YOUNGSTOWN YSU professor helps start publishing house press

By SHERRI L. SHAULIS
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- After spending years making a name for himself in the literary world, a Youngstown State University professor is ready to help others do the same.
Dr. Philip Brady, professor of English at YSU and director of the university's Poetry Center, is co-founder of Etruscan Press, a new publishing house press dedicated to publishing poetry, fiction and nonfiction.
"It does the thing that small presses do," Brady said. "We will publish fiction, poetry, essays ... all of that. Up to this point, there has not been a lot of focus on the dialogue that exists between those different forms of literature."
Brady founded the press, based in Silver Springs, Md., with Dr. Robert Mooney, director of the O'Neill Literary House of Washington College in Maryland.
Etruscan Press was funded by a grant from Stephen M. Oristaglio and features a national board of advisers, Brady said. Famed authors W.D. Snodgrass, Li-Young Lee, Michael Collier and John Vernon are on the board already.
"Our idea was to find authors who were writing essays, poems, short stories, really anything, and publish those, with the only criteria being excellence as we saw it," Brady said.
The first project published under Etruscan Press was the book "September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond," edited by William Heyen.
How it started
Brady said immediately after the terrorist attacks, Heyen, a nationally respected poet, sent out a mass e-mail to friends, colleagues and others with a piece titled "The Dragonfly," which appears in "American Writers Respond."
When the e-mail began eliciting a variety of responses, Heyen noticed that people were "paying attention," Brady said.
"He came to us and asked to be able to edit a multi-genred response to the events and the issues of the day," Brady said. "The 127 responses he accepted, that's this book."
Etruscan Press also has plans to publish two other books this fall, one a collection of selected poems from Milton Kessler and the other a collection of essays from H.L. Hix.
Brady said, however, this is just the start of the press and the impact it can have at local, regional and national levels.
While Etruscan is not affiliated with YSU, or any other university, with Brady's participation and the work of others, he believes it can help to bring some attention to little-heard writers.
"This could easily illuminate a lot of the literary talent in this area, and others," he said.
For more information on Etruscan Press, visit www.etruscanpress.org.
slshaulis@vindy.com