Middle-America's most engaging authors since 1998.
Middle-America's most engaging authors since 1998.
Spartan Press was launched in spring of 1998 by Jason Ryberg and Will Leathem as a vehicle to give voice to Middle-American writers whose work did not fit into the more calcified commercial and academic-centric publishing apparatus.
Since then, Spartan Press has brought to print over 400 titles of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction.
Spartan’s main goals were to provide writers with professional, eye-catching products (books) that stood apart from the usual POD schlock, and to do so at a price point where working authors could earn meaningful financial returns on far smaller print-run quantities than the existing publishers that seemed to siphon off most (if any) financial reward from work.
Spartan Press does not accept unsolicited manuscripts. You may send a query letter describing why your book of poems fits into one of our ongoing series.
We publish authors working across all styles, but with a focus on the indie writers who tour and performs frequently. We only publish full-length poetry manuscripts.
Jason Ryberg
spartanpresskc@gmail.com
Jason Ryberg is the author of over twenty books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, several angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors, and a box full of notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel. He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community. He lives part-time in Kansas City, with a rooster named Little Red and a billy goat named Giuseppe, and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.
Will Leathem
w84gdo@gmail.com
Co-founder and co-owner of Kansas City’s legendary Indy bookstore, Prospero’s Books, Leathem is a poet, essayist and fiction writer with several full-length books, dozens of published short stories, essays and fictions. He is founder and Executive Director of the Arts Nonprofit Club Medici.