Nomadic Press

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Nomadic Press

Nomadic Press was a non-profit, community-centered publisher HQ'ed in Oakland, CA. Closed March 2023

08/07/2025

🖤✨ What an honor it is to lift up and celebrate these 20 luminous voices. As we continue honoring the 2025 /Nomadic Literary Award recipients, we invite you to slow down, breathe deep, and truly take in this pulse of collective brilliance.

Each name you’ll see in this carousel is a worldbuilder—someone whose words expand what’s possible, challenge the status quo, and tend to the fire of imagination in community.

Let’s celebrate our poetry winners:
Zoe Dorado
Giovanna Lomanto
René Peña-Govea
Darius Simpson
Michael Dean Gallagher
Alie Jones
Alan Pelaez Lopez
Sarah Matsui
Lyn Patterson
Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta
Shelley Wong
Lyzette Wanzer
Aimee Suzara
David Maduli

Our fiction awardees, crafting truth through story:
Hao Tran
Emily Hoang
Taneesh Kaur
Jesus Francisco Sierra

And our nonfiction honorees, bringing clarity and courage to the page:
Maw Shein Win
Pamela Lozoff

To each of you: thank you for your stories, your refusal to stop telling them, your commitment to language as liberation. Your work is urgent, gorgeous, and necessary.

These awards are not merely about recognition—they’re about connection. We honor you not only for what you’ve written, but for what you make possible for others.

🖤 From our community to yours: we see you, we celebrate you, and we’re with you.

03/15/2025

OPEN NOW! The portal to send us your poetry, fiction, or non-fiction invitations is now open!

The San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Literary Awards offer 20 winning writers ages 18–25 $2,500 per recipient for outstanding work in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.

Applicants must currently live in either Contra Costa, San Francisco, or Alameda counties. The Nomadic administers these awards with San Francisco Foundation. Judges will be announced soon!

Invitations will be open March 15–April 15, 2025.

IMPORTANT RESIDENCY NOTE: While we completely understand that the costs of the Bay Area have displaced so many long-time residents, it is a requirement of the award that you currently live in one of the counties listed above. Proof of residency will be required if you are selected as a finalist.

Visit link in bio for more information or to send us your work!

07/25/2023

Our last publication is a love letter to Oakland titled The Town. It is an anthology of 65 contributors who live (or have lived) in Oakland and was a collaborative editorial labor of love between J. K. Fowler and Ayodele Nzinga.

You can preorder your copy here ($21) and books will be shipped out in August: https://www.nomadicpress.org/thetown

05/03/2023

From J. K. Fowler, Nomadic Press Publisher:

As of June 1, 2023, we are extremely excited to announce that the vast majority of Nomadic Press titles will be migrating to a new publishing house—Black Lawrence Press! Over 100 of our authors will have a new home in the aftermath of Nomadic Press closing its publishing operations in March 2023. We are relieved to know that our authors will have such a trusted and respected home at Black Lawrence Press and look forward to watching them thrive within this new house. This will also include titles that we had committed to for 2023 and were unable to publish so stay tuned for those books’ new publishing dates with Black Lawrence Press!

From Diane Goettel, Black Lawrence Press Publisher:

The editors here at Black Lawrence Press have been following Nomadic Press for years, and we’ve been consistently impressed by both the books that they’ve published and the community of writers that they have gathered and supported. Having published some of the same authors, Nomadic and Black Lawrence share a fortuitous kinship. Our goal is to offer the Black Lawrence Press platform to as many Nomadic authors as possible, and we’re delighted that over 100 authors have decided to entrust us with their titles! We look forward to collaborating with them and welcoming them to Black Lawrence Press.

04/29/2023

Congratulations to Lourdes Figueroa on the release of her chapbook VUELTA—out now! A long poem, Vuelta draws upon the author’s background as an oral poet, as well as her migration-influenced sense of language and the world. “It is a language of the in-betweens that persists [...] the in-betweens of Spanish and English, of gender orientation, sexual orientation, and cultural orientation that breathes the words forward or backward.”

Join us in congratulating the fabulous Lourdes in the comments!

04/26/2023

The poems in SOFT ARMOR by Michal "MJ" Jones will transform how you see love. Praised by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, Nefertiti Asanti, Mimi Tempestt, Daniel B. Summerhill, and Kay Ulanday Barrett—SOFT ARMOR encapsulate the experience of loving that which disappears but is never destroyed. Join us in congratulating MJ on the publication of their chapbook and order your copy here: https://bit.ly/MichalJones

Michal ‘MJ’ Jones is a poet & parent in Richmond, CA. MJ serves as the Editor-In-Chief of Foglifter Press, a premier journal publishing trans and q***r writers. Their poems have appeared in Anomaly, Kissing Dynamite, TriQuarterly Review, & wildness. They received their MFA in Poetry from Mills College. They founded & currently facilitate Litany!, a monthly workshop for a cohort of Black q***r poets. They have a debut full-length poetry collection HOOD VACATIONS from Black Lawrence Press.

