While speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists at a regional conference in Montgomery, Alabama, last Friday afternoon, novelist Tina McElroy Ansa announced that she was forming her own publishing company, Down South Press, which starts off this fall with Taking After Mudear, the sequel to Ansa’s 1993 novel Ugly Ways. Of course, it would be pretty easy to knock the venture as self-publishing based solely on that info, but Ansa is ready to block the jab: “My novels will comprise only some of the many established and emerging writers I will publish,” she wrote when contacted by email about the launch. “I am not a self-publisher. We are a small press.”
“I’ve had this idea for founding this independent small press for a number of years,” Ansa continues. “It is in reaction not only to my own experience in mainstream publishing (I’ve been published by three of the large publishing houses), but also what I know other authors of color have run up against—many writers of quality serious and contemporary fiction are being passed over and being told that there is no longer a market for their work.” In her speech last week, Ansa described her plan to operate as “the kind of involved, smart publisher I dreamed of and the type that every serious writer deserves for his or her work.” After publishing her own novel, “each of our lists will feature a new book by a well-known, established author and at least one debut work by a new voice in American literature… We plan to publish the books that will be classics in years to come.”
No word yet on who the first “new voice in American literature” joining Ansa on this fall’s list will be, but Down South will begin looking at agented manuscripts in July, with Bay Area bookseller and anthology editor Blanche Richardson leading the editorial team. In the menatime, the house’s website already boasts accolades from Pearl Cleage, E. Lynn Harris and Tananarive Due, the latter of whom heralds Down South’s formation as “a beacon of hope to all of us who care about the future of black literature.”