7 pm at Scuppernong Books

Publishers decide, in a very real sense, what makes it into publication and much of the print information available to the consumer. If a small press publisher can survive in a notoriously fickle business, they have the chance to make little-known work available or to respond quickly to new information.

Early this year, Dennis Johnson and the staff at Melville House worked around the clock to prepare the just-released Mueller Report for publication and wide distribution. They’ve become specialists at this type of quick turnaround publishing, having previously published The Climate Change Report and The Torture Report, among others.

Melville House is an independent publisher located in Brooklyn, New York. It was founded in 2001 by sculptor Valerie Merians and fiction writer/journalist Dennis Johnson, in order to publish Poetry After 9/11, a book of material culled from Johnson’s groundbreaking MobyLives book blog. The material consisted of things sent to the blog by writers and poets in response to the 9/11 attacks, and Johnson and Merians felt it better represented the spirit of New York than the call to war of the Bush administration.

Melville House is also known for publishing fiction, including Nobel Prize winners Imre Kertesz and Heinrich Boll and non-fiction, including their Last Interview series.

Dennis Johnson is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer and journalist who founded the first American book blog, MobyLives. With his wife, Valerie Merians, he is the co-founder and publisher of Melville House. He lives in Brooklyn.

Dennis will also spreak at 5:30pm on Tuesday, October 22 at the Weatherspoon Art Museum on the campus of UNC-G.

Co-sponsored by Weatherspoon Art Museum