Pulley Press

Pulley Press aspires to locate, encourage, and publish poetry by poets who write from America’s rural places.

Our poetry imprint takes its inspiration from the industrial pulley: a sleek, ubiquitous tool that enables anyone to move heavy objects. In our case, we see the press itself as a device to help poets glide their poems into the hands of readers.

Pulley poets may be writing about their working lives and the places where they live. Within the intersection of landscape, workplace, and identity, the poets’ own back stories may influence their verse and bring new experiences to light.

We’re seeking poems from places perceived as remote—Indian Country, farms and ranches, small towns, from routes of migrant work, from factory floors and breakrooms—from the rich diversity of people and places beyond bright, shining cities.

The Pulley Press Story

In The Triggering Town, poet Richard Hugo writes that “a small town that has seen better days” is an inspiring image to start a poem. Indeed. But poems can start in warehouses, in mills and shops, throughout Indian Country, and along the rail lines that no longer have scheduled stops in smaller communities. Pulley Press wants to find poems from places like these and bring them into he hands of readers.

Founder and editor of Pulley Press, Frances McCue, acts on a life-long mission to connect literature to community life, whether that is through Richard Hugo House, founded by McCue and Andrea Lewis and Linda Breneman in 1996, or Where the House Was, a feature documentary written she produced or through this new poetry imprint, Pulley Press, founded by McCue and Greg Shaw.

Together, Shaw and McCue reflected on how a small press could reach into rural areas. As the pandemic progressed, McCue saw how the press might be inspired by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, an initiative that brought people together and inspired artistic productivity that came from all parts of the country. How might this press be a microcosm of a similar effort to encourage poets to create books from where they lived?

Greg’s experience as a journalist and writer who covered rural America in his home state of Oklahoma included a stint as writer and editor for the Cherokee Advocate, the tribal newspaper of the Cherokee Nation. He has co-authored numerous best sellers, including Reprogramming the American Dream, a Wall Street Journal bestseller that examined economic opportunities in rural America. Greg brought Pulley to one of its first collections: Mankiller Poems: The Lost Poems of Wilma Mankiller. The story of Frances and Greg traveling to Mankiller Flats with Charlie Soap and searching the barn is in Indian Country Today. See the story here.

The traditional path to publishing beautiful poetry is a long one, usually leading to an MFA and a tangle of contests and submissions with reading fees and on to publications. From there, poets publish in magazines and try to move into publishing a collection. Pulley Press is a mechanism that hopes to make that whole process more accessible, and faster.

If would like us to consider your manuscript, or you have a Pulley pitch, please click here to read our submission guidelines and submit your work. For all other questions, use the form below.

Get in Touch

Please use this form to get in touch with the team at Pulley to discuss our books or to get connected with our authors.

If you are submitting your work for consideration please use this page to do so.