Silver Press boosts team and creates new imprint and residency

Silver Press is marking its seventh anniversary with an expanded team, a new imprint and new titles along with with a freshly created residency. 

This year three new team members will join directors Sarah Shin and Alice Spawls at the independent feminist publisher. Publishing manager Jay Drinkall joins from Ignota Books to supervise the expansion of Silver’s publishing project, head of sales and outreach So Mayer joins from Burley Fisher Books, and becomes Silver’s main point of contact for sales, events and outreach. Graphic designer and artist Rose Nordin will join as art director to continue "the elegant, innovative covers", Silver Press said. 

“The expanded team will be making 2024 a special year, with two new Silver Press titles that build on our successes,” the indie added. 

There is also a range of new titles coming. In October 2024 it will publish a revised version of Ursula K Le Guin’s iconic book on craft, described by Silver Press as the "beloved creative writing guide, revised and updated for a new century, Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story, with a new introduction by three American writers who knew and worked with Le Guin: Kelly Link, Karen Joy Fowler and Molly Gloss”. 

In November the press will publish its second anthology, Bodies of Sound, edited by Shin and curator and writer Irene Revell, “a vibrant and urgent survey of writings on sound, listening and feminism", Silver Press said. It features contributors including Sara Ahmed, Svetlana Alexievitch, Anne Carson, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Don Mee Choi, Pauline Oliveros and Daphne Oram. 

In addition, a new imprint, Spiral House Editions, will launch, tipped as “a home for books exploring art, poetry, transformation and ways of knowing", by Silver Press.  

While the covers and ISBNs are changing, Spiral House titles will stay at the same price points and will remain available from Silver Press’ sales agency Inpress and distributor Booksource.

Spiral House will publish four titles acquired from Ignota. In June there will be Quantum Listening by Pauline Oliveros, followed by Gaia and Philosophy by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan in July. Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry, edited by Shin and Rebecca Tamás, will be published in September as an updated edition before States of the Body Produced by Love by Nisha Ramayya (November). 

Silver Press is also launching a residency. “To celebrate the creative influx and impetus of Bodies of Sound, Quantum Listening and Steering the Craft, Silver Press will begin a 2024-25 residency at [artist space] Young Space in east London, with events focused on creative collaboration, listening and interdisciplinary conversations and performances,” the press said. 

This follows Silver Press’ most expansive year to date with three titles – as well as Le Guin’s Space Crone, a collection of her writings on feminism and gender which is a finalist for the Locus Award for non-fiction, as well as published Zong! by M NourbeSe Philip, winner of a 2024 Windham-Campbell Award and its first anthology, After Sex, edited by Spawls and Edna Bonhomme, dubbed by Silver as “an urgent collection of writing on reproductive justice, which will be celebrated at the Vagina Museum in July”. 

The publisher launched in 2017 with Leonora Carrington’s short stories, The Debutante and Other Stories, and a selection of Audre Lorde’s essays, speeches and poems, Your Silence Will Not Protect You. 

As well as overseeing Silver Press, Shin is a writer and curator and Spawls is co-editor of the London Review of Books.