OMNIDAWN PUBLISHING with Laura Joakimson, Executive Director, Co-Publisher

Today, executive director and co-publisher of Omnidawn Publishing Laura Joakimson will give a presentation of Omnidawn Publishing. We like to invite various small presses to speak at our festivals so our students and guests can get to know about their wonderful offerings!

Omnidawn Publishing, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, seeks to support and expand our community of writers and readers through the work we choose to publish, which questions, in both form and content, the prevailing limits of convention. Our intent is to explore internal and external boundaries and push, with compassionate insight, the limits of risk. Just as our name suggests—“omni” (in all ways and places) and “dawn” (the first appearance of light)—we publish creative works that open readers anew to the myriad ways that language may bring new light, insight, awareness, as well as a heightened respect for, and appreciation of, differences. At Omnidawn, it is a significant part of our mission to celebrate and include authors of different races, ages, genders, LGBTQIA+, people with disabilities, and to include any/all those whose voices are underrepresented in publishing and in our culture at large. We want this celebration and inclusion to be reflected at every level of our organization: authors, volunteers, staff, poetry and fiction editors, poetry and fiction contest judges, reviewers, board members, and advisory board members. 

It is also a significant part of our mission to give opportunities to be published to authors who do not have the financial means to apply to our poetry contests. We offer fee waivers to those who write to us to let us know about financial hardship. In all of our publications, (books, our free online journal Omniverse.us, and more) we are committed to conversations which address equity, reparations, class, gender, and other issues of social justice. As of October 2022, Omnidawn is a women-run press. Its co-publishers are Rusty Morrison and Laura Joakimson. All of us at Omnidawn have seen the numbers (thanks in part to the work of VIDA) which tell us that women-run organizations are underrepresented in the US. Rusty and Laura bring to our work a culture of collaboration, an open invitation to positive life-affirming change, and a belief in the value of compassion. All of us at Omnidawn believe that the best, and most resilient organizations and individuals are constantly re-attuning to the changing state of the present, while still honoring what remains important, which comes from our past.

Omnidawn was founded in 2001 by Ken Keegan & Rusty Morrison. Ken and Rusty began the press because of their belief that lively, culturally pertinent, emotionally and intellectually engaging literature can be of great value, and it is a privilege to participate in that work. Ken Keegan passed away of cancer in October, 2022. Rusty & Laura have continued what is best from that legacy, while renewing Omnidawn’s focus on becoming a more modernized, resilient and sustainable press.

We at Omnidawn whole-heartedly believe that our society needs small presses so that widely diverse ideas and points-of-view are easily accessible to everyone. Italo Calvino: “… the function of literature is communication between things that are different… because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.”

Omnidawn books are frequently reviewed in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Rain Taxi, Lana Turner, The Journal, Jacket, and Pleiades, and have been reviewed in Chicago Review, American Book Review, The Village Voice, The Midwest Book Review, The Poetry Project Newsletter, HOW2, The New Review of Literature, Small Press Traffic Newsletter, Electronic Poetry Review, Interim, and ARC (Canada’s National Poetry Magazine), as well as many other publications and podcasts such as the On Being Project’s Poetry Unbound, Words on a Wire, Poets at Work, VS, Close Talking, For the Wild, and Art Heals All Wounds.

You can read more about Omnidawn here: https://www.omnidawn.com/

Laura Joakimson is a Bay Area and Seattle writer and poet who spent several years on the planning committee for Litquake, San Francisco’s homegrown literary festival. Her work has appeared in Quiet Lightning, Magnitude, and Scissors & Spackle. She was an English teacher in South Korea for two years, and more recently worked for seven years in a San Francisco print shop. She has a master’s degree from Western Washington University in poetry. She also brings experience in social media and marketing to her work at Omnidawn.

Host or Publisher Soul Bone Lit Fest & MIU's MFA in Creative Writing