Publishing-in-Transit: Granary Books

Mary Catherine (M.C.) Kinniburgh is a co-director of Granary Books, where she is an archives broker, rare book dealer, and publisher. She specializes in twentieth century and contemporary poetry, archives, and artists’ books. She wrote Wild Intelligence: The Politics of Knowledge and Postwar American Poets’ Libraries (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022), which explores the idea of the poet’s library as a political act of countercultural knowledge production. She has edited works by Gregory Corso and Mary Korte with Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and published a bibliography and oral history of Maureen Owen’s Telephone Books and magazine (with University at Buffalo’s Among the Neighbors series). She is also the publisher of TKS Books.

Jen Bervin is a visual artist and poet whose multidisciplinary practice weaves together situated poetics, research-driven works, and long-term collaborations with specialists ranging from literary scholars to material scientists. The subject of a survey publication Jen Bervin: Shift Rotate Reflect, Selected Works, Bervin’s work has been exhibited internationally and is held in more than sixty collections. Her books include Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems with Marta Werner (New Directions, 2013); Silk Poems (Nightboat, 2017), a poem written nanoscale in the form of a silk biosensor with Tufts University’s Silk Lab; and numerous artist’s books with Granary Books, most recently, Concordance Omission (2023).

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, activist and filmmaker whose work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the early 1970s. She coined the term “Arte Precario” in the mid-1960s in Chile, as an independent and non-colonized category for her precarious works composed of debris, structures that disappear in the landscape, which include her quipus (knot in Quechua), envisioned as poems in space. The author of more than 30 books, Vicuña is the recipient of numerous awards, and solo exhibitions of her work have been held at a number of major institutions, most recently the Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile (2023).

Cole Swensen is the author of twenty volumes of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023), which was long-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a collection of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise. A book of hybrid poem-essays, Art in Time, was published by Nightboat in 2021. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Award and has been awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series. She has also translated over twenty volumes of poetry, prose, and art criticism from French and won the 2004 PEN USA Award in Literary Translation.