Lawrence Schimel is the editor and publisher of A Midsummer Night’s Press, an influential publisher of poetry. Founded by Schimel in New Haven, CT in 1991, A Midsummer Night’s Press first published broadsides of poems by Nancy Willard, Joe Haldeman, and Jane Yolen, among others, in signed, limited editions of 126 copies, numbered 1-100 and lettered A-Z. In 1993, Schimel moved to New York and the press went on hiatus until 2007, when it began publishing perfect-bound, commercially-printed books. The first two imprints of A Midsummer Night’s Press were Fabula Rasa, devoted to works inspired by mythology, folklore, and fairy tales, and Body Language, devoted to texts exploring questions of gender and sexual identity.

The newest imprint of A Midsummer Night’s Press is Periscope, devoted to works of poetry in translation. Recently, I talked with Lawrence about this new imprint and his work as a publisher.

Julie: What prompted you to start the Periscope imprint?

Lawrence: We had published one previous book in translation, as part of our Body Language imprint, so I was familiar with the difficulties of publishing a book in translation in the US without having the poet available to help with promotion, through readings, participation in events, etc. At the same time, as a translator myself, I was aware of how little gets translated into English from other languages, especially poetry, and also of how difficult it is for works by women writers to be translated. Alison Anderson did some VIDA-like number crunching of translations published in the US, and found that only 26% (of works from all languages and in all genres, fiction, poetry and nonfiction combined) are by women writers.

So I decided that by creating an imprint devoted wholly to poetry-in-translation, and with a specific focus on women writers, I hopefully could create enough momentum and attention for these poets and their work–differently than just publishing isolated books in translation here and there, where it is too easy for them to get lost or otherwise be overlooked.

I decided that our criteria would be women writers who had published at least two books in their own country (so they are already established to some level, not just starting out) but had not yet been published with a book in English. So our mission would be to try and help introduce these writers to an English-speaking audience. (One of the first authors, Care Santos, has published over 40 books, but this poetry collection is her first to be published in English.) More.

See: The Huffington Post