend our reach into cyberspace, and our new Technorati page will go a long way in helping Aquarius Press achieve that goal. Click on the link above, and you will travel to our profile page. While it's still under construction, we will be adding features as we go along. It's a challenge keeping up with the myriad options available, but it's exciting to see how blogging technology has evolved just in the past year alone. Another great feature is the ability to post videos (mainly acquired through YouTube) on Technorati where it increases viewership exponentially. Look for our author features there soon.

The Land of Silent Morning a 50-Year Success

"As I walked through the marketplace, I promised myself that I would never die like my mother." These haunting words struck me and my editors as we read through what would become one of our great literary achievements. The Land of Silent Morning is more than just another memoir amongst memoirs, it's a validation of a life of shame, struggle, poverty, and redemption over a span of 50 years. The author, Kateleen K. Washington (nee Kyong Mi) first talked with me by phone. Her English was stilted, but I was intrigued by the intensity in her voice, her dead certainty that her life story would be a message to the world. I believe it is. Two weeks ago we hosted a pre-release party near her adopted hometown of Utica, Michigan. The people who came were not only the general public, but people from Kateleen's early years, people who knew her when she was struggling to survive in a foreign country, and her ex-husband, a man of whom she wrote quite a bit about in the book. It was interesting to see when he walked through the door with his new family that he and Kateleen tearfully hugged as if time had never moved on for either of them. During the Author Q and A, she admitted that she perhaps didn't appreciate the husband she had then, a man who had literally rescued her from a life of being an escort in South Korea's nightclubs. She says she couldn't appreciate his humor back then, but I believe she does now.

Kateleen holds no regrets, however, only pride in having forged a life for herself here in the U.S. as a business owner. She says she has no desire to ever return to Korea, but she has a burning desire to find her sisters with whom she lost touch so many decades before. She is hoping that this book will help with that mission. Whether she finds them or not, she will always be a part of the Aquarius Press Family.

Publishing Success in Trying Times

As the first month of this new year draws to a close, we are slammed nearly every day with dire economic news. For us in the publishing industry, it's even more terrifying--in addition to the overall economic woes, we face the collapse of the publishing industry and the decline of print book readers. It would be easy to just give up at this point, but as with virtually anything, there is a bright side. Even during the Great Depression, there was still economic activity, and more importantly, people still bought and read print material. For publishers like Aquarius Press, this is a time to forge ahead, while our competitors are afraid to make a move.

"There are more of us than there are of them." These words, spoken by my friend and fellow author Sylvia McClain, is very inspiring and true. She was referring to the traditional book reading public. This current generation was raised on books, before the new digital technologies burst on the scene. In other words, there are still countless numbers of people who like to hold books in their hands. As a publisher, Aquarius Press is ready and able to meet both print demand as well as digital demand for the new age, but it's nice to know there are others out there who still prefer to flip the pages of a book on a rainy afternoon.