“A shipment of Sarah-Catherine Gutierrez's new book But First Save 10: The One Simple Money Move That Will Change Your Life was on the way to Et Alia Press one afternoon early in July and publisher Erin Wood was preparing for the onslaught.
"We've got 650 pounds of books coming today," she says. "My daughter is going to be helping put return address labels on all the packages and my husband is printing the address labels in his office."
“This is how things are run at Et Alia, the ambitious, Little Rock-based ‘small press for big voices’ that has published memoirs, children's books, anthologies, poetry, books on fashion, nature and Wood's award-winning 2019 collection of interviews and photography "Women Make Arkansas: Conversations With 50 Creatives," which also spawned the annual Women Make Arkansas Market.
“In the past five or six years, I've really wanted to make this a full-time thing," Wood, 42, says during a telephone interview. "It also became really clear to me that if you were going to publish three to five books a year, why not make them in Arkansas? This is my native state, and we've got lots of stories to tell.
“Georgia author Megan Volpert edited Closet Cases: Queers on What We Wear, which was published by Et Alia in March.
"‘I see Erin at the forefront of this new South we are all trying to build together, something that is a little more progressive, a little more diverse," Volpert says. "If you look at the types of writers she's publishing, it's a very diverse bunch and it's mostly women. She gets a lot credit for being a small, one-woman operation, but not a lot of people look at the very quiet and useful way that her selections have been political.’"
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