The year of 2020 ended with a string of stories about publishing and the broad publishing community that highlighted ongoing failures and systemic fractures. These stories included Poets House, a Manhattan poetry library hosting events to support engagement and conversation around  poetry, laying off a majority of its staff; Penguin Random House purchasing Simon & Schuster, turning the Big 5 (along with Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan) into the Big 4 — with approximately 60% of English-language books coming through ever fewer number of publishers; New York Times published an opinion piece on racial inequities in publishing, highlighting the eye-catching detail that only “5% of fiction published since 1950 was written by people of color” and the deeper bias it signifies; and an anonymous letter from a former Small Press Distribution employee citing patterns of financial abuse and mistreatment (leading the distributor to recently hire “Oppenheimer Investigations Group to conduct an objective assessment of our workplace, employee concerns, and our culture, and to provide recommendations on addressing these issues and improving our work environment.” All of these are signs of a field in need of self reflection for the betterment of all associated with the field from writers and readers to editors and graphic designers.

And yet, it is not all doom and gloom. The passionate work of literature continues. Meytal Radzinski has dedicated 2021 to the recognition and celebration of women writers in translation, posting daily under #DailyWIT on Twitter, and Open Letter’s Chad Post is doing a deep dive into the Dalkey Archive and exploring the history of the Best Translated Book Award. 

All return me to a question close to the heart of HAUS RED: what is the role of the publisher? Or more exactly, not how does a publisher makes texts available to a public, but how do they create and craft spaces for their texts, and what models do they employ to create more equitable, rewarding, exuberant spheres for art?

—Nicholas Grosso

New York
March 2021