Thirty Years of Welcoming Writers

Red Hen Press celebrates and honors Southern California literature
By EDDIE RIVERA, Editor, Weekendr Magazine
Published on Oct 7, 2024

At the Red Hen Press’s 30th benefit luncheon held Sunday at Noor, even the opening welcome was lyrical and literary.

Publisher and Executive Director Kate Gale began softly, “Everything we do brings us back to stories. I get up in the morning several days a week to swim, and while I’m swimming, I think of swimming stories and all the swimming stories I’ve ever read.

“When I was a kid in the spring,” she continued, gazing out at the audience of writers and poets, “I would go out on the pond when the ice was thin, near a road. One kid would stay on the shore and I would inch out to a place where the ice would crack. I’d go through and I’d be flailing around in the icy cold pond. This is where you have to assume there weren’t any parents.”

She went on. “There would be chunks of ice around me and the other kid would haul out the rope to get me out. Sometimes it took a while and I would start to get woozy. The first decade or so of publishing felt just like that,” she said.

Extending the comparison, she told the packed room, “Sometimes we have a relapse, and I remember the time in the pond. I feel the ice give and the cold water rushing around me, but I have to swim as publisher and CEO. I have authors and staff depending on me, and I have to make it to shore, but I feel good about the staff holding onto the rope. As we move into our fourth decade, we are building the foundations that will shift us onto thicker ice.”

This is how editors and publishers describe their companies’ effort—not with pie charts and graphs, but with analogies and imagery.

The afternoon celebrated Red Hen’s three 2023 award winners—Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award winner Jose Hernandez’ Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man; Women’s Prose Prize winner Malia Marquez’s City of Smoke and Sea; and Quill Prose Award winner Holly McCloy’s Nine Grudges: the Spiteful Origins of the Happiest Dyke on Earth—but also celebrated the writer’s life, as referred to by numerous speakers.

Gale also added proudly that the non-profit publisher is “thriving and experiencing sustained growth in sales and stability.”

As she noted, in the last year, Red Hen Press books were featured in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly NBC, and Elle Magazine.

“Our authors read at bookstores from Washington to Greece,” said Gale. “We are about to launch our Red Hen Radio podcast and we are working on increased audio book, film and foreign rights sales, and we are on track for our biggest sales year ever.”

Deputy Director Toby Harper Petrie also shared that the independent non-profit book publishing company is the biggest of its kind in Southern California, publishing literary fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry, along with another five literary programs “that serve aspects of the literary circle of life.”

The afternoon also featured readings from students in the “Writing in the Schools’” program, as well as short presentations from featured guests Aliah Wright, Florencia Ramirez, and Jason Schneiderman.

Said Wright, proudly, “Happy Birthday, Red Hen. Your literary prowess is worthy of today’s celebration.”

As she elaborated. “From the moment I met Kate, I knew she was the perfect editor for my novel. She understood my vision in a way few others have. However, little did I realize the profound respect she also commands in the publishing industry, particularly among booksellers… As I autographed countless copies of my book for eager readers, I was pleasantly surprised by the admiration and praise showered upon Red Hen Press and Kate.”

Ramirez, a trained researcher at the University of Chicago School of Public Policy, shared a tale of her Mexican father’s near-death from dehydration as a child, the prologue of her book, Eat Less Water.

As he lay on a wooden table snatched from a nearby chicken coop, just a few drops of water on his lips, as a doctor advised, saved him and helped kick start his recovery. Ramirez equated the tale to the Earth’s use of water, explaining that relatively speaking, of all the water in the world, only a few proportional drops provide all the planet’s needs. And thus, they are precious.

“There are so many stories I could tell about Kate and Mark and Toby and Monica (of Red Hen Press) and how integral they’ve become to my life and my teaching and my poems,” said David Schneiderman, author of Self-Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire.

“But I’ll just tell the story of how this book got its name,” he said. “This book had a terrible name.

“I won’t say what the name was,” he said sheepishly. “It was that bad. And Kate, one night over dinner, said to me, ‘We’ve been thinking about the name of your book.’

“And the staff made a list of possible titles, and as soon as I heard Self-Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire, in Kate’s voice, I knew that was it. It just clicked. And somehow everyone here at Red Hen seeing it first, made it possible for me to see it, too.”

Doug Manuel, poet and Bayard Rustin Fellow at Whittier College, also praised the bravery of Red Hen Press in publishing his first book of poetry, saying, “Eight years ago, Kate and Mark took a chance on a beleaguered graduate student and agreed to publish Testify, making me the first person in my family to receive a bachelor’s degree or to go on to graduate school.

“Growing up,” he said, exuberantly, “I never knew anyone who published a book. I come from manual laborers, and factory workers. To be real, drug dealers, ex-cons, felons, not poets, not publishers, and not professors, but my dear friends. That’s the thing about Red Hen, about Kate and Mark. They seek out people like me, the hungry ones, the ones from the margins, the ones that got to scratch, the ones that got to work hard to get every opportunity. Red Hen makes dreams come true. It’s a California treasure.”

Finally, David St. John, longtime poet and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at USC, lowered his eyeglasses and gazed out from the podium, saying, “I look around this room and I see so many writers I love and admire. I see so many writers who over the years I’ve lived here in Los Angeles have become my friends. And I’ve seen how Kate and Mark and Toby have thrown open the doors to our moment and our cultural reckoning and what we need. Because what we need has to do with what’s in these books.”

 

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