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Also this issue: Did Feds Foil Terrorist Plot Against Bell? Time's Up? Don't Go Away Angry Bin There, Done That The Bell Curve |
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June 27-July 3, 2002
on media
When the No. 1 best seller on The New York Times non-fiction list is the autobiography of ill-tempered 1980s tennis star John McEnroe and No. 2 is a compilation of blurbs by various celebrities describing turning points in their lives, it’s easy to get depressed about the state of publishing. Where are the books by the eloquent, not-so-famous writers, about subjects that matter deeply to a few people rather than superficially to just about everyone?
That is the hope behind New City Press, a new not-for-profit publishing house organized by two Temple English professors who strive to fill the gap between commercial publishing and university presses. "We do not publish academic writing or scholarly writing or even student writing," says August Tarrier, the Press' editor. Rather, the goal of New City is to put out books written by and about Philadelphia communities.
The first New City Press book, launched Wednesday, is No Restraints: An Anthology of Disability Culture in Philadelphia, edited by Gil Ott, a poet and director of development at Liberty Resources, an advocacy group for the disabled.
Ott calls the anthology "admittedly fragmented." The book, with nearly two dozen contributors, contains fiction and non-fiction, poetry and photography and even a comic strip. The goal is to give the reader a "sense that people with disabilities can form their own community or culture."
New City Press' second book, The Forgotten Bottom Remembered, is due out around Labor Day. Through transcribed interviews with residents, the book tells the story of a section of Grays Ferry that was cut off from the rest of the neighborhood by the construction of the Schuylkill Expressway. The residents discuss how their neighborhood managed to avoid the racial strife that has long plagued the rest of the community.
A third book, a bilingual history of Kennett Square farm workers, is also in the works. Like The Forgotten Bottom Remembered, the farm workers' history is based on interviews with the Latino migrants who pick most of the East Coast's mushrooms.
What all of these books have in common, says Steve Parks, the publisher of New City Press, is that they "give a community the ability to define itself." This has long been the goal behind New City Press, even before it published No Restraints. Since 2000, the Press has published Open City, a journal of community arts and culture, and Parks has held writing workshops in the Philadelphia public schools.
