Small Press Ecologies with Caryl Pagel (October 18 Butler North)

The Craig Paulenich Endowed Lecture on Literary Community presents poet, editor and associate professor Caryl Pagel on "Small Press Ecologies". This event, free and open to the public, will take place at Butler North on Saturday October 18th from 4:30pm-5:15pm. We thank our generous hosts for making this beautiful historic space available.

This lecture will consider small presses as imaginative and defiant forces in contemporary culture. How might editors shape public literary output via intentional, generative relationships and care for an author’s writing over time? How is the act of publishing a form of inquiry? How is editing intimacy? What are the practical collaborative (and local) possibilities? How can anyone participate? This talk will address small press histories, potentials, enthusiasms, failures, and experiments in the practice. Attendees will leave with a recommended reading list of new works by small presses.

Caryl Pagel is an associate professor at Cleveland State University, where she teaches creative writing to undergraduates and students in the NEOMFA program. She is a publisher and editor at Rescue Press and directed the CSU Poetry Center for over a decade. Pagel’s most recent books are Free Clean Fill Dirt (poetry, University of Akron Press) and Out of Nowhere Into Nothing (essays, FC2). Pagel was the recipient of the 2025 Lorine Niedecker Fellowship.