Since its inception, Litmus Press’s programming has been anti-border, anti-war, anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial. The very foundation of our publishing work is built on the belief that we poets must create and tend to the spaces wherein language may flourish, challenge the status quo, resist oppression and distortion, and envision a future we can all inhabit.

We hear the calls of our colleagues, our collaborators, our friends and our community, and we resist complicity and complacency with the living history of U.S. imperialism and its war machine. The pursuit of liberty and democracy by means of theocratic ideology, oppression, environmental destruction, and slaughter can, and will, only lead to more of the same. This is not a world we can all inhabit. It is not a world in which language and art can flourish.

As one powerful, non-violent, strategy in the opposition to the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza, settler violence in the occupied West Bank, and escalating violence against the people of Lebanon, Litmus Press commits to the guidelines of the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement and the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) as modeled on the successful global movement to dismantle South African apartheid. Litmus Press gratefully acknowledges our peer organizations who have led the way with their commitments to BDS/PACBI. We join hundreds of small arts and literary organizations in the effort to pressure larger local, national, and international academic and cultural Institutions to take principled stands on the ongoing atrocities, and in so doing we unequivocally denounce anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and the dangerous conflation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism.

We are also grateful to the deeply invested individuals who are part of the international, intersectional, and multi-dimensional network of Litmus Press for their invaluable questions, concerns, and engagements throughout this past year.

The conversation does not end here. We are equally committed to the continuation of discussions about evolving strategies for resistance to oppression, violence, and environmental destruction.

Writers Against the War on Gaza

Hundreds of Authors Pledge to Boycott Israeli Cultural Institutions (October 2024)

Open Letter by Gaza Academics (May 2024)

A Statement of Solidarity with Gaza from Literary Translators (November 2023)

Middle East Studies Association: Committee on Academic Freedom

October 2024

Litmus Press was launched in 2001 with the publication of the first issue of Aufgabe and Keith Waldrop’s The House Seen from Nowhere. From 2001 to 2004, Litmus Press operated out of pocket and out of the apartment of E. Tracy Grinnell in Providence, RI and then Brooklyn, NY. In 2004, Grinnell established Ether Sea Projects, Inc, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, as the funding umbrella for the publishing activities of Litmus Press. Ether Sea Projects also provided early fiscal sponsorship for other small publishing projects such as Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs (founded by Brenda Iijima) and Belladonna Series*, among others.

Additionally, Ether Sea Projects manages and distributes in-print titles originally published by O Books and The Post-Apollo Press, as well as publishing reprints and new editions of selected titles from these important presses. Litmus Press aims to preserve and extend the legacy of aesthetic innovation and feminist and progressive politics established by these vital predecessors.

Litmus Press is run by a small, part-time staff of dedicated poets, translators, artists, and editors committed to the ethics of community-making, mutual aid, and the anti-capitalist experiments in literature and art that have driven small press publishing for over a century. While operating as a nonprofit, fulfilling the particular administrative and fundraising demands that that entails, we adamantly remain small and fluid, responsive to new movements and projects. We will always prioritize the publication of challenging, innovative, transformative and non-conformist texts, and encourage depth of reader engagement, over the demands of an economic bottom line.

Litmus Press books are made possible by public funds from the The New York State Council on the Arts, a State agency, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The New York City Cultural Development Fund. Additional support for Litmus Press comes from the The Leslie Scalapino – O Books Fund, individual members and donors. The design and development of this website is made possible with generous support from Tom White, of the Scalapino-O Books Fund,  and Simone Fattal, of the Post-Apollo Press.

Our studio space in Brooklyn, New York, shared with Belladonna Series, World Poetry Books, and Winter Editions, is on unceded Munsee Lenape and Canarsie land.