“It is that experience of reading a book which can most politicize and most radicalize people,” says Anthony Arnove, a founding editor and editorial board member of Haymarket Books, Chicago’s foremost progressive publisher. Founded in 2001, Haymarket has grown in tandem with the rising popularity of political organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America. Haymarket’s editors have bet on a hunger for leftist classics, Howard Zinn-inspired people’s histories, politically engaged poetry and children’s books, and on new work from marginalized voices, and they’ve had notable success with a number of titles, Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, Naomi Klein’s No Is Not Enough, and Eve Ewing’s Electric Arches among them. In everything from its staffing to its book acquisitions strategy, Haymarket has quite intentionally set out to do business differently in a competitive industry where profit margins, especially for small publishers, are usually thin.
“The holy grail of radical publishing,” says Fain, now the press’s managing editor, is a book that sparks “conversations . . . in existing movements.” Many of Haymarket’s books—especially those with a connection to Chicago—focus on the achievements of social justice struggles and on offering a counternarrative to dominant accounts of contentious political issues. In September, for example, Haymarket published José Olivarez’s poetry collection Citizen Illegal, which counters dehumanizing anti-immigrant rhetoric with joyful, vivid, and closely observed portraits of the lives of Latinx people in Chicago. The book is now a finalist for the 2019 PEN/Jean Stein Award, worth $75,000 and given to a book of any genre for its “originality, merit, and impact.” (The winner will be announced next week.)
But Olivarez’s book found its audience and then some. In addition to the PEN/Jean Stein nomination, it won the 2018 Chicago Review of Books award for best poetry and a place on best-of-year lists put out by the New York Public Library and NPR.
In an e-mail, Arnove explains that the practice of not reading unagented submissions filters out diverse authors and many marginalized, progressive, and radical political viewpoints. “A young female poet of color, a trans essayist, a socialist labor organizer from Appalachia are all going to have higher barriers to finding an agent who can submit their manuscript than a white guy who graduated from Harvard and has family connections,” he writes. Once accepted, Arnove says writers are presented with an “author-centric” contract that offers unusual levels of authorial control over things like cover design. While Arnove would not allow the Reader to see a sample contract, both Olivarez and Britteney Black Rose Kapri, whose poetry collection Black Queer Hoe was published by Haymarket in September, say that they were happy with their contracts.
Still, Haymarket, like any publisher, wants to sell many copies of its books as it can. “Ultimately, you’re competing in an industry and a world where there are ideas everywhere,” Plank says. “Someone’s [always] trying to sell an idea. Trying to sell the idea that we could have a different kind of society seems like a pretty OK way to counter that.”
