Early in 2009 we set out to
publish five, themed literary anthologies – and we have succeeded.
In every case, as per our
mission, we have sought to tackle big themes related to the human condition:
pain, migration, war, human nature, and faith. In these four years we have
dealt with countless queries in thousands of emails. We have read nearly 800
submissions and thousands and thousands of pages. We’ve worked with 63 authors
(award-winning, established writers as well as a few first-time writers).
Although this has always been a two-person operation, we have had assistance
from colleagues and honors quality students. Each project has been different
and satisfying. For the recently-published Puzzles
of Faith and Patterns of Doubt we published less than 9% of submissions.
For the Being Human, Battle Runes, and Common Boundary anthologies we published about 15% of submissions.
We held one group reading at St. Francis College (April 2010), have had Nahid
Rachlin (March 2011) and then John Guzlowski (October 2011) come and read
separately, and just held another group reading (February 2013). In the future,
we hope to hold two more readings but have them student-centered. We have had
an active web site loaded with profiles, interviews, articles, and a number of
book reviews.
We are now able to take a
deep breath. But what is next?
As we have periodically
added author profiles and interviews to the Bibliotekos site, we’d like to add
more. We’d like to have more articles on the site – about authors and books.
And we are opening another tab (with a new call) for science writing – not necessarily
for any anticipated anthology but to be published on the site.
We are not sure what our
next book project is, but we have so far been able to exceed our own
expectations. We’d like to spend some time developing material on the site. As
you might be aware, one of us is editor of the ASEBL Journal / blog, a
scholarly venture, and that requires quite a bit of time and attention as well.
The journey has been
fascinating, we look forward to the next phases, and we appreciate your
continued interest and support.
