March Is National Small Press Month

March is National Small Press Month

Small Press Month, now in its 12th year, is a nationwide promotion highlighting the valuable work produced by independent publishers. An annual celebration of the independent spirit of small publishers, Small Press Month is an effort to showcase the diverse, unique, and often most significant voices being published today. This year's slogan is Celebrate Great Writing.

You can visit the official NSPM website by clicking here. There are a number of interesting resources including a check list of ways that we as avid readers and book buyers can support small presses. I also found a very interesting page on the website that lists some of the most prominent books of the last few decades that have been printed by small presses that inevitably allowed very important voices to be heard for the first time. I encourage you to look at the whole list of books but a few that I recognized immediately were A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, and Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile which has been in the spot light recently because of the movie staring Tom Hanks.

The small presses that printed these books and many others deserve to be celebrated for the voices they have helped to bring to light and the people who have been affected by these texts.

"The life’s blood of contemporary and modern literature is in the custodianship of so-called small publishers. Without them, there is no future for literature."
-- Walter Mosley, author of This Year You Write Your Novel and the recently published Blonde Faith