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| Founded | 1999 |
|---|---|
| Founder |
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| Focus | Poetry, Publishing |
| Location |
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Area served | San Francisco Bay Area |
| Owner | Collective |
| Employees | 16 |
| Website | www.sixteenrivers.org |
Sixteen Rivers Press is a shared-work, nonprofit poetry collective that provides an alternative publishing avenue for San Francisco Bay Area poets.
Founded in 1999 by poets Valerie Berry, Terry Ehret, Margaret Kaufman, Jacqueline Kudler, Diane Sher Lutovich, Carolyn Miller, and Susan Sibbet as a shared-work, nonprofit poetry collective dedicated to providing an alternative publishing avenue for San Francisco Bay Area poets. [1] Sixteen Rivers Press was modeled after the Alice James Books collective, a Boston-area regional press created in the 1970s. [2] Named for the sixteen rivers that flow into San Francisco Bay, the press publishes books by poets residing in the Greater Bay Area region.
Sixteen Rivers Press continues as one of the longest-running and most successful collective presses in the United States, having published over sixty collections of poetry. Its authors have won prizes in poetry and translation, National Endowment for the Arts and other grants, honors in various genres, and have published books with other presses—in poetry, fiction, architecture, education, psychology, and other nonfiction. [3] [4]
Sixteen Rivers Press chooses manuscripts via an annual “blind” selection competition, the collective's membership participating in that selection. Poets whose manuscripts are chosen for book publication commit to working with the press for a term of three years, their book appearing during the second year of that term. Many writers have chosen to stay active in the press past the requisite three-year term.
Although the press operates with a nonprofit board, it uses a consensus model of decision-making.
Sixteen Rivers Press is a US 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation. The press employs no paid staff. Money to publish new books comes primarily from sales of the previous year's books, augmented by donations, grants, and fundraisers.
Since 2005, through the generosity of particular supporters and featured poets, Sixteen Rivers has held annual fundraiser evenings. Featured poets at those fundraisers have been Philip Levine, Eavan Boland, Al Young, Ilya Kaminsky, Brenda Hillman, Robert Hass, Jane Hirshfield, Mark Doty, Kay Ryan, and Camille Dungy.
In 2009 and 2012, Sixteen Rivers Press was recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts with Access to Artistic Excellence grants. Grants have also come from The Koret Foundation, The Whitney Foundation, Yellow House Foundation, and others. [5]
In 2007, Sixteen Rivers Press released a CD, Naming the Rivers, featuring poetry read by poets published by the press prior to that year.
In 2009, Sixteen Rivers Press released The Place That Inhabits Us , a wide-ranging anthology of poems by non-members that explores different aspects of life within the San Francisco Bay Area and that area's effect on poets’ lives and consciousness. Former United States Poet Laureate Robert Hass wrote the foreword to the volume.
In 2011, Sixteen Rivers Press initiated its Under Forty chapbook series, a publication competition for writers under the age of forty. The first chapbook selected was Judy Halebsky’s Space/Gap/Interval/Distance . The second was Miriam Bird Greenberg's All night in the new country .
In 2013, Sixteen Rivers Press published its first book of translations, I Know/Je Sais by French writer Ito Naga, translated by the author and press member Lynne Knight.
In 2018, Sixteen Rivers Press published the anthology America We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience , a response to the 2016 presidential election combining the voices of poets from across America with poets from other countries and other times, with a foreword by Camille Dungy.
Current Sixteen Rivers Press Nonprofit Board Members include Dane Cervine, Terry Ehret, Margaret Kaufman, and Carolyn Miller.
Current Sixteen Rivers Press Advisory Board members include Kazim Ali, Gillian Conoley, Camille T. Dungy, Ruth Gundle, Lee Herrick, Brenda Hillman, Jane Hirshfield, Marie Howe, Joyce Jenkins, Kay Ryan, David St. John, Eleanor Wilner, Maw Shein Win, and Matthew Zapruder.
Current active Sixteen Rivers Press collective members include Valerie Berry, Barbara Swift Brauer, Patrick Cahill, Dane Cervine, Terry Ehret, Gerald Fleming, Margaret Kaufman, Lynne Knight, Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong, Christina Lloyd, Moira Magneson, Carolyn Miller, Matthew M. Monte, Camille Norton, Eliot Schain, Murray Silverstein, Alice Templeton, Helen Wickes, and Joseph Zaccardi.
