C. Russell Price is a genderqueer poet originally from Virginia but lives in Chicago. Previous publications include: Assaracus, Court Green, Glitterwolf, MiPOesias, Weave, and elsewhere. They are a 2015 Lambda Fellow in Poetry. They currently work with TriQuarterly and Story Club Magazine. Their chapbook Tonight We Fuck The Trailer Park Out of Each Other is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press in Summer 2016.
What doors do you open at The Offing?
I’m a poetry reader. I’m one of the first screeners of submissions. If you jump out, if you’re trying something different//something personal, intense — I keep you. If I keep thinking about your poem after reading hundreds of others that deal with the same personal politics/identity/macro & micro rebellion — I champion you.
What doors does The Offing open for you?
The Offing has introduced me to countless authors who I may have never met. The staff is so diverse in aesthetics and personal his/herstory that submissions get a wide range of readings. We’re scouting for the work that really punches. Every pub date I meet someone I can’t stop reading.
Is there a piece you’ve worked on or found at The Offing that’s been especially meaningful to you?
Hands down, “It Is Important To Be Something” by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. I read it at my birthday party, I taped it next to my bathroom mirror, I have it framed on my desk at work. It’s a stunning piece. In such short amount of lines, it really gets at what I love about poetry: lyrically acrobatic, personally devastating. I’m not saying that “good” poetry has to be dramatic, I’m just saying either blow the top of my head off or find the nearest exit.
What would you like to see us do with the donations we receive during our fundraiser?
I would love to see recordings of Offing authors in conversation. I would love to see an Offing tour. I would love to just pay our writers the amount their work deserves. We’re not here to give you contributor copies, we’re here to destroy the white, cis, heteropatriarchy that contemporary publishing has created. I want to see us take down all the machines through community-centered workshops led by Offing writers. I want more and more voices at the table.
Anything else? Tell us something about your experience with The Offing and why this work is meaningful to you.
The Offing is a community of passionate writers who are sharing and pushing work that gets buried by the mainstream. I’ve never been so inspired by a collective of editors who are looking to make meaningful and necessary waves in publishing.