We spoke with Annar Veröld-Miranda, publisher and co-executive director of Host Publications—winner of the 2026 Constellation Award—in our latest member spotlight.
What is the history behind Host Publications? When was it founded and what is its mission?
Host Publications was founded in 1988 by our late founder Joe W. Bratcher, and originally published literature in translation from around the world—including works by Nobel Prize–winner Pablo Neruda, Cervantes Prize–winners Ida Vitale and Nicanor Parra, and Neustadt Prize–winner Ananda Devi.
Since 2017, Host has been led by a seasoned team of editors—publisher Annar Veröld-Miranda and editor-in-chief Claire Bowman—who are devoted to publishing historically marginalized writers, providing mentorship to emerging editors of color, organizing intersectional literary spaces for in-person and virtual artistic expression, and leading educational workshops. After publishing amazing writers within our local literary community, such as Fernando A. Flores and mónica teresa ortiz, we shifted our mission from publishing works in translation to publishing historically marginalized writers in the United States.
In 2022, after the sudden passing of beloved publisher Joe W. Bratcher, Veröld-Miranda and Bowman stepped into the roles of co-executive directors and began the process of officially registering Host Publications as a nonprofit organization. In 2026, Host will celebrate its second year as a nonprofit organization and thirty-eighth year as a press.
With a current focus on poetry, our mission is to elevate systemically marginalized writers whose work is radical, experimental, and queer, an intersection we’ve lovingly begun to refer to as a poetics of liberation—breaking the rules put in place for the writer, the reader, and the art form. We focus on publishing poetry (and sometimes fiction!) by emerging BIPOC and LGBTQ+ writers, writers of a lower socio-economic status, immigrant writers, and writers with disabilities. We are eternally invested in the intersection of identities, the way it shapes a writer’s work, and how they play and make trouble on the page.
Host Publications is the winner of the 2026 Constellation Award, given to honor an independent literary press that champions the writing of people of color for excellence in publishing. Can you tell us what receiving this prize means to you as a press, and what the $10,000 award will help you accomplish?
At Host Publications we have been feeling gratitude and joy to receive the Constellation Award and be woven into such a beautiful vision for the future of publishing. We are intensely devoted to our authors, our readers, literature, and our mission, and despite the intentional oppression of historically marginalized writers and major disruptions in federal funding for the literary arts, our love for the work and people we champion has only deepened. Because we do this work wholeheartedly, tirelessly, intensely, and passionately, we are thankful to be celebrated and championed during this season in history. Most of all, we are thrilled to showcase our incredible writers, our unique in-house editorial style and ethos, and to empower our community of writers whose work inspires social transformation and creates a new sense of what is possible in writing.
As we look toward continuing to sustainably expand our capacity at Host Publications, we’ve allocated the $10,000 award from the Constellation Award to hire a part-time poetry editor, so that we may continue to provide our historically marginalized writers with compassionate, author-centric, in-depth editorial support.
Can you tell us about some recent or upcoming Host Publications titles?
We are so proud of the tapestry of poetry Host Publications champions and how with every title we publish, we expand on what a Host Publications book could entail—the range, the excellence, the thread of conversation between the books and poets! It’s a tremendous honor to do this work and engage with these writers.
Last fall, we celebrated the tender, maximalist collection Wayward Creatures by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, dezireé a. brown’s video-game- and ritual-inspired they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming, and the Praisesong for the People: Poems from the Heart and Soul of Texas anthology, edited by Amanda Johnston.
This spring, we are stunned by Summer Farah’s magnetic debut The Hungering Years, and soon, celebrating Chiagoziem Jideofor’s local remedies, C. Rees’ NOCTUARY, and Jae Nichelle’s Grownfolk Blues: a musical in poems.
To learn more, I recommend listening to The Host Dispatch podcast, where our editors discuss literature, publishing, the writing life, and all things creative that connect the literary community.
What distributor is Host Publications working with? How can bookstores and libraries find and order your titles?
Host Publications is proudly distributed by the great team at Asterism Books. Our editors have a long history of working at a small, independent bookstore, and it’s so great to work with a distributor who understands the readers and the booksellers on such a genuine and authentic level. Asterism has been wonderful with helping us with our internal bookstore outreach project and supporting bookstores, libraries, and universities interested in our titles. The Host team also loves packing small orders placed through our website with craft paper and bespoke Texas twine.
Are there any indie bookstores (or libraries) that you think do a particularly good job featuring titles from indie publishers? If so, what do they do?
Our neighborhood bookstore, Alienated Majesty Books, is a haven for small presses—carrying over 850 indie presses! They curate a beautiful collection of US-based and international small presses, translations, literary fiction, indie comics, politics and theory, environments, and poetry. Alienated Majesty is such a radical and inclusive space, and we are happy to call it the home of our book launches, our monthly reading series I Scream Social, and a schoolhouse of sorts to learn the ins-and-outs of small press publishing. The team at Alienated Majesty Books has championed us so fearlessly every step of the way. On May 15, they’ll be throwing us a very big party to celebrate the Constellation Award!
How can interested writers submit their work to Host Publications?
Host Publications will be open for full-length poetry manuscript submissions from March 1 through June 1, 2026, through our Submittable, and we are so excited to consider new work!
We’re looking for manuscripts that are ready to enter the editorial process on the way to being published, and that reflect a culture-shifting perspective that is unique, but is in conversation with other work—writers of the past and present, artists, activists, philosophers, filmmakers. There isn’t one particular style we’re looking for, but we love writing that is tender, surprising, and transgressive.