04/25/2023

Congratulations to Danny Thanh Nguyen on being awarded the 2023 San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award in Fiction! Danny has won $5000 for her short story “Return to Sender”. Follow Danny on social media and join us in celebrating his win in the comments!

Danny Thanh Nguyen (they/she/he equally) has published stories and essays in GQ, them magazine, The Offing, The Journal, and elsewhere. They are a 2023 MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute Visiting Fellow and 2023 UC Irvine Southeast Asian Archive Anne Frank Visiting Researcher. Danny’s column on kink and leather culture has appeared in the international social network platform Recon and is translated into five languages.

04/17/2023

Congratulations to Nen G Ramirez on the publication of their poetry collection, ALL WOMEN ARE BORN WAILING. Winner of The Acentos Book Prize, early praise of ALL WOMEN ARE BORN WAILING are calling Nen’s debut “an anthology of infinite nuance. It’s heartbreaking. It’s witty. It’s
endearing. It’s scathing […] The only thing more impressive than its gradation is its consistency. Every poem is a knockout.”

Available now: https://bit.ly/NRWailing

04/13/2023

Join us in congratulating Christell Victoria Roach, recipient of the 2023 San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award in Poetry! Christell has earned $5000 for a cycle of three poems presented together as “Bluesing by the Bay”. Join us in the comments with your congratulations to Christell and give her a follow to keep you with her powerful work.

Christell Victoria Roach is an Emmy-nominated storyteller writing about Blackness, the Blues, and many different types of love. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Miami after graduating from Emory University with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Creative Writing & African American Studies. Her recent work has been published by the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Magazine, Obsidian Literary Journal , Scalawag Magazine, The Miami Rail, and SWIMM Magazine. She is currently working on her first book of poetry about her family’s pioneer history in Miami entitled, “Bluesing."

04/11/2023

Spotted out in the wild: hardcopies of ALL WOMEN ARE BORN WAILING by Nen G. Ramirez! 👀📖🥳 Winner of the Acentos Book Prize, Nen’s debut has been praised for being “filled with shards of violence woven with threads of memorable beauty [that] evokes a deep, familiar pain in poems that are original and profound. This is the kind of collection you will wish to slowly savor but can’t help devouring.” -Shannon McLeod, author of Whimsy and Nature Trail Stories

Visit https://bit.ly/NRWailing to order your copy of ALL WOMEN ARE BORN WAILING

04/05/2023

Congratulations to Vania Gutierrez, recipient of the 2023 San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award in Poetry! Vania as won $5000 for two sample poems from their project “A Name Unearthed”. Follow Vania on social media and join us in celebrating her win in the comments!

Vania Luna Gutierrez (she/they) is a poet exploring what it means to hold relations — to land, lineage, self, language, people, and place. Born and raised on Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi lands (Chicago, IL), her work is heavily influenced by the city, and her cultural traditions. She affirms that poetry is a essential tool in the liberation of all oppressed peoples, and is key in revitalizing and sustaining sacred, ancestral traditions of storytelling and cultural preservation. Vania values collective healing and care, and understands poetry as a catalyst for transformation. Vania currently resides of Lisjan Ohlone territory (Oakland, CA).

04/02/2023

Join us in congratulating Carla Schick, recipient of the 2023 San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award in Poetry! Carla has earned $5000 for their poem “Rent Control”. Comment with your congrats and give Carla (who is new to IG!) a follow

Carla Schick is a q***r transformative justice activist and educator. Their works have appeared in Forum, Milvia St., Suisun Valley Review, Dove Tales: Write in Peace, and online at A Gathering of the Tribes and The Write Launch. Their poetry is also in the 100 Lives Anthology (Pure Slush), Medusa Project and a chapbook of poetry about RBG (When There Are Nine). Recipient of SF CC Forum's 2022 poetry prize. Served on editorial board of Milvia St. They received their Certificate in Poetry from Berkeley City College. Carla is a member of Circulo de Los Poetas, and Las Chingonas Poetas.

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http://www.nomadicpress.org/

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Recent Press: SF Chronicle Datebook

J.K. Fowler is hesitant to use the word “uplift” in describing the efforts of Nomadic Press, the nonprofit he founded in 2011. Particularly for a small nonprofit publisher located in Oakland, the idea of lifting up writers and artists — many of whom come from marginalized backgrounds — might pose a problem.

“The agency of the author pre-exists the publisher,” Fowler says in Nomadic Press’ office in uptown Oakland. “People of color and q***r people of color, women, trans folks — they have been uplifting themselves forever. It doesn’t take a publisher to uplift them.”