About Us
KATTYWOMPUS PRESS was founded on the north coast of Ohio, in August, 2010. We publish chapbooks, including over 300 Poets’ Greatest Hits, a line which we’ve taken over from Pudding House Publications, in Columbus. Poets’ Greatest Hits parallels the recording industry’s Greatest Hits album tradition. This invitation-only series offers a unique collection of the poet’s most popular work, as well as a peek into the life and creative process of the author.
POETS’ GREATEST HITS does not accept submissions. Greatest Hits poets can be nominated only by our esteemed selection panel or other Greatest Hits authors.
KATTYWOMPUS accepts submissions for anything else that belongs in a chapbook. We publish a wide range of poetry as well as short prose forms. Please see our submissions page for guidelines.
Publisher’s Statement Kattywompus is a literary small press in the hallowed tradition of selective, editor-chosen publications. We are not and will never be, nor will we collaborate with or in any way support a vanity press. You cannot pay us to publish your work, and if we decide to publish your submission, you owe us nothing other than a manuscript finely tuned in good faith. We at Kattywompus believe in the value of poetry arts and literary arts. We believe in the notion of right livelihood. And we believe, as Jen (down at Pudding House) likes to say, “What lifts one, lifts us all.”
STAFF
Sammy Greenspan Publisher, Editor-in-chief, Kattywompus Press and Poets’ Greatest Hits. Director of Pudding House Salon-Cleveland, a monthly poetry workshop intensive. Sammy has published her poetry and short fiction in various journals, hard copy and online, and several anthologies. Her chapbook Step Back From the Closing Doors (Pudding House, 2009) was a Pushcart nominee. Her work can currently be read online in In Posse Review and Del Sol Review, and at northcoastpoet.com. You may have run into Sammy in one of her previous incarnations as waitress, artist, interviewer, lab technician, physician, homeschool teacher, educational advocate, or rabble rouser.
Bonné de Blas Associate Editor, Artists' Books Editor. Book artist, poet, Director of Art Books Cleveland. Her poetry has been published in ant, ant, ant, ant, ant, Ocotillo Flame, Levy Graffiti, Brushfire, and Poetalk, and in the Pudding House anthologies What I Knew Before I Knew and Another Memorial for Wallace Stevens. Her artists' books have been exhibited and collected nationally and internationally. A recovering attorney who did graduate work in Creative Writing at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Bonné can be found, when not at Kattywompus Press or in her studio, working at various local binderies, bookstores, and galleries.
Curmudgeon Friend of the wompus and occasional blogger, Curmudgeon prefers to remain incognito. Don't bother asking. We're not going to tell you his real name. Curmudgeon has been explicit on that point and will not write for us except under this pseudonym. And we try to stay on his good side.
New Releases
Blind fish who aren’t actually blind, alien cow-abductions, a dog who dreams of rotisserie chicken… from Wisconsin to Florida, Jesse Millner’s Shapes the Clouds Assume offers up a sweet and generous slice of the mutant, disturbingly familiar underbelly of Americana to startle us, make us cringe, and make us laugh out loud.
The micro-fictions and prose poems of Richard Holingers’s Hybrid Seeds: Little Fictions slip in and out of the voices of our time: a famous painter’s muse, a perplexed writing instructor, a motley gathering of familiar film heroes relaxing—or sliding into post-traumatic hallucination—together on bridge night.
On a Bed of Gardenias: Jane & Paul Bowles, Karren Alenier’s sixth collection of poetry, unfolds the exotic love story of Jane Auer and Paul Bowles, American expatriate writers considered to be the precursors of the American Beats. The poetic story begins after Jane’s death in 1973 as Paul and Jane’s Moroccan lover Cherifa sit smoking kif and revisit scenes from Jane and Paul’s lives. The insinuation is that Cherifa poisoned Jane. Paul says that Jane was his muse but did he bleed her pen dry?
This collection feeds Alenier’s libretto How Many Midnights, a multi-media opera-in-progress with her collaborator, composer John Supko. Alenier spent three weeks in 1982 in Tangier, Morocco, working on her poems about Gertrude Stein with Paul Bowles. In 2005, some of those poems about Stein premiered in Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On, her first opera with composer William Banfield.