How about some words of inspiration with your latte or cappuccino when the weather turns cold?
That’s what Coffee House Press is offering in fall, when the Minneapolis-based literary press provides 10,000 sleeves for paper coffee containers printed with passages of prose and poetry from local writers of color.
Caroline Casey, the nonprofit press’ managing editor, says the sleeves will be available in five independent St. Paul coffee shops that are engaged in their communities and at least partly owned by people of color. Already signed up are Workhouse Coffee Bar on University Avenue and Nina’s Coffee Cafe at Selby and Western avenues.
The idea for the project came up during one of the Coffee House staff’s weekly meetings, when they brainstorm as they walk around the Northeast Minneapolis neighborhood near the office.
“Last summer, we talked about the Knight Foundation asking for art projects that would engage the community,” Casey recalled. “We remembered that a couple years ago, the IFC (cable/satellite) network sent us 10,000 sleeves promoting ‘Portlandia’ because they thought we were a coffee shop.
“So we refined the idea a little further. We thought about how we could make it as broadly engaging as possible and how to use resources and engage St. Paul in a lot of ways that were about the city and the people.”
As Coffee House publisher Chris Fischbach points out, the press has “for the past few years, been transforming from being solely a publisher to becoming a cultural organization that produces both books and programming.”
Thanks to a $5,000 matching grant from the Knight Foundation, the Coffee Sleeve Conversations project was born
It will be curated by St. Paul native Tish Jones, popular African-American spoken-word poet, activist and organizer. An open call for submissions will go out soon to writers of poetry, essays or fiction who self-identify as persons of color, and Jones will select sentences or phrases from 20 submissions. Jones and the writers will be paid for their work.
It isn’t surprising Coffee House is committed to a project that brings writers of color to the forefront. Allan Kornblum, the press’ founder, who died in 2014, set the bar high from the first days he moved his Toothpaste Press to the Twin Cities from Iowa and renamed it Coffee House.
Since the 1980s, Coffee House has published books by Frank Chin, novelist and pioneer of Asian-American theater; Japanese-Americans Karen Tei Yamashita and Yuko Taniguchi; Hmong writer Kao Kalia Yang; Chickasaw poet, novelist, essayist and playwright Linda Hogan; and African-Americans Alex Pate, T. Gernomino Johnson and John A. Williams. Earlier this month, Mexico native Valeria Luiselli’s novel “The Story of My Teeth” was announced as a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Now, Casey and publisher Fischbach are hoping the Coffee Sleeve Conversations project will pique readers’ interest in local writers of color and perhaps spark discussion in these days of divisiveness.
“We are not going to solve racism with a coffee sleeve,” Casey acknowledges. “But anytime you ask people to engage in ideas in your community, you advance the conversation. This could be an opportunity to think about their community and engage on a deeper level. But this is not a public service. There’s an argument to be made that you read diverse writers because they are interesting. You will be getting more out of your reading.”
The sleeve project is part of Coffee House’s broader Books in Action outreach initiative that uses “publications and programs to create possibilities for a reader/writer exchange beyond (and even without) the page.”
For instance, participating coffee shops will be given kits with information about the writers and the work from which the lines on the sleeves are pulled, as well as resources for ideas about how to use the sleeves to spark conversation, including setting up an event or a reading by the authors.
Another intriguing Books in Action project is CHP in the Stacks, a 3-year-old program partly funded by the McKnight Foundation through which authors work in artistic residencies in different kinds of libraries and collections.
Jay Peterson, project manager, says he doesn’t know of any other national literary press doing this kind of outreach on this level.
Artist-residents have included Steve Healey at the Floating Library at Silver Lake in St. Anthony, Emily Stover at the Department of Transportation and Army Corps of Engineers, Kao Kalia Yang at Sun Ray Library in St. Paul and Hans Weyandt, former co-owner of Micawber’s Books, at the Hennepin County Central Library.
Managing editor Casey says a big plus for the artists is that they go into the project with no proposals, not knowing what they want to get out of their residencies.
“It’s wonderful to see now various the outcomes have been. The opportunity to mess around, not come out with a complete project, is productive for their work long term and moves them in different directions,” she said. “And librarians and archivists love to see their collections used in that way.”
Two of the most recent residents — Erin Sharkey and Junauda Petrus, who call their artistic partnership Free Black Dirt — worked in the archives of the University of Minnesota’s Givens Collection of African American Literature. They will give a capstone presentation of their experience at 7 p.m. Feb. 18 at the Elmer L. Andersen Library, University of Minnesota, 222 21st Ave. S., Minneapolis.
On Feb. 25, photographer Eric William Carroll will present the inaugural Evening at The Bakken with a program titled “G.U.T. Feeling Vol. 4: Radionics,” an exhibition culminating his residency at the museum specializing in electricity and magnetism, 3537 Zenith Ave. S., Minneapolis.
Although Coffee House is engaged in community activities, it is a publisher. So it’s not surprising that Casey is excited about the spring list, including “Among Strange Victims” a debut novel by Mexican Daniel Saldana Paris. “We’ve made a move the last couple years into translation from Latin America, and this is a terrific example of that,” she says.
Also forthcoming: “Everything I Found on the Beach” by Cynan Jones, whose novel “The Dig” got excellent reviews; “Songs From a Mountain,” poetry by Carleton College graduate Amanda Nadelberg; and “Amateurs,” a novel of “manners, money and the tricky line between friends and long con” by Minnesotan Dylan Hicks.
Coffee House Press accomplishments
Coffee House Press is expecting to continue the momentum of 2015. Last year’s accomplishments included:
- Receiving a $100,000 grant to participate in the Bush Foundation’s Community Creativity Cohort, a one-time program designed to recognize and learn from exemplary organizations that meaningfully engage people in the arts and integrate the arts into public life. Sixteen organizations from Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota will participate.
- Beginning a partnership with Emily Books, the Brooklyn-based feminist publishing project to create an imprint for original books that blur genre distinctions. Beginning this spring with Jade Sharma’s debut novel “Problems,” Coffee House will publish two Emily Books titles a year.
- Began offering pay to interns, who generally are not paid in the publishing industry. The stipends come from the Allan Kornblum Memorial Fund and the Bush Foundation Creative Community Cohort grant.
- Mark Nowak, essayist, playwright, cultural critic and author of three poetry collections, two published by Coffee House, winning the Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism for doing “innovative and transformative work at the intersection of poetry and social change.”
- Being chosen by Entropy website as among the best of 2015 presses, magazines, publishers and journals.
