A time to work, a time to brag

Approximately two years and two months ago, at a hotel bar in Philadelphia during the AWP convention, we cooked up the idea for this press. Today, we open for our third reading period. We’ve certainly learned a lot, and sometimes it feels like every day brings a new unexpected challenge in the small-press landscape. But the purpose of this particular newsletter is, well, to brag.

So here, enjoy some joyful tooting of our own horn as we remind ourselves and boast to you about some of what we’ve accomplished in the past 26 months:

• Our first reading period, in summer 2022, received 254 manuscripts from which we selected our first four books.

• Our second reading period, in summer 2023, received 309 manuscripts from which we selected books five and six (Pastoral, 1994 by Joe Wilkins and Your Mother’s Bear Gun by Corrie Williamson, to be published in early 2025).

• An Eye in Each Square by Lauren Camp has been reviewed in The Adroit Journal, Rain Taxi and EcoTheo, and featured in LitHub’s 7 New Poetry Collections to Read in June.

• Poems from An Eye in Each Square were featured at Poetry Daily and Poets.org, and Lauren had an essay in LitHub on poetry and astonishment.

• Bullet Points by Jennifer A Sutherland is a finalist for Foreword’s Indie Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the Medal Provocateur from the Eric Hoffer Award, and just had a wonderful interview in The Baltimore Banner.

• Bullet Points has been reviewed in Psaltery & Lyre, North American Review, ANMLY, and elsewhere.

• Dear Memphis author Rachel Edelman gave a featured interview to The Southern Review of Books and Amherst College Magazine, and their essay “We Meet at the Well: Miriam, Hagar, and Me” was published in Lilith.

• Carla Sofia Ferreira’s A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us was the subject of a lovely TikTok review by Evelyn Berry (a poet crush of ours--we adore you, Evie) and has reviews forthcoming!

• All four of our poets have recorded interviews with Han’s Of Poetry Podcast — among other interviews and media appearances.

• We recorded our own episode of Of Poetry, too: just two poetry nerds delighted to be working together.

• We attended our first AWP as a press, this year in Kansas City, where we got to host signings by all four of our poets and sold scores of books and talked to approximately a million people about River River. It was a blast.

• Our press was featured this past week in Electric Lit’s list of 23 small presses to support in the wake of SPD’s closure. This gave us such a feeling of being part of a community—what an encouragement!

• We also know of more features and reviews for our two newest books that should be landing in the world soon. (Interested in reviewing one of our books? Get in touch!)

• We ran a successful Kickstarter fundraiser to help transfer our distribution to Itasca Books after SPD abruptly closed. (All the gratitude to those who helped us out—SPD’s closure was/is demoralizing for the small press community, particularly in how it was done, and y’all picked us up off the floor and showed us the support we desperately needed!)

None of this is possible without the work and words of our amazing poets. We’re just the conduit between their poems and readers who find a home in their language; that’s at the heart of everything we do.

We have so much be grateful for. Running River River Books is a lot of work, and so we wanted to stop and take stock of all we’ve managed so far. In her book PR for Poets, Jeannine Hall Gailey writes that one of the hardest parts about promoting your books is that no one tells you when you’ve done enough. We definitely don’t feel like we’ve done enough; honestly we feel like we’re just getting started. But her words are a good reminder that it’s important to look back at what you’ve done. It’s easy to get caught up in the scarcity of publishing, but there’s abundance as well, and we have much to celebrate.

And with that, back to work. We’re open for manuscript submissions from now (May 1) through the end of June. We can’t wait to see what y’all send us. And thank you, thank you, thank you, for supporting our little press.

-Amorak & Han