Getting to Know Belle Point Press

A new small press in Fort Smith, Arkansas

Hello! This is the newsletter for Belle Point Press, a new small press based in the little border city of Fort Smith, Arkansas. Allow us to introduce ourselves.

Our Masthead

We’re Casie and Michael Dodd, a wife-and-husband team who really love books. It’s how we met, why we fell in love, and what most people know first about us. Since Michael has a full-time day job, I (Casie) handle most of the operations, but we are family-run in every sense.

Both sides of our families have deep roots in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and the surrounding region. Our ancestors fought on both sides of the Civil War. We have Cherokee blood. After meeting in Tulsa during grad school, we spent the first few years of our marriage up in Chicago before Covid (and our growing family) made that life unsustainable. We relocated back to our roots and chose Fort Smith as the place to settle our family for good.

We have two children: a son who’s almost three and an 18-month-old daughter. (We’re not big on sharing public photos, but if you’re lucky, you’ll get to meet them sometime.) I stay home with the kids throughout the week and do my own writing work (poetry, essays, and reviews) whenever I can squeeze in a line or paragraph here and there. If you’re interested, you can learn more about my publications here or keep up with me on Twitter.

Our Name

Historically, the name Belle Point means a lot here in Fort Smith. It dates back to 1817, when the first literal Fort Smith was built at the confluence of the Poteau and Arkansas Rivers in order to (at least theoretically) establish peace between the Osage and Cherokee tribes. We aren’t the only business around here to capitalize on this name since it’s a kind of local shorthand. It reminds us of these borderland roots, hovering in a space that bordered rivers just as it came to border our home states—while it also refers to a particular place that’s lasted (in some form) through the centuries, that still remains.

Even more symbolically, we love this name for many reasons. Since Fort Smith is itself an in-between place—an urban(-ish) area surrounded by rural communities, part Southern, part Western—we think it represents much of the Mid-South region at large. Growing up in a suburb of Tulsa, I never saw myself as particularly “Southern” but didn’t know how to articulate it. In fact, at one point I would have claimed the label “Midwestern” until I moved to Chicago and realized that was something else entirely, that people thought I had an accent or assumed I was from a very different type of place. At the same time, this area often doesn’t quite fit the states of the more distinctively “American South” or “Deep South.” We are, in many respects, in the middle of things: claiming the Southwest when it suits us, devoted to the plains, lazing along the bayou. The Mid-South contains multitudes, but it is also the place where we can feel that we belong.

Our Vision

This regional complexity often seems misunderstood or overlooked in the literary mainstream. We want to find voices of all kinds, from all kinds of backgrounds, exploring it with loyalty, honesty, and affection. We want your poems, your stories, your essays and memoirs—all your work that remains tethered to its roots even as it wanders.

Put simply, our mission is to celebrate the literary culture and community of the American Mid-South: all its paradoxes and contradictions, all the ways it gets us home.

Our Goals

We’re committed to focusing on writers based in (and/or with strong roots in) the Mid-South. We view these limits somewhat broadly but are primarily interested in seeing work from/about Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, and other more conventionally “Southern” states. We’re interested in Appalachia. We’re curious about the plains and the desert—all settings similar to our scenery. But over time, we hope to make our region as distinctive a presence in the literary world (whatever that is) as all the other places we already know.

As we prepare to publish our first publication, the Mid/South Anthology (more on that in our next post), we are also wrapping up submissions for our first poetry chapbook series. Beyond that, we’re developing a few other projects behind the scenes. As a literary press, we are eager to publish full-length works in the coming months, including short story and essay collections, novels, memoirs—and, of course, poetry. (Always poetry.) Down the road, I love the idea of exploring things like workshops and other community-building opportunities, as well as partnerships with other literary organizations/presses in the region. But who knows what dreams may come?

Since we are building this press from scratch, we have the advantage of openness. While I have a lot of ideas for what I would like to do, my greatest hope is to cultivate a place that represents the many ways we are who we are. Have an idea? Let me know.

We are so glad you’ve joined us. Help us show everyone what it means to be from around here.