When Carmen Giménez, then a young poet in
San Francisco’s vibrant literary
scene, walked into one of the city’s bookstores in 1999, she was dazzled by its
selection of chapbooks: short and often handmade, the booklets came in all
sizes, textures and materials.
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Although she was riveted by the variety of zines,
and small presses she saw represented at the store, called Paperback Traffic,
she found few publishers that promoted writers of color in a way “that was not
tokenizing”, she said.
“As a woman of color, I had an awareness that there
was this whole world of writers that existed, that needed a space, and could
coexist with white writers in a catalog,” she said.
So, she decided to try her hand at publishing. She
produced a friend’s chapbook on another friend’s letterpress, and was hooked.
By 2002, Giménez had co-founded Noemi Press, which in the years since has
produced lithographs, silk-screened books, and even a poetry collection with a
spray-painted cover. Its books have been finalists for
National Book Critics Circle and Lambda Literary awards, while its editorial staff at one time
included three National Book Award finalists.
Now, after 20 years, Giménez, 51, has stepped down
from Noemi to become, on Monday, executive director and publisher of Graywolf
Press, one of the nation’s most venerable independent, nonprofit publishers.
She also left her post at Virginia Tech, where she was an English professor.
Her goal, she said, will be to cultivate the next generation
of public intellectuals, whoever and wherever they might be, and to widen the
press’s audience.
As careers in academia and journalism become harder
to sustain, especially for young people, she said, writers “might not be coming
from the same traditional academic backgrounds”.
The search for new talent will encompass “any number
of places where people are talking or thinking, or being creative or having a
voice”, including TikTok, where Giménez believes there is probably a public
intellectual waiting to break out.
“Maybe their book doesn’t even exist yet,” she said,
“but let’s talk about what it would look like.”
At an independent press, editors can offer sustained
attention to books “that might need a little bit more development”, she said.
After years in the industry, “you see what the book can be when the writer has
the capacity to work at their wildest, full potential”.
As a woman of color, I had an awareness that there was this whole world of writers that existed, that needed a space, and could coexist with white writers in a catalog.
Graywolf’s list includes acclaimed authors such as
Carmen Maria Machado, Maggie Nelson, Percival Everett and Diane Seuss. (Giménez’s
own book “Be Recorder”, a finalist for the
National Book Award in poetry, was a
Graywolf title.)
Giménez’s focus on growth and mentorship has been a
hallmark of her career, according to Suzi Garcia, one of Noemi Press’ new
co-publishers.
“She is looking to create opportunities.”
The first book Garcia acquired as a poetry editor —
“Beast Meridian”, by Vanessa Angélica Villareal — earned the author a Whiting
Award in 2019.
Giménez gave her the space to pursue the project,
Garcia said, “but she would not set you up for failure, because she was going
to back you up the whole time”.
Anthony Cody, another new co-publisher of Noemi, met
Giménez a decade ago and considered her a mentor before joining her staff in
2017. “She’s really helped pull the curtain back and allow people to see how
publishing works,” he said, “and demystify some of what, historically, has been
gatekept.”
Giménez was born in New York and grew up in
Maryland, New Jersey, Southern California, Mexico, and San Jose,
California,
where she attended high school and college. As a young person, she wanted to
write fiction, “but because I’m so attracted to the granular level of language,
I ended up being a poet”, she said.
In college, where she ferried writers around on
behalf of her school’s reading series, she became interested in the
entrepreneurial side of literature.
“I wanted to know how you plan a reading,” she said.
“I wanted to know how you make a journal. I wanted to know how you do literary
activism.”
She plans to develop Graywolf’s existing social
justice initiatives, such as Citizen in the Classroom, which aims to start
discussions about race in high school and college classrooms using Claudia
Rankine’s seminal text, “Citizen”.
“The world is changing in really scary ways,” she
said, citing a rise in book banning and rhetoric targeting marginalized
communities.
Books often take one to two years to publish, so
editors must ask, preemptively, she said, “how is this going to fit into a
national conversation or an international conversation about what it means to
be a human being?”
Beyond publishing “books that are provocatively
engaging”, it is up to presses to find readers for those books.
“The next frontier is: How do we widen the audience?
How do we get into places that aren’t literary?” she said.
Cody cites Giménez’s foresight as one of her
greatest assets.
“Carmen is someone who, 20 years ago, was willing to
see a need and begin to take the risk to publish work without any sort of hint
that it would pay off, but knowing that it was the right and necessary thing to
do,” he said.
And as an author herself, Giménez understands that
publishing is a team effort.
“I’m very much a believer that I’ve never written a book by
myself,” Giménez said. “There are all sorts of people who inhabit, reside in
and have been transformative forces in every book that I’ve written.”
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