Backwoods Literary Press
Publishing, workshops, and shared spaces for rural storytellers
Backwoods Literary Press is an independent press dedicated to rural stories and the many layers of the people who carry them.
We believe rural life is expansive, complicated, and always changing. Our annual anthology brings together writing shaped by rural places, from small towns and hollers to reservations, borderlands, and communities spread far beyond where they began. We’re especially interested in work rooted in working class life and the experiences of BIPOC, LGBTQ+, immigrant, disabled, and other writers whose relationships to rural places are often overlooked or flattened.
We publish in an effort to preserve the stories that might otherwise be lost, as well as to help shape how rural places are understood, remembered, and imagined.
Alongside our books, we create spaces for people to write, read, create, and gather through workshops, curated readings, open mics, and community events across Kentucky and beyond.
Photo by Trish J. Gibson
Reclaiming the Narrative
Documentation is political because the record we leave behind shapes what future generations understand about us. What gets preserved, published, taught, and remembered is never neutral. It’s shaped by institutions, money, power, and the people who have access to the tools of storytelling. The fights over what belongs in our classrooms, our libraries, and our history books are proof of that.
That’s why telling our own stories matters. When powerful people and institutions can decide which histories are worth teaching and which are better left out, writing becomes a way of pushing back. We can’t control every textbook or version of history, but we can create a record that exists beyond them. A record of how people actually lived, what they endured, what they built, and what they fought to change.
The stories we preserve today become part of the history future generations inherit. The stories we preserve now may become the evidence someone reaches for decades from today when they ask what this moment was really like. We want to leave behind more than the version of history that small few chose to tell. And, as a matter of fact, we want to leave behind our own.
New writing, rural stories, upcoming events, and more. Subscribe to Backwoods on Substack.
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New writing, rural stories, upcoming events, and more. Subscribe to Backwoods on Substack. ☆
