Greetings from Echobird Press!

Greetings!

Yes, you heard an echo. It’s how we roll here at our little desert-borne press.

I suppose the question is, who are we and what are we doing?

Echobird Press is the brainchild of Kat Heatherington and Terra McKeown.

Kat has been writing poetry since she was a child, and has been making chapbooks, publishing poems and manuscripts, and doing public readings since college. Originally wanting to become an academic, the ivory tower at that level didn’t suit her, and now she does graduate advisement for a California university. Kat has published three books: Bones of This Land, The Heart is a Muscle and A Map Without Your Shadow (Heart is, currently, out of print).

Since ze was 9 years old, Terra has been telling people that ze was going to be a novelist when ze grew up. It took several decades to grow up, apparently, but Terra did publish the first two books of zir urban fantasy series The Alters and a third will be coming next year. In the meantime, they have been a social worker, somatic therapist, disability advocate, and generally being the healer healing zirself.

But how did this project come to be? Really, it was Kat’s ingenious idea. Terra had recently self-published a book, and Kat was trying to find a place for her books after her previous publisher folded. So one evening, Terra got a text asking “What if we started a press?” Ze blinked and replied, “Well, that’s a fantastic idea.” 

That got the ball rolling, but what it would become was something we didn’t anticipate.

Yes, we started an imprint because we wanted to publish our books. It’s a bit of a vanity, but we’re queer: we like vanity. And doing things the way others don’t. Regardless, we also realized we had lots of friends and community members who have trouble finding places to publish. We wanted to work with them and get the words of theirs that we love to the world.

Even though we started publishing spec-fic novels and poetry chapbooks in late 2022, we have been going slow since then, working with some of our community on publishing with us. We currently have seven books in our catalog, and at least three more on the way in early 2025. As we open our submissions, we hope to double that for the coming year.

Not only that, in the coming year, we are expanding our range, offering at least one online event to celebrate our authors and community, as well as moving on to other media such as audiobooks.

Beyond just the books, though, we wanted to make sure our values matched our art. We always had difficulty finding representation in books and other media, and have had obstacles to publishing because of who we are and who and what we write about. Representation for all folks who aren’t straight, able-bodied WASPs is always a challenge. The publishing world and other media is coming along, and there’s lots out there to read and watch with people of all colors, ethnicities, gender identities and sexual orientation, and that’s amazing! But there is always more work to do. After all, if we love books, then we want to do it “right.”

What “right” looks like is as ambiguous as those quotes imply: Kat and Terra are both white, and we know falling into white savior behavior is both abhorrent and doesn’t get anything effectively done. Racial justice is a big part of both our personal work and the work we do in the world. Educating ourselves and others and uplifting the voices of and providing support to BIPOC and queer/trans folks is at the core of what we want to do with Echobird Press. It is the force behind our assertion that Echobird wants “diverse authors for diverse readers.”

In the coming months, we will be launching our pages on decolonization as well as anti-racism, an organic page to provide resources, entertainment and collaboration. These resources are primarily geared toward white folks, but we do hope that these resources will help increase the courageous conversations the world needs to have and move us even just a few steps closer to equality for all.

It’s an exciting time for Echobird press! Stay tuned for more…our newsletters will only be monthly so as not to deluge you, but we invite you to be a part of our community and celebrate a deep love for the written word and the diverse hands that write them.