Frabjous days

2011 Next Generation Indie Book Award Short Fiction Winner (calloo! callay!)

AND, my publisher Kore Press is one of four organizations in the country (selected out of 120) to be honored by the National Book Foundation with a 2011 Innovations in Reading Prize! The National Book Foundation awards prizes to individuals and institutions that have developed innovative means of creating and sustaining a lifelong love of reading.

Kore Press
Tucson, AZ
www.korepress.org

For eighteen years, Kore Press has been defined by innovation. Whether it’s publishing the highest quality women’s literature, educating youth, or doing creative community programming, they have been on the edge of using literature to advance progressive social change. As a community of literary activists, Kore is dedicated to engaging the public through several visionary, creative writing projects. The “Grrls Literary Activism Workshop” is an after-school creative-writing-as-activism program that engages youth with America’s long, literary history of passionate writing intended for communal, public circulation in the world rather than in the private form of a book (using t-shirts, video PSAs, readings, podcasts, poems wrapped around tampons and loaded into a repurposed tampon machine that travels to public restrooms). “Bounce Back” uses literature in surprising ways to raise awareness and create safety for queer students, teachers, and staff on high school and university campuses (using a 40-foot banner, a blog, a newspaper ad, posters in elevators, coffee cup sleeves, repurposed political yard signs). And with “Coming in Hot,” Kore created, produced, and toured a play based on a collection of poetry and memoir by women in the US military as a means to both expand audiences into traditionally non-literary populations (military, veterans, teens) and to create a vehicle for dialogue.

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Days don’t get much more frabjous than this.