CURRENT AND UPCOMING NOTABLE NOMADIC PROJECTS Other ventures of Nomadic Press include Nomadic Coffee, a collaboration with Thomas Landry’s Nomadic Coffee Roasters, in which poetry from Nomadic Press authors is printed and included within bags of organic coffee. Nomadic Coffee is available on the Nomadic Press website and at various writing conferences, including the major annual academic gathering, the Association of Writing Programs. The press also hosts public open mics for poets and prose writers every Friday at 6 pm Pacific time. These started during Covid and have been a way for editors to meet talented writers from around the world and connect with these people over Zoom. Nomadic Press is also in the process of working with Parcel Projects to provide programming for a development in Oakland, CA on central Telegraph St, a seven-story building that will include several floors of affordable housing, with more than half the units set aside for transitional-age youth (people beginning their careers, who may have aged out of foster care). They will host programming, literary, and cultural events on the first two floors.
According to the Parcel Projects site, “2301 Telegraph is part of an ongoing investigation into the ways in which architecture can be utilized to encourage cultural expression, collaboration, economic opportunity, and justice, as well as promote access to resources, re-connection and empower those who have been severed from opportunity. The project is intended to support a more equitable urban environment, given concrete expression by the experience and stories of those who inhabit it. We are excited about the potential of this project to serve as a model for new thinking about community-based design processes and see the building itself as a test site to explore innovative ideas about programming and engaging neighborhood networks...a counterpoint and an example of how and for whom to build in cities like Oakland now.” Nomadic Press also sponsors a program, Pass the Mic, teaching young people (teens and college students) how to organize cultural events. In addition, they perform at a peace and justice festival in Oakland, participate in a “mixtape” event called Bay to Brooklyn that connects cultural creatives on both coasts, and open up their Oakland office space to organizations and literary series that they believe reflect their mission to amplify under- represented creative voices.
EXPANSIVE FUTURE FOR NOMADIC PRESS Nomadic Press currently has nodes in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Des Moines, Iowa, and Brooklyn, New York. They are determined to serve writers of color and other people under-represented in the literary ecosystem in Oakland, CA and around the world.
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