Dede Cummings’ interests and talents in writing, book design, and environmental justice all led to her founding of Green Writers Press.
The award-winning Green Writers Press represents the intersection of Dede Cummings’ passions for the published word and a sustainable future for the Earth.
By Valerie Stuart
Green Writers Press was born in 2014 out of the devastation of 2011’s Tropical Storm Irene and one local woman’s determination to stem the tide of global climate change.
Brattleboro’s Dede Cummings, inspired by fellow Vermonter Bill McKibben and active in his group 350.org (the international movement of ordinary people working to end the age of fossil fuels) and the locavore movement, thought long and hard about how all of her passions might intersect and make a difference only she could lead.
A talented writer and designer, she found that difference in publishing.
Five years old at the time of this writing, Cummings’s Green Writers Press (GWP) has published 130 authors: emerging and established fiction and non-fiction writers such as Julia Alvarez, John Elder, Clarence Major, Gary Margolis, and Tony Whedon. Roughly half are Vermonters.
The press is guided by a world-class advisory board: the head of the list is the late Howard Frank Mosher, who lived in the Northeast Kingdom and received many awards for his fiction, including Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, the American Civil Liberties Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Vermont Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the New England Book Award and, most recently, the 2011 New England Independent Booksellers Association’s President’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts.
Frankly, the roster of the advisory board is staggering. The names will impress those in the know; you should definitely check out their full credentials on greenwriterspress.com, along with all the other goodies on the site, which includes titles new and upcoming, ordering information, and a blog and podcast.
Certainly GWP has no shortage of manuscripts to choose from. Last year the company received 300 submissions for consideration. This year Cummings expects her expert team to review 600 manuscripts. Readers will get the best of the best.
Standout titles already under GWP’s banner include Come Together: A Movement of One by Dana Simpson and the Thinkers Gang. The handbook’s objective is to inspire individuals to address climate change by retooling their daily actions.
Another is Resilience and Resistance: Building Sustainable Communities for a Post Oil Age by Tim Stevenson. The author shares his recommendations on what communities can do to survive the climate crisis and thrive in a post-petroleum world.
This past July, GWP received the Vermont Literary Inspiration Award from Bookstock, which hosts one of Vermont’s largest annual literary festivals. The awards committee said it chose GWP “hands down” from a shortlist due to its environmental focus and strong support of Vermont literary life.
GWP’s best-selling children’s picture book Salamander Sky, written by Katy Farber and illustrated by Meg Sodano, won the prestigious John Burroughs Riverby Award this year. The story, about the migration of the elusive spotted salamander every spring in the eastern United States, is commended as a tool for engaging children in conservation. The picture book also received a Vermont Book Award. Last year it won a Nautilus Book Award (silver) and was named a New England Children’s Book Award finalist.
Three of GWP’s children’s books were long-listed for Green Earth Book Awards in 2017. The tales — Broken Wing by David Budbill, Kaboom! by Brian Adams, and Did Tiger Take the Rain by Charles Norris-Brown — embolden children and teens to take action to preserve the planet.
Poets for the people
Cummings, who also is a commentator for Vermont Public Radio and whose poetry has been published in Mademoiselle, The Lake, InQuire, Vending Machine Press, Kentucky Review, Connotation Press, and Bloodroot Literary Magazine, says what she finds most rewarding about being a small independent press — most gratifying — is publishing the work of fellow poets.
“Publishing is extremely competitive and there is a real need for poetry in today’s world,” she says.
She adds that several recent GWP titles address what she sees as peoples’ search for meaning:
Anthology of Poetry: Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection, edited by Vermont poet James Crews, encourages readers to transcend the negativity that fills the media during these turbulent times and focus on daily acts of kindness and connection. In the book, venerable poets such as Jane Hirshfield, Mark Doty, and Marie Howe appear alongside remarkable up-and-comers. Approximately 2,000 copies sold when the book was released.
The underlying theme of All One Breath by poet Robert Pack is humankind’s kinship with the earth’s other inhabitants. His poems address the grim reality of how irresponsible human activity has endangered the earth. But they also offer hope our imagination will save us.
Connecting on human issues
Actually, GWP authors cover several other subjects in refreshing new ways as well, including social justice, feminism, caring for our elders, and aging.
Cummings proudly recalls how one well-known Vermonter, who could have opted for a major publisher, chose GWP because it is owned by a woman and a poet. Former Vermont Gov. Madeleine Kunin’s New York City-based agent told Cummings as much when she called to inform her GWP had gotten the job.
Kunin’s Coming of Age: My Journey to the Eighties paints an honest and positive portrait of aging as the author, who led the Green Mountain State 1985–1991, considers herself toward the sunset of her extraordinary life. Foreword magazine named the work an Indies Book of the Year finalist in 2018 in the autobiography and memoir category. And Kunin is partnering with GWP on a poetry collection, forthcoming this year.
Supporting bookstores to boot
Another distinction of Cummings and GWP: She encourages her authors to partner with their communities’ bookstores through its Adopt a Local Bookstore program.
Acclaimed Vermont author Howard Frank Mosher was on board. The late author of 12 books, including A Stranger in the Kingdom and Where the Rivers Flow North, Mosher had said it was vital that GWP support small independent bookstores. He felt passionately that Vermont needed an independent press to keep good ideas and literature alive.
Mosher was a GWP Advisory Board member until his death in 2017. In his honor, GWP annually awards a prize for an author’s debut novel or short story collection.
So that’s the first chapter of Green Writers Press’s story. Looking ahead, Cummings says she has plans to grow the business. GWP recently signed an agreement with Chicago-based Independent Publishers Group, one of the world’s largest book distributors. The contract will enable GWP to market its books — and their authors’ and artists’ messages of immediacy, care, and community — worldwide.
When we say talented writer, we mean it…
As a Middlebury College undergraduate, Dede Cummings received the Mary Dunning Thwing Award, attended the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and studied with Hayden Carruth at the Bennington Writing Seminars. Later she was a poetry contributor at Bread Loaf and was a Discover/The Nation poetry semi-finalist. In 2016, with Green Writers Press turning out award winners and helping spread her message of global climate care, Cummings was awarded a writer’s grant and partial fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, the largest international artists’ and writers’ residency program in the United States.
