Since 1998, Kenning Editions has been exploring the tensions between aesthetic quality and political commitment. We are interested in poetry, poetics, art, drama, and hybrid genre literary and critical writing that is experimental in the fullest sense: formally daring and close to lived experience. We publish new and archival writing from the United States, Latin America, Europe, and elsewhere, often in translation.
Incorporated as a non-profit in 2016, Kenning Editions was founded in 1998 to publish Kenning: A Newsletter Of Contemporary Poetry, Poetics, And Nonfiction Writing (Issn 1526-3428). The newsletter sought to represent non-hierarchically three generations of writers working under radical modernist impulses; to challenge them to publish under the rubric of “progressive social discourse,” in exploration of Williams’ statement regarding finding (or not) “the news” in poems, “men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there”; and to transgress geographic and linguistic boundaries. In thirteen issues, the newsletter featured work by authors such as Amiri Baraka, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Barbara Guest, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Jackson Mac Low, Nathaniel Mackey, K. Silem Mohammad, Sawako Nakayasu, Leslie Scalapino, Juliana Spahr, and Brian Kim Stefans. It also published symposia, chapbook editions, and more than one broadside insert. The penultimate issue of Kenning was a double-CD audio edition, which became the very first set of audio files uploaded to the Penn Sound archive.
In 2006, Kenning Editions devoted itself exclusively to publishing high-quality trade paperback volumes of new and archival writing by authors whose work reflects the diversity and innovation for which the newsletter came to stand.
Kenning Editions does not award prizes or acquire new projects in a way that forces artists to compete, out of the conviction that competition not only fails to reveal merit but is the least pertinent condition for experiment of any kind. Instead, we tend to commission projects, as our modest production schedule allows. We are not reading unsolicited submissions at this time.
KENNING EDITIONS NFP is a 501 (c) (3), non-profit “public charity” and contributions are tax deductible.
Wholesale and Purchase information:
Kenning Editions are distributed to individuals, libraries, and the trade by:
Small Press Distribution
1341 Seventh Street
Berkeley, CA 94710-1409
tel: 800 869 7553
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