We spoke with Laura Cesarco Eglin, founding editor and publisher, and poetry and translation editor, of Veliz Books in our latest Member Spotlight.
What is the history behind Veliz Books? When was it founded and what is its mission?
Minerva Laveaga and I had both always wanted to start a press. We met in El Paso while I was living there and doing my MFA, and in 2015, when I was in my last year of my PhD in Boulder, Colorado, we decided to create Veliz Books. I went to El Paso and we had a little retreat. Because Minerva is from Mexico and I am from Uruguay, and because I have moved around a lot, we thought of the word veliz (an older term for valija / maleta / suitcase) for the press. And thus, Veliz Books was born!
In the ten years since, Veliz Books—which is based in Houston now—has published thirty-four titles, including poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and books in translation. The small press has had different team members over the years, each helping it to take shape and grow. We are currently made up of four volunteers dedicated to bringing beautiful books into the world: Lau Cesarco Eglin (founding editor/publisher, poetry and translation editor), Tabitha Stone (prose editor), Grace Tsichlis (social media coordinator, assistant prose editor), and Allison Keiser (managing editor).
Veliz Books helps literature travel and fosters a community of readers and writers passionate about words and language, regardless of where they may live. We are dedicated to publishing both emerging and established authors whose works are stylistically complex, even unconventional, and speak to issues in need of voice. We also strive to be part of the greater literary community by holding readings for our authors; taking part in panels on publishing, editing practices, and translation at national conferences; and holding workshops with community organizations.
Veliz Books celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2025. What are your hopes and goals for the next 10 years?
We hope to continue finding ways to foster this literary community. We hope to continue publishing books that add to the variety and diversity of our catalog. We hope to continue expanding the kinds of stories we offer, adding more novels and creative nonfiction to our prose section and helping more translators bring fresh voices into English. We love working with our authors, poets, and translators—each bringing a unique perspective, background, and voice to Veliz Books.
We want to continue to find more ways in which we can support our authors, poets, translators, the team, and the community around us. For example, we offer free submissions to writers, poets, and translators who self-identify as being part of a minoritized community, and we give free consultations to anyone wanting to start a press or literary magazine (and to presses and magazines that are already established).
In our next ten years, we would love to collaborate with more independent artists to work with for cover art and design; to find more reach for the incredible work we publish through reading series and programming with indie booksellers; and to continue fundraising efforts to increase how much we pay our authors, to support our authors getting their work into more hands, and to give back to our communities.
Can you tell us about some recent or upcoming Veliz Books titles?
Each year we publish one poetry collection, one book in translation, and one in prose. In 2026 we are publishing:
- Sonora, by the Galician poet Chus Pato, translated by Erín Moure. This poetry collection holds the resonance of human life facing time itself, and an inevitable finality of voice. Here the voice is that of a feminine lineage; the death faced most centrally is that of the poet’s mother, in a book dedicated to her daughters. Crucially, it includes the sound waves of her native Galician, the language of both her parents, its history of endurance, as well as the granitic fissures and domes of the place where this language is spoken.
- Cow Stomach and Mother Fat by Steve Halle. In his second full-length poetry collection, Halle interrogates how our innermost selves emerge from time immemorial to navigate conditional economies of being. Written and refined over a fourteen-year span, Cow Stomach and Mother Fat employs the dramatis personae of Cow Stomach, Mother Fat, and Ensu Fario, whose monologues and verses use dark comedy to explore ideas of hunger, needfulness, want, desire, and love; emergence and formation of being and identity; how human and nonhuman persons are intertwined and enmeshed in precarious systems; toxicity/toxic masculinity; monstrousness; formlessness; and the politicization and regulation of gender, among other subjects.
- Ore Vein by Danilo John Thomas. Thomas’s debut short story collection explores the thin spaces between hardship and heroism prevalent in small-town America. He captures what it feels like to come of age among the urban decay and cracked pastoral landscapes of southwestern Montana and a fictionalized version of the town where he was raised. From the claustrophobia of crumbling mine shafts to the senseless consequences of bar brawls, these stories are at once mystical and all too real, violent yet deeply introspective, masculine but tender. Ore Vein, like the mines it showcases, digs deep in dark places after fortunes, showing what it means to hit the mother lode and, sometimes, what it means to lose it.
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?
Powell’s Books in Portland featured our book The Star-Spangled Brand by Cuban poet Marcelo Morales, translated by Kristin Dykstra, as a “Small Press Spotlight.” Basket Books and Dreamers Books and Culture, both in Houston, carry our titles, and Basket Books has also hosted readings with various Veliz Books authors. McNally Jackson in New York City regularly stocks some of our titles. Next Chapter Booksellers in Saint Paul picked The Confines by Anu Kandikuppa as one of their staff picks.
What distributor is Veliz Books working with? How can bookstores and libraries find and order your titles?
Veliz Books distributes through Asterism and through our website. (For international shipping, please go through Asterism.)
How can interested writers submit their work?
Interested writers, poets, and translators can submit their full-length poetry, prose, or translation manuscripts during our reading period, which extends from March 5 to May 5 every year. We read submissions via Submittable—and of course, if anyone has any questions, they should feel free to email us.
