HYSTERIA IS COMING
Hi! We're Lucky Bastard Press, a small press with big ideas based in Oakland, California. This year we're publishing HYSTERIA, an anthology of writing female and nonbinary writers about their biology and anatomy and experiences with the body. No ovary will be left unturned. We're approaching everything from tampons to hysterectomies, eating disorders to gender identity, old traditions, rude awakenings, and moments of sheer pleasure. In our pages, you'll find stories of faith, race, pride and shame. Stories of the doctor's office and the dance floor, the bedroom, the bathroom, the stage and the study.
We cast our net far and wide to gather writing from an array of authors as diverse and varied as the human-bodied experience. We wanted to talk about bodies from every ethnic background possible. We wanted queer bodies and straight bodies. Cis bodies and trans* bodies. Bodies of different classes and countries. We wanted to hear about old bodies and new bodies, sick bodies and healthy bodies. Bodies that made babies and bodies that hadn't/wouldn't/couldn't.
We also wanted lots of different styles, so in HYSTERIA you'll find slam poetry, prose poetry, lyric essays, formal verse, free verse, microficion, fantasy, myth, legend and your back yard.
Contributors include award-winning established authors as well as some emerging writers we love and know you will love as well. Just to whet your appetite, here are some writers you'll get to read work from in HYSTERIA:
Rita Dove, U.S. Poet Laureate (1993-1995) & Pulitzer Winner
Natasha Trethewey, U.S. Poet Laureate (2012) & Pulitzer Winner
Patricia Smith, Four-time National Poetry Slam Champion & National Book Award Finalist
Judith Ortiz Cofer, O. Henry Prize winner & Pushcart Prize Winner
Lesléa Newman, Two-time Stonewall Honor author
Amy King, Executive Board Member for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts
Bri Blue, Two-time Best Spoken Word Artist of the Year
Francecsa Lia Block, Lambda Literary Award Winner & Stonewall Book Award Winner
Alison Joseph, Academy of American Poets Prize Winner & Associated Writing Programs Prize Winner
You'll also see work from such luminaries as Dorothea Lasky, Kelli Russell Agodon, Paula Mendoza, Amber Flame, M. Mack, Lynn Melnick, Randon Billings Noble, Erika Wurth, Eman Hassan, Christine Heppermann, Kate Litterer, Dena Rash Guzman, Allison Townsend, Sheila Squillante, Minal Hajratwala, Kia Groom, Ivy Alvarez, and Gayle Brandeis.
Many of our contributors have had work in such acclaimed annual anthologies as Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Essays, and Best of the Net. They've appeared in all kinds of magazines, including these familiar rags: The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Salon, The Rumpus, Tin House, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Sun, Boston Review, and even O Magazine.
All of our contributors are completely fabulous and we can't wait to share their work with you.
About the Editor:
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E. Kristin Anderson is a
Pushcart-nominated poet and author who grew up in Westbrook, Maine and is a
graduate of Connecticut College. She has a fancy diploma that says “B.A. in
Classics,” which makes her sound smart but has not helped her get any jobs in
Ancient Rome. Kristin is the co-editor of Dear
Teen Me, an anthology based on the popular website and her YA memoir The Summer of Unraveling is forthcoming in 2017 from ELJ
Publications. Her poetry has been published worldwide in many magazines
and anthologies and she is the author of seven chapbooks including A Guide for the Practical Abductee (Red
Bird Chapbooks), Pray Pray Pray: Poems I
wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (Porkbelly Press, 2015), 17 Days (ELJ Publications) Fire in the Sky (forthcoming from Grey Book
Press), and She Witnesses (forthcoming
from dancing girl press). Kristin
an editor at NonBinary Review, helps
make books at Lucky Bastard Press, and is a poetry editor at Found Poetry Review. Once upon a time she worked at The New Yorker. She now lives in Austin,
TX where she works as a freelance editor and is trying to trick someone into
publishing her full-length collection of erasure poems based on women’s and
teen magazines. She blogs at EKristinAnderson.com and tweets at @ek_anderson.
About Lucky Bastard Press:
Founded in 2015 by Allie Marini and Brennan DeFrisco,
Lucky Bastard is committed to social justice, equality in literature, and safe spaces for writers of all backgrounds. We straddle the world between the page and the stage, and love writers from the liminal spaces. We're champions of underdogs and long shots, and want writers who don't fit neatly in the boxes of The Canon.
What We Need
We believe in paying our artists and authors. We're fundraising to make that happen. We also have a few other expenditures that you might expect in the book making process.
- We hired artist Jodie Wynne to make a super fantastic cover that this book deserves. Her prices are competitive and fair, but not cheap!
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Right now, our budget doesn't allow us to pay our contributors very much. But we think they're worth every penny we can give them. So our biggest goal, after cover art, is getting fair pay to our contributors.
- Some of the poems in this anthology are reprints from other books, and there have been nominal fees for reprint rights
- In order to manage the many individual author contracts involved, we subscribed to Adobe Document Cloud and would like to recoup that cost.
- Of course, there is the straight-up cost of printing this book. We'll be using the most inexpensive methods possible to get the finest quality product. HYSTERIA will be a 6x9 perfect-bound paperback and approximately 280 pages long. No digital version will be available. You have to hold this baby in your hands!
- If we exceed our goal, we would like to use funds to plan HYSTERIA readings in some of the areas where we have a large amount of authors, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco/Bay Area, Chicago, NYC, & Boston. There will also likely be a launch event in editor E. Kristin Anderson's home of Austin, TX. You are totally invited.
SUPER BONUS EXTRA AWESOME NEWS: An anonymous donor will be matching your donations dollar for dollar, up to $3,000. So when you give us money, we get twice as much. We are so excited and thankful!
What You Get:
For $3, you get our infinite gratitude. And these days, that's hard to come by, isn't it?
For $5, you get gratitude AND swag, including HYSTERIA and Lucky Bastard stickers and tattoos.
For $10, you get a copy of the book! YAY you! Donating $10 is basically pre-ordering HYSTERIA.
For $15, you get a copy of the HYSTERIA anthology AND a Lucky Bastard chapbook of your choice (see catalog
here). Our authors include HYSTERIA Contributors Jennifer MacBain-Stephens and Sarah Ghoshal as well as other poetry badasses like Les Kay and T.A. Noonan .
For $25, you get HYSTERIA and TWO Lucky Bastard chapbooks. How lucky does that make you?
...and we have MORE perks! Check them out!
The Impact
Let's be real. We don't need another anthology. But we DO need more writing from authors of diverse backgrounds about the experience of being in a female or nonbinary body.
We also hope that this anthology is an enjoyable, exciting read for all of you out there. We want you to love having this book on your shelf (or your coffee table or the back of your toilet or wherever you keep your favorite books) as much as we loved putting it together.
Risks & Challenges
The book is already curated, edited, and laid out. All we need now is to get the money to pay the bills. When you give us your money, the only risk is the agony waiting for production to wrap up, and then waiting for mailman.
Other Ways You Can Help
We understand that not everyone can send us money. That's okay. If you want to help is in other ways, we'd love it if you'd spread the word!
- Share a link to this campaign on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or wherever you're Social Media-ing with the hashtag #HYSTERIAanthology.
- Find EKA, Allie, and/or Brennan at AWP 2016 in L.A. for some sweet Lucky Bastard and HYSTERIA swag that you can show off to your friends. When we're not attending panels, speaking, reading, or dancing, you can probably find us wandering the bookfair.
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Go to the library and read a book by a female or nonbinary writer. That helps. Maybe it doesn't help our budget, but it helps our community. And that matters to us.
