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ABOUT US

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Ragged Sky is a small, highly selective cooperative press.  We work with our authors closely.  Authors retain copyright and we use our experience and professional resources to support the author’s work through the editing, production, and marketing process.  Ragged Sky Press has historically focused on mature voices, overlooked poets, and women's perspectives. 

Become a part of the Ragged Sky community. Visit our blog, news page, Facebook page, and Twitter scroll. Sign up for our list to receive updates. Get to know who we are and the kind of literature we enjoy.

Ellen Foos, Publisherellenfoos

Ellen, and therefore Ragged Sky, are about both community and poetry. Ellen's service to poetry and community includes founding a poetry reading series at the Princeton Public Library and organizing poetry slams at the Arts Council of Princeton. Ellen is a production editor who has worked professionally in publishing for over twenty-five years.

Abigail Johnson, Communications Directorruthzamoytaotoole

Abigail Johnson is a writer, editor, and multi-media artist based in Princeton, NJ. Her work seeks to bridge gaps, blurring the lines between the disciplines, the personal and the objective, the natural and the artificial. Her work has been featured in the Trenton City Museum, MIT’s Computer Music Journal, and One Sentence Poems. By day, she edits books about physics and astronomy.

Arlene Weiner, Editorarlene

Arlene adds vision to the team, based on her experience as scholar, teacher, and professional editor. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals, have been anthologized in Along These Rivers (Quadrant) and Eating Her Wedding Dress (Ragged Sky), and have been read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's Almanac. In 2008 Arlene was a MacDowell Colony fellow.

Acknowledgments

Paul Foos, our Webmaster, built our Web site and helps us out when there's a glitch. The crisp, colorful design of this Web site is the creation of Trina Robinson, a freelance writer and designer, production editor at the New York Times, and a poet as well. The images used in the design and on several of our book covers are details of paintings by Jean Foos.

Ragged Sky is a nonprofit organization under the auspices of Co Works, Inc., a 501c3.

 

HISTORY

Ellen Foos, MacDowell Colony fellow and member of the U.S.1 Poets’ Cooperative, founded Ragged Sky Press in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1992, when Fred Mertz, a parish priest, asked her to help him publish his novel, The Ore and the Dross. That was followed by Mile End, Alan Grayson's searing autobiographical novel, and Michael R. Brown’s poetry collection, Susquehanna. Since then, Ragged Sky has moved to Princeton, New Jersey, and produced over 15 books of poetry and inspired prose.

In 2005, Ellen and four other poets began to meet and share their work. A year later, Ellen decided to compile their work as the five-volume Ragged Sky Poetry Series, including works by Elizabeth Danson, Ellen Foos, Carlos Hernández Peña, Elizabeth Anne Socolow, and Arlene Weiner.

In 2009 Ragged Sky produced the lively and provocative poetry anthology Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems, edited by Ellen, Ruth Zamoyta O'Toole, and Vasiliki Katsarou. One hundred contemporary poets—local stars and literary luminaries such as Kim Addonizio, Margaret Atwood, Billy Collins, Elaine Equi, Jorie Graham, Maxine Kumin, Paul Muldoon, and Charles Simic—joined together in this anthology to celebrate clothing in its many forms and functions: as desire, as ghost, as body, as poetry, as talisman, as transformer of the soul.

Following on the bridal train of that success came several acclaimed individual poetry collections, including Vasiliki's own Memento Tsunami in 2011.

© Ragged Sky Press