Greeting from City Lights Publishers.

Beginning with the Pocket Poets Series and the publication of Howl, City Lights has played a vital role in American poetry for over 50 years.  In the tradition of the press’s storied poetic origins, we are pleased to announce a new series, City Lights Spotlight. Bay Area poet Garrett Caples will edit the series.

We hope that you will consider publication of this news.
Authors and editors are available for interview, and review copies can be offered, as well.

More about the City Lights Spotlight Series:

City Lights Spotlight hopes to shine a light on the wealth of innovative American poetry being written today. We intend to publish accomplished figures known in the poetry community as well as young emerging poets, using the cultural visibility of City Lights to bring their work to a wider audience.  In doing so, we also seek to draw attention to those small presses publishing such authors.

Our plan at the outset is to produce two books a year, starting in Spring 2009. We feel honored to launch the series with

Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988-2008 by Norma Cole, an important San Francisco-based avant-garde poet and visual artist whose literary associations range from Robert Duncan?s late circle to the language poets.  In Fall 2009, we’ll publish Have a Good One by Anselm Berrigan, a much-admired figure in the New York poetry world and recent director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church.

?With the Spotlight series, we?re hoping to grow the audience for the poets we?ll publish, and also to introduce our readers to the rich world of contemporary innovative poetry we?ll be drawing from. It?s an opportunity for City Lights to play a meaningful role in a different way, and it’s a natural complement to our established poetry program, says City Lights Executive Director and Publisher Elaine Katzenberger.

As City Lights founder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, wrote in his recent Poetry as Insurgent Art, If you would be a poet, experiment with all manner of poetics . . . to create your own limbic, your own underlying voice, your ur voice.  With City Lights Spotlight, we seek to maintain this standard of innovation and inclusiveness, publishing highly original poetry from across the cultural spectrum, and reaffirming our longstanding commitment to this most ancient and stubbornly enduring form of art.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Kind regards,

Garrett Caples
Editor
City Lights Publishers