Presentation and Q&A: "Making Sense of the Publishing Landscape"

This event is open to MFA students, English PhD students, Zell Fellows, and recent MFA alumni only. Please email asbates@umich.edu for login instructions.

Stephen Motika was born in Santa Monica, California, where he grew up working in bookstores and dreaming of a life in publishing. He went to college at Vassar and earned an MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College. Alice James Books published his first book of poems, Western Practice, in 2012. He is also the author of three chapbooks: Arrival and at Mono (2007), In the Madrones (2011), and Private Archive (2016). He is the editor of Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman (2009) and co-editor of Dear Kathleen: On the Occasion of Kathleen Fraser's 80th Birthday (2017). His articles and poems have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, At Length, BOMB, The Brooklyn Review, Eleven Eleven, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Poets.org, Vanitas, among other publications. He has held residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Millay Colony for the Arts, ZK/U in Berlin, and the Lannan Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and taught at Naropa University, the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference, and in the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. He worked for many years at Poets House, where he served as Artistic Director.

Motika started his work in book publishing in 1999, first at David R. Godine, where he focused on sales and marketing, then Simon & Schuster, where he was in editorial. He joined Nightboat Books as an editor in 2006 and became publisher in 2007. Motika has grown Nightboat into one of the nation’s leading publisher of innovative poetry and prose; publishing approximately 20 new books a year. The press has also issued reprints/rediscovery projects and published several significant anthologies, including We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel, and Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, edited by Christopher Soto. Some of Motika’s authors at Nightboat include Etel Adnan, Caroline Bergvall, Brian Blanchfield, Marwa Helal, Erica Hunt, Paolo Javier, Rosamond S. King, Dawn Lundy Martin, Brian Teare, among many others.