One of the great small press publishers in our area needs our help. They suffered a terrible tragedy two months ago, lost all of their equipment, and need to rebuild.
FootHill Publishing has long been a huge supporter of local poetry. In the past few years Michael Czarnecki and his crew have published many local poets including Carol Graser (The Wild Twist of Their Stems), Will Nixon (Love in the City of Grudges), William Seaton (Spoor of Desire), and Charles Rossiter (All Over America: Road Poems).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51TWlpZeA2o
They have setup an Indiegogo campaign to help the cause, so please go and donate to help them reach their goal.
Here is the information on what happened and how you can help.
On July 12 FootHills Publishing suffered a devastating fire that destroyed all of our equipment, inventory and archives. An Indiegogo campaign has been set up to help rebuild the business. The business was located in our house so we also lost all of our personal possessions. There was no insurance. The loss from the fire was complete.
FootHills Publishing was formed in 1986 for the purpose of getting into print the words of poets who found it hard to get their work out to the public other than at readings or in the occasional magazine. The first few books were published in conjunction with Great Elm Press, operated by Walt Franklin. Since then, FootHills Publishing has released more than 400 chapbooks and books of poetry.
We are a small family-run operation. I do the editorial work – Carolyn handles the book production and shipping and our two boys, Grayson (21) and Chapin (17), help with production. Grayson also assists with some design work. All of our books are now hand-stitched and we have received many compliments on the quality of the work, both in content and production.
The work has always been a labor of love. We live simply in the hills of central New York, publish books as we can – there were a number of years when no books were released because there was no money available to do so. We celebrated FootHills 25th anniversary in 2011, a major accomplishment that I never gave any thought to until late in 2010 when the realization of that milestone jumped out at me. Twenty-five plus years and it is still a struggle sometimes (when isn’t poetry a struggle in America?) Too many times we still balance our often-in-short-supply resources between paying bills and publishing books. But, as Van Morrison said back in the 70s – “It’s too late to stop now.”
When FootHill was formed back in 1986 I made a decision to never take grant money or money from poets to publish books. 26 plus years later I can say we have stayed true to those ideals.
I would appreciate it if you could consider helping us to rebuild and move forward toward our third decade of poetry publishing.
Towards that end, please check out the following sites to get a better, more complete, understanding of who we are, what we have done and how others have viewed us.
If you need more information please don’t hesitate to email or call Michael Czarnecki at fhp@foothillspublishing.com or 607-661-8777.
