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Broken Jaw Press Inc.
Box 596 Stn A
Fredericton NB E3B 5A6
Canada
www.brokenjaw.com
Welcome to our publishing house!
“Great writing needs great publishers. Broken Jaw Press is one of this country’s treasures.”
—Sean Wilson, Artistic Director, Ottawa International Writers Festival (onstage, Spring Edition, 2005)
“In Fredericton, Joe Blades’s Broken Jaw Press is a prolific source of new poetry.”
—Roy MacSkimming, The Perilous Trade: Publishing Canada’s Writers (M&S)
“All praise to Blades and Broken Jaw Press for putting this work before the public. Let there be many, many, many more.”
—George Elliott Clarke, Halifax Herald
“I like Broken Jaw. The press has jam, personality and takes chances that no other press takes in this country.”
—Joe Rosenblatt
Independent Canadian literary arts publishing house Broken Jaw Press was founded by writer/artist Joe Blades in the winter of 1983–1984 while he was working in Banff, Alberta. 2005 marks 20 years of publishing by Broken Jaw Press (and a quarter century of publishing by Joe Blades). After being in Halifax, Nova Scotia from 1984–1990, the publishing house has been based in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Incorporated in 2003, Broken Jaw Press Inc. and its imprints publish poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction, by both new and award-winning authors.
More than a publishing house, Broken Jaw Press is an energy-centre that gathers in writers and readers from all of the margins. Located east of the centre of Canada and left of the mainstream, we specialize in highly contemporary writing by poets, writers, translators and artists who take risks and take the responsibility for doing something different. Diverse in gender, genre, age and origin, our authors and artists have one thing in common: they go out to the edge. Many of the writers are positioned on the outside, whether by their native language or by their work with language, and writing, for them, is a highly conscious act, at once deliberate and playful, reflective and releasing.
The Broken Jaw Press name came from a medley of sources: a working of the publisher’s initials; letterpress technology—a “jaw” locks flatbed type and furniture in place, if the jaw is loose or broken, the type can move and, in printing, create a bad impression; response to a book review in Mondo Hunkamooga; and a summer 1985 The Globe and Mail article on reconstructive surgery. These fixed the Broken Jaw name with images by Joe Blades—collaged, carved in clay, cast in bronze, inked in skin. In it, we see something of the risk-taking element of writing and publishing poetry and other creative work.
From 1994 to 2003 we ran the New Muse Award to recognize a new writer with their first book. In 1996 we acquired SpareTime Editions. We created the annual Poets’ Corner Award in 1997 for the judged best Canadian poetry manuscript received. An Editorial Board gives substance toward fulfilling our publishing mandate.
In 2006 we have published six new trade books, one print chapbook, three free BJP eBook chapbooks, and several a little something broadsheets. Congratulations are in order for the recent accomplishments of several Broken Jaw Press authors and their books: In April 2005, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, author of All the Perfect Disguises (2003), winner of the Poets’ Corner Award 2003, was appointed Halifax Regional Municipality Poet Laureate for 2005-2009. In June 2005, Alice Major, author of Tales for an Urban Sky (1999), winner of the inaugeral Poets’ Corner Award, was appointed the inaugeral City of Edmonton Poet Laureate. The Space of Light / El espacio de la luz (2004) by Nela Rio, edited and translated by Elizabeth Gamble Miller, was a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for the Best Book of Translation for 2004. The title story in Cecilia Kennedy’s The Robbie Burns Revival & Other Stories (2004) was a finalist for an Arthur Ellis Award 2005, and the book is now in its third printing.
So far in 2007, we have published an a little something broadsheet, a spoken word artists chapbook, and the first issue of New Muse of Contempt since "winter 1999". Several trade books and other publications are in the works.
The accomplishments of our authors and their books show something of what we have done, how we have gotten to where we are today. The future is unknown, no matter how we prepare for it, no matter what we dream, but we work to see that Broken Jaw Press and its community of authors, editors, translators, and artists will continue to write and publish great books for great readers everywhere.
Broken Jaw Press is a member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP).
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