Founder Matvei Yankelevich | Founded 1993 | |
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Ugly Duckling Presse is an American nonprofit art and publishing collective based in Brooklyn, New York City that publishes poetry, translations, lost works, and artist's books. It was founded in 1993 by Matvei Yankelevich as a college zine before expanding to publishing other works in 1995 and taking shape as a collective in 2000. A micropress, the company uses distribution methods not traditionally seen in publishing, such as subscriptions, and gathered its early audience with guerrilla marketing techniques.
Contents
Publications
Ugly Duckling Presse (UDP) focuses on new, international, and "forgotten" writers and specializes in projects that may be difficult to produce at other presses. Formats produced include full-length books, chapbooks, and broadsides. These formats, along with UDP's magazine and newspaper, all contain handmade elements. The Presse states that these, "call attention to the labor and history of bookmaking".
Past publications include Nets by Jen Bervin, erasure poetry of Shakespeare's sonnets, Poker by Tomaž Šalamun (which was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation) and works by New York-based writers Steve Dalachinsky and Lewis Warsh. The Presse also publishes a regular series of translations of Eastern European poetry. Publications include works by Czech poet Ivan Blatný and Russian conceptualists Dmitri Prigov and Lev Rubinstein.
In collaboration with various visual and performance artists, Ugly Duckling Presse also creates "paperless" works. These may be performed, or produced through media such as digital video, CD, or tree bark.
Premises and personnel
The Presse maintains a workshop and letterpress studio in the Gowanus neighborhood in the industrial complex of The Old American Can Factory on the Fourth Street Basin of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. Its current editors are Katherine Bogden, G. L. Ford, Yelena Gluzman, Chuck Kuan, Anna Moschovakis, Michael Newton, Daniel Owen, Emmalea Russo, Kyra Simone, Rebekah Smith, and Matvei Yankelevich.
Past editors are Abraham Adams, David Jou, Phil Cordelli, Ellie Ga, Ryan Haley, James Hoff, Marisol Limon Martinez, Filip Marinovich, Julien Poirier, Linda Trimbath, and Genya Turovskaya.