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I grew up evangelical. It’s part of my personal history that’s still hard to talk about for a lot of reasons. But one reason that it still continues to feel relevant to my new vocation as a small press publisher is that I always felt kind of weird about missionaries. They go back generations in my family, both in the US and elsewhere (in “Catholic country,” always relayed to me with a sense of dread); I experienced my fair share of local and international missions work as a teenager. I spent a summer in New Orleans as a camp counselor and lived and worked in a soup kitchen in Chicago for a year. But while I can’t speak in full honesty to the voice in my head during some of those earlier times, I do know it always struck me as uncomfortable to make assumptions about people in other communities, about their needs or values.

It’s no secret that we care about this region, broadly speaking—Mid-South or whichever pocket of our surrounding community you come from. As we watch the press grow and refine our vision of what that means (as we’ve talked about here, among other places), I’m still learning how to articulate how that works in practice. (AWP was an interesting exercise in that respect, as we were approached by writers from all over trying to gauge our relevance to their own work or other writerly purposes.)