Handler: A painter can sell his work or her work, but usually needs a gallery.

We need people in the middle to bring our work to its readers.

[ Music plays ] Cleveland: I am Gabriel Cleveland.

I'm the executive director and managing editor of CavanKerry Press, the largest nonprofit poetry publisher in the state of New Jersey.

I coordinate content editing, copy editing, graphic design, proofreading, printing, and distribution -- a lot -- a lot of things to juggle, but it's good -- you know, keep things moving, and we end up having beautiful books to show for it, so no regrets.

Reyes: My name is Dimitri Reyes, and I'm the marketing and communications director at CavanKerry Press.

Our distribution center is with the University of Chicago.

So every time a book gets published with us, we keep some in our own stock while we're moving books through events such as the Paterson Poetry Festival or AWP.

But the University of Chicago also houses the majority of the books, and that's how we are still able to get a boosted signal for our authors through places like Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, local bookstores, museums, other university libraries, et cetera.

Kelley: My name is Tina Kelley, and two of my books have been published by CavanKerry Press.

I was adopted at birth, and...

I was at "The New York Times" for 10 years.

I did feature stories, and I got to do a lot of nature stories.

"Trains Running After Storms" -- it's a headline from "The New York Times."

And those were the times when I'd get lots of material for poems.

"I had to commit flight.

I had seen too many birds escaping, flying off to the sides as if I were evil.

In the east, the rumbling called me, kept ahead of me..." CavanKerry is special, partly because it's flavored by Joan's interests.

She cares a lot about health and psychology and people's daily lives and the meaning that can be found there.

So I vibed with it because I'm a journalist and I don't like abstractions -- I like the facts.

[ Chuckles ] And I find great meaning in the facts and great poetry in the facts.

Handler: Because I'm also a psychologist, I knew what was needed.

Yeah, absolutely.

Because I dealt with people all the time in my office, and I knew they weren't getting what they needed, So I...

I said, that's going to have to be one of the points of the press or the -- the concerns of the press -- focusing on the honest truth about illness.

Bell: I watched greeting cards pile up -- pale pink and sparkly -- blessing, little angel, princess, precious.

And then the crumbling would appear again, like a mudslide caving in a village.

Cleveland: It so clearly articulated her experiences with postpartum depression, all the complicated emotions that that brought up -- the anger, the despair, the -- the hope.

Bell: My mother said, "Maybe you need more sleep," after the OB said I would be fine, though I couldn't imagine fine while the world chanted: "Love the baby, love the baby."

Cleveland: Our number-one priority is, can you access this?

Can you step into someone else's world by way of this book?

Carreira: "Tanto Tanto," which is Portuguese for "a lot, a lot" or "much, much," is a collection of work that centers around the relationship between two women, two queer women, and they're both daughters of immigrants.

"Between noon and 2:00 p.m., I think of mangoes, how I've never seen a mango tree in real life, how I want so bad to eat a mango straight from the limbs of your grandfather's farm, the sweet fuzzy juice sliding down my chin, between my breasts."

Reyes: What started out as an idea for Joan and her friends self-publishing together became something that is a household high-tier name in the literary community.

So my job is to continue Joan's mission and making sure that we are a big press with a small-press feel, because everyone at CavanKerry Press is also an author, and we want to make sure that the authors we publish are treated the same way we want to when we publish.

Doty: I've known Joan since we were both youngish poets.

Just -- you know, we would read together, sometimes run into each other sometimes.

And she called me and said, "I have -- I have created a press.

Do you have a manuscript?"

That's where my life took another turn.

This is my "Grandma" poem.

"Mischief made her lift her arms and turn with such a look of wonder on her face that I was not afraid to see the flames licking along both sleeves of her flannel robe."

Cleveland: I can't underscore enough just how much a gift Joan has given to the world to say, "Here is a place for you to be heard.

Here is a place where we will listen closely and read your work attentively and understand you the way that we all deserve to be listened to and understood."

Doty: "And Grandma, naked, jubilant, winked at me as the kettle rushed its way to boiling dry, and sent me from some far hilltop in her far world a vision of what it was certain I'd become -- wild-eyed and crazy and blazing like a six-gun, nothing at all to be met with shame or fear.

So this is for her, who now has long been ash, a chronicle the last word of which is 'oh.'"

[ Applause ]