Type Of Publisher
Press
Genres Published
Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry, Cross Genre Hybrid, Autobiography Memoir, Criticism Reviews, Environment Nature, Erotica, Essays, Experimental, Feminist, Horror Thriller Suspense, Humor, Interviews, Political, Regional, Religious, Sci Fi Fantasy Speculative, Translation, Visual Art, Young Adult
Year Established
2012
Address
Goleta, CA
Name
Vincent
Title
Co-Director of Punctum Books
Email
Mission Statement / Editorial Focus
punctum books, founded in Brooklyn, New York in 2011, and now incorporated in Santa Barbara, California as a public benefit corporation co-directed by Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, is an independent queer- and scholar-led, community-formed, and peer-reviewed Sparkly Diamond open-access (OA) publisher devoted to academic and para-academic authors working in any field in the humanities, social sciences, fine arts, and architecture & design who want to publish books that are genre-queer and genre-bending and which take experimental risks with the forms and styles of intellectual writing. Our authors understand that where they publish is just as important as the content of their work, and that sharing their work with the global commons is vital and necessary. Three primary concentrations for us are (1) books that shift the paradigm in established disciplines; (2) books that help to create emerging transdisciplinary fields; and (3) books that play in the fields of creatively speculative thought (Submission Guidelines). Following the contours sketched out above, we also welcome multi-authored essay volumes that are creatively conceptualized and expertly curated around specific themes, subjects, debates, approaches, and the like. We are also committed to supporting projects of translation and multilingualism across a wide variety of historical periods and languages. Our commitments to and care for diversity, equity, and inclusion are evidenced in our Directorship and staff, our catalog and also in or Editorial Advisory Board. Ultimately, punctum seeks and houses work that feels and thinks in the realm of “away from,” the grammar of the de-, that which deforms, decolonizes, deconstructs, defenestrates, demystifies, detoxifies, destabilizes, decenters, degentrifies, demythologizes, defers, detaches, defends, deletes, departs, decriminalizes, demobilizes, delocates, depolarizes, denationalizes, decalcifies, decommissions, delaminates, and delegitimizes. Maybe we should also think about the re-, returning, going back, doing things over, remembering, repeating ourselves, running backwards, relapsing, regrouping (etc.). Where are we going? This is an adventure story. punctum is partnered with the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Library, and with them, and with other institutional libraries, we have developed an OA book publishing model that never charges fees to authors and that privileges cooperative expertise and knowledge sharing between librarians, knowledge managers, publishers, and scholar-researchers. UCSB Library helped us build community-owned infrastructures for our books and have helped us to design our digital catalog so that it follows all of the “best practices” for cross-referenced metadata, cataloguing, indexing, dissemination, discovery, aggregation, and preservation. For a long while now, university libraries have been on the front lines of protecting and fighting for the community-led commons against its takeover and privatization by obscenely rapacious commercial-conglomerate publishers. We stand with the librarians who work to care for and curate the catalogues of available and open knowledge, and who are using what little resources they have to support OA publishing. The majority of punctum’s funding comes from research libraries through our Supporting Library Membership Program. Every book we publish is a gift from university libraries. We choose the name punctum, following the idioms of the Middle Ages and contemporary cultural theorist Roland Barthes, to evoke the moment (medieval theologian Augustine’s punctum: writing as always momentary in the now), as well as the pricks and punctures and perforations made by awls punching holes in medieval vellum (thus helping to create the blank and open book that makes writing possible, an opening-to-writing). And in Barthes’s terms, writing about photography, the punctum is the sensory, sudden intensity that the photograph has on the viewer, the pointed instrument that disturbs the studium: the “accident” which “pricks us,” the sting, the speck, and the cut, into and out of which anything might fall or emerge, and by which we feel ourselves pierced (writing as shock to the system, to the readers of our books, but also to systems of knowledge more largely). punctum is also the cast of the dice: we’re taking chances out here. It’s a form of play, but it’s also work, perhaps the best precarious job at present in the humanities at large.
Select All Communities That Apply
asian-american-pacific-islander-asian, black-african-american-african, hispanic-latino-latina-latinx, indigenous, immigrant, disability, lgbtqia, over-50, veterans, women
Accepts Unsolicited Submissions
No
Charges Writers A Submission/Reading Fee
no
Author Payments
none
Formats
paperback, hardcover, ebook
Contests
yes
Twitter
Instagram
Distributors
Asterism Books
Press
