Roxane Gay wears many hats — professor, editor, social commentator, advice columnist — but she is perhaps most widely known as a best-selling writer, whose books include the essay collection “Bad Feminist” and a memoir, “Hunger.”
Now she is starting a book imprint. Roxane Gay Books will be part of Grove Atlantic, the publishing house announced Wednesday, with plans to release three titles a year, a mix of fiction, nonfiction and memoir, and a focus on underrepresented voices.
Gay has published books before, she said in a phone interview, though on a very small scale. She founded Tiny Hardcore Press in 2011, turning out 25 to 50 copies of each title along with e-books.
“This was when I was making absolutely no money,” she said. “Everything was very shoestring but well intended. And I always wondered what it would be like to publish books with an actual budget and actual promotion efforts behind it, like a marketing department and advances and things like that.”
Grove is one of the larger independent publishers in the United States and one of the most prestigious. It has published Gay’s fiction since 2014, starting with her first novel, “An Untamed State.” She said the company has committed to offering a minimum for advances at her imprint. (She and Grove declined to say what the minimum will be.) Her own first advance at Grove — which she said was too low — was $12,500.
Gay, who is based in Los Angeles, will make her first call for submissions this summer and plans to open her doors to writers with and without agents. She cautioned that that could change if the volume of manuscripts becomes overwhelming, but said it was worth a try.
“There are so many barriers and so many gates,” she said. “Let’s take them down.”
Grove also said Wednesday that it plans to offer a paid, one-year fellowship program that would serve as a crash course in publishing, for applicants without access to such jobs through traditional pathways.
Gay will select and edit the books her imprint publishes, but she will also work closely on these projects with Amy Hundley, an executive editor at Grove who edits Gay’s work. Hundley said that Gay’s eye for talent, in addition to the talent she herself possesses, was enormously appealing to Grove.
“She’s really interested in queer voices, she’s really interested in feminist voices, she’s really interested in voices on body size,” Hundley said, “all kinds of different conversations that are really exciting right now, and I think are the future.”
