Scenes: Soft Skull Press: An Interview with Mensah Demary

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• ScenesSoft Skull Press: An Interview with Mensah Demary

Could you briefly describe your press's history?

Soft Skull Press began in New York City in 1992 as photocopied, tape-bound books. Over thirty years later, Soft Skull continues to evolve, becoming wiser and more thoughtful about the literature we publish. Though the history of the press should be remembered and protected against nostalgia, Soft Skull today is a house of diverse literary writers among a continuum of independent artists, past and future. Soft Skull has published award-winning books across genres by authors including Lynne Tillman, Rebecca Walker, Maggie Nelson, Kashana Cauley, Hiromi Kawakami, and others. Since 2021, Soft Skull has been led by Editor-in-Chief Mensah Demary, and Assistant Editor Cecilia Flores.

How would you characterize the work you publish?

Each Soft Skull title is a distinct, singular work of literature demonstrating integrity, developed through practice, and derived from the intuition of its author. Soft Skull Press exhibits mastery and genius unrestrained by genre.

Who is your audience, and in what ways are you trying to reach them?

Our audience consists of thinkers, dreamers, and artists seeking a sensory experience beyond reading who collude with our books to foster liberation through the attractive force of affinity.

By cultivating a curatorial approach to our initiatives, events, and acquisitions, Soft Skull tries to reach its audience through interdisciplinary and creative events, partnerships and campaigns. Our collaborative editorial practices render the book neither object nor subject, exclusively, but encourages lines of articulation and flight connecting our titles, authors, concepts, and worlds to one another, fostering a cosmos within which our readers are at liberty to place themselves.

By partnering with inventive and multimedia digital art spaces and intentional, public, cultural institutions, Soft Skull aims to provide events [End Page 171] and experiences for our authors and readers that celebrate, interrogate, participate in, and reimagine the composite parts of a book's object-to-subject relationship.

What is your role in the publishing scene?

It is vital to independent literature that we provide a home for artists who eschew corporate publishing. As editors and collaborators, we think deeply about our relationships to Soft Skull, its authors, and their titles. We are defenders of the life of the mind. We do so, in part, by pushing back against opinion for opinion's sake. We ask our authors, and ourselves, to refine their opinions into theories, across genres, faithful to a body of fact.

Examples of this can be found in Soft Skull's forthcoming Black Punk Now, an anthology of nonfiction, fiction, and comics—a cornucopia of righteous resistance, both energetically provocative and fun to read that refuses totalization while being totally Black punk today. Which is in conversation with Shotgun Seamstress (2022), the only complete collection of Osa Atoe's legendary DIY punk zine, with each issue expressing the fullest range of being in radical defiance of the limited possibilities dictated by dominant culture.

In 2022 Soft Skull reissued Black Cool, Rebecca Walker's visionary essay collection whose contributors include Hank Willis Thomas, dream Hampton, Dawoud Bey, and bell hooks. Black Cool 2, coming Fall 2024, will offer a second, canonical, illuminating, contemporary, and transcendent collection.

What's in the future for your press?

Publishing-time is never present. We're always two years ahead or two years behind. But our future consists of rolling out cohesive lists of titles that honor intuition, observe play, and articulate a vision for our ever-evolving audience. We intend to let our work speak for itself.

Still to come in 2023–24, Soft Skull will publish Stephen Kearse's Liquid Snakes, a wildly original novel that subverts the direction toxic pollutants travel on a socioeconomic ladder; Wings of Red, James Jennings's stylish autofiction debut about being an educator in New York City public schools; in paperback The Survivalists, Soft Skull's breakthrough debut novel by TV writer Kashana Cauley; Juliet Escoria's highly anticipated collection [End Page 172] of short stories You Are the Snake; celebrated ethnographer on a skateboard José Vadi's Chipped, a reverential and poetic memoir through skating that expands the understanding of how a board can alter a life...