Sixteen Rivers Press titles are available from the press itself, online outlets in the United States and internationally, and traditional bookstores. Ebooks are produced and distributed by Stillpoint Digital Press .
Robert L. Hass is an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He won the 2007 National Book Award and shared the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for the collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005. In 2014 he was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.
The Yale Series of Younger Poets is an annual event of Yale University Press aiming to publish the debut collection of a promising American poet. Established in 1918, the Younger Poets Prize is the longest-running annual literary award in the United States.
Founded in 1969 the Community of Writers is a writers' conference held each summer in Olympic Valley, California. The Community of Writers is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization and has a governing Board of Directors.
Ron Silliman is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet. He has now begun writing a new poem, Universe, the first section of which appears to be called Revelator.
Katherine Hastings is an American poet from Northern California. Her full length collections are “A Different Beauty”, "Shakespeare & Stein Walk Into a Bar", Nighthawks and Cloud Fire.
Thomas Sayers Ellis is an American poet, photographer and bandleader. He previously taught as an associate professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Bennington College in Vermont, and also at Sarah Lawrence College until 2012.
Ruth Ellen Kocher is an American poet. She is the recipient of the PEN/Open Book Award, the Dorset Prize, the Green Rose Prize, and the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Cave Canem. She is Professor of English at the University of Colorado - Boulder where and serves as Associate Dean for the College of Arts and Sciences and Divisional Dean for Arts and Humanities.
Carolyn Mary Kleefeld is an English-American author, poet, and visual artist. She is the author of twenty-five books, has a line of fine art cards, and has had numerous gallery and museum awards and exhibitions between 1981 and the present, in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other major cities.
Thomas Centolella is an American poet and educator. He has published four books of poetry and has had many poems published in periodicals including American Poetry Review. He has received awards for his poetry including those from the National Poetry Series, the American Book Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry and the Dorset Prize. In 2019, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Shirley Kaufman Daleski was an American-Israeli poet and translator.
Camille T. Dungy is an American poet and professor.
Terry Ehret is an American poet. She has published several collections of poetry including Suspensions, Lost Body, and Translations from the Human Language.
Matthew Shenoda is an Egyptian-American poet, writer, and professor based in the United States. Born July 14, 1977 in California to Coptic parents who immigrated from Egypt, Matthew Shenoda is a writer and educator whose poems and writings have appeared in a variety of newspapers, journals, radio programs and anthologies. His work has been supported by the California Arts Council and the Lannan Foundation among others.
Diane Sher Lutovich was an American poet, and writing teacher. She was a founding member of Sixteen Rivers Press, a publishing collective based in Northern California. She was a native of Hibbing, Minnesota.
Carolyn Leilani Yu Zhen Lau (aka Carolyn Lau) (born 1946 Honolulu, Hawaii) is an American poet.
Rosalie Moore was an American poet.
Jacqueline Kudler was an American poet and educator who lived in Sausalito, California.
Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda was named Poet Laureate of Virginia by the Governor, Tim Kaine, on June 26, 2006. She succeeded Rita Dove and served in this position from June 2006 – July 2008. While serving as Poet Laureate, Carolyn started the "Poetry Book Giveaway Project" and added the "Poets Spotlight" to her webpage highlighting one poet from the Commonwealth each month, in addition to traveling widely to promote poetry in every corner of Virginia.
Lucille Lang Day is an American poet, writer, and science and health educator. Day has authored or edited 20 books and is a contributor to over 60 anthologies. She is best known as a poet and writer for her award-winning memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story, for her integration of science imagery and concepts into poetry and for advocating use of poetry as a tool in environmental activism. As a science and health educator, her many achievements have included promoting science education for girls and serving as codirector of Health and Biomedical Science for a Diverse Community, a project that was funded by the National Institutes of Health and aimed to make biomedical science more accessible to underrepresented minorities.
Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks Who Shape How We See the Natural World is a 2020 book written by Kathryn Aalto and published by Timber Press.
2004 [...] What I Stole, Diane Sher Lutovich
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