Lovers of offbeat fiction and poetry need look no further than Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama, a publisher on a mission to discover and release works that might not be appreciated elsewhere. Started in 1974 as a publisher of poetry chapbooks, the press began featuring works by Alabama authors in 1984 and, later, with the appointment of Dr. Joe Taylor as director, expanded to publishing authors from across the U.S. Currently, the press publishes eight to 10 books a year and has more than 250 titles in print. It is also the founder of the Changing Light Prize for a novel-in-verse.
The press’s strongest categories are fiction, both novels and story collections, and poetry, especially novels-in-verse, and it also publishes the occasional work of nonfiction. Among its most recent publications are Find Your Own Way Home by Michael George and An Art, A Craft, A Mystery by Laura Secord—both novels-in-verse that have been quite successful, the press says. The former is “a mystery about a murdered teenage runaway, woven into verse observations from multiple narrators” and the latter “a recounting of the witch craze in Salem, woven into verse observations from multiple narrators.” Exemplary of this year’s UP Week theme of #StepUP is the memoir Accidental Activist by Mary Allen Jolley, about a Washington, D.C., influencer who was “instrumental in initiating the student loan program, which opened higher education to poor and middle-class students,” the press says.
Recently released and forthcoming books of note from Livingston Press include Junior, “a dark coming-of-age story set in Western Massachusetts” by Jon Boilard; Villages by Robert Inman, which delves into the healing process of a returning vet suffering from PTSD and physical wounds; and One Hundred Pearls, a debut by Barry Michael Cole that “relates the history of a slave removed from Africa to toil at Tannehill Ironworks in Tuscaloosa.” Additionally, Enid Harlow’s Voices and Jeffrey S. Markowitz’s Zero Day Blue Jay were cowinners of the press’s 2024 Tartt First Fiction Award for a first story collection.
