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Publication: The Jambar, Youngstown State University, Youngstown OH.
By Liam Bouquet Photo courtesy of Philip Brady.
The fourteen-year-old Etruscan Press, an independent nonprofit literary press partnered with both Youngstown State University and Wilkes University in Pennsylvania, has been named one of five finalists for the Associations of Writers and Writing Programs’ 2015 Small Press Publisher Award.
Philip Brady, the executive director of Etruscan and a professor in the YSU English Department, said the press is up against Bellevue, Coffee House, Graywolf and Salmon presses. The winner will be announced at the AWP conference this April in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
“[The AWP] are the pre-eminent association for creative writing,” he said. “This is huge for us. All the other presses there are at least thirty years old. … We are the new kids on the block.”
Etruscan Press was founded in 2001 by Brady and his colleague Robert Mooney, a professor of English at Washington College in Maryland.
“Mooney is a fiction writer, and I am a poet,” Brady said. “What we wanted to do is bring a conversation to literature, a conversation we have been having over the years. The conversation is really about the relationship between poetry and prose. Are they really two ways of expressing the same human impulses, or are they completely different activities that happened to be joined by writing? Of course there is no answer; it is not a yes or no.”
Though they kept this question of genres as their driving force, their initial plan for their first year was changed after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“One of the people that we had talked to, an eminent poet named William Heyen, came to us on Sept. 12 knowing we were starting a press, and he came to us with an idea — to capture the response of American writers to this event,” Brady said. “Which is really an unusual idea because literature, what we usually think of as one of its qualities is...