Interviews from Yale University Radio WYBCX

Interviews from Yale University Radio   WYBCX


Sarah Lawson and Lee Norton

October 23, 2020

Sarah Lawson is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn. They are a member of the Ugly Duckling Presse editorial collective, and act as UDP's Publicity Director.

Lee Norton is a member of the Ugly Duckling Presse Editorial Collective, where he also serves as the Development Director. He teaches composition and literature at Queens College CUNY, usually with a focus on the history and rhetoric of the life sciences, theories of genre, 20th-century fiction, and contemporary poetry, in some combination. He earned a PhD in English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill; his critical work has appeared in Occasions; his poetry, in Ohio Edit, Drunken Boat, Supermachine, and several other magazines.

Ugly Duckling Presse is a nonprofit publisher for poetry, translation, experimental nonfiction, performance texts, and books by artists. Through the efforts of a volunteer editorial collective, UDP was transformed from a 1990s zine into a mission-driven small press that has published more than 300 titles to date, and produced countless prints and ephemera.

UDP favors emerging, international, and “forgotten” writers, and its books, chapbooks, artist’s books, broadsides, and periodicals often contain handmade elements, calling attention to the labor and history of bookmaking.

UDP is committed to keeping its publications in circulation with our online archive of out-of-print chapbooks and our digital proofs program. In all of its activities, UDP endeavors to create an experience of art free of expectation, coercion, and utility.

Here is a link to the pamphlet subscription mentioned in the interview and the regular subscription is here.

And here is some more writing on the reasoning / history that went into doing the pamphlet series, in the words of editor Daniel Owen.

Soviet Texts, the first representative selected volume of poetry by Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov, a leading writer of the late Soviet and early post-Soviet era and one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism.

The first batch of the 2020 Pamphlet Series, with work from Simon Cutts, Sergio Chejfec, Don Mee Choi, Steven Zultanski, and Aleksandr Skidan.

Bobbie Louise Hawkins' autobiographical novel One Small Saga; and Laura Riding's first book of poetry, The Close Chaplet.