Our mission is to connect aspiring and inspiring authors and artists to audiences through the book arts.
Our Story
The idea to form Red Bird Chapbooks started during a 2007 class on bookmaking through Hamline University’s MFA program. The instructor, Regula Russell, insisted that each student come up with a name for a personal press. Our founder, Dana Hoeschen, chose the name Red Bird for its simplicity, its generic nature, its slightly whimsical appeal, and the constant presence of red birds at the feeder outside the window of her workspace.
A few years passed . . . Dana let the idea settle in while she experimented with forms and honed her bookmaking skills until one day she approached a couple friends with the idea of starting a chapbook press. With their support, encouragement, and a poetry manuscript, Red Bird published its first chapbook in 2010.
Red Bird has grown in the years since – publishing numerous chapbooks, pamphlets, and broadsides and expanding our flock from one to a team of many. Over the years Red Bird has published over 170 chapbooks, a handful of pamphlets, and more than a dozen broadsides. During our reading periods we receive manuscripts from all over the world. Our community of authors, which initially drew from Hamline University's MFA in Creative Writing community, now represents authors residing in the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, and the South Pacific.
Our designers continue to experiment and innovate with book design, ensuring that each Red Bird title is truly unique. We have chapbooks and map books, pamphlet stitch and stab bindings, a star book and a whole host of forms in between. Each new possibility we accept has its own possibilities in terms of form.
We are grateful for the generous group of volunteers that make up the Red Bird team. For years, our team of bookmakers got together weekly for bookmaking and chapbook assembly sessions. While Covid interrupted this tradition, we are hopeful we can meet again in the future. Until then, our bookmakers work at home to fold, score, and stitch our books.
What started as one person’s prompt in a classroom has evolved to a flock of talented writers and artists – all volunteers – all dedicated to making Red Bird Chapbooks publications beautiful representations of the writing and art they contain. More information on this team can be found on Our Flock page.
Our vision is a community of readers, writers, and visual artists bound by books.
Meet our AUTHORS Meet our VOLUNTEERS
Our Values and Principles
By artists, for artists—
a commitment to collaboration
All positions at Red Bird are held by artists who pursue their own art. We know how we prefer to be treated as artists and the importance of having art in the world that represents us. We understand the care and intimacy that experience deserves. Because of this, Red Bird encourages one-on-one relationships between editors and authors that are attentive and engaging. The resulting manuscript is then tended to by our design team and ultimately stitched together by our assembly team. From beginning to end, we believe in the necessity of collaboration in order to create art.
Accessible and affordable—
for our authors and our readers
Red Bird is a 501c3 non-profit organization; we do not profit from sales. Red Bird does not charge reading fees or up-front publication fees. We do not require pre-sales or minimum purchases of our authors. Red Bird offers competitive royalties as we believe authors should be paid for their work. Red Bird ensures readings are truly blind so the work is judged purely on its own merit and not on an author’s standing in the community. We are also committed to maintaining an affordable price point and price our books accordingly.
Volunteer driven—
we do it for the love of the literary arts
Each person involved in Red Bird is a volunteer. This includes our Executive Director, editors, designers, book assemblers, and interns. We affectionately call ourselves the “The Flock” and dedicate our time and talents because of our shared love of the literary arts.
Creative, hand-crafted, unique—
the work drives the form
All of our chapbooks are hand-crafted—which means each book is cut, folded, and stitched, sometimes pasted, wrapped, or even stabbed, by hand. We believe the work drives the form whether that is long lined verse that requires fold out pages or square shaped blocks of prose that looks best centered on the page. There have even been collections that called for a book shaped like a star. Because of this flexibility, we are open to multi-genre and hybrid works as well as traditional genre forms and we can treat each book as a unique piece of art.
Community connectedness—
with our authors and the greater bookmaker community
Community connectedness happens around the book assembly table on weeknights, over plates of food at our bi-annual editorial gatherings, among new readers at our sales booths at local book fairs, and during our celebratory author readings. Red Bird also has long-standing relationships with organizations such as Artista Bottega in St. Paul, the Minnesota Prison Writers Workshop, and The Poets House in New York.
