Greenfield Review Press records (MS.2016.006)

Administrative history

The Greenfield Review Press was founded in Greenfield, NY by Joseph and Carol Bruchac in 1970. It published the The Greenfield Review, a cross-cultural magazine that focused mainly on poetry, beginning in 1970 and running until 1987. During this time it served as a home for a great diversity of voices by publishing poetry issues devoted to black American and black African poets, as well as Canadian, Chicano, West Indies/Caribbean, Arab American, American Indian, and Asian American poets. These last two schools of poetry had gained a wider audience and great critical attention from mid-1970s to mid-1980s. The Greenfield Review published these poets at a time when they began to find individual voices and identification in a larger American community. In this way, the 1970s are a unique period of discovery for each of these groups. The press published a variety of works from different poets and writers up until its last known work in 2005.

The Greenfield Review Press was also a major publisher of American prison writing by incarcerated persons. The publisher’s first book of prisoner poetry was a collection of inmate poems smuggled out of Soledad Prison in 1971. Consequently, the press published a number of anthologies as well as single-author works penned by American inmates, while also becoming involved with both the distribution of literary materials to prisons and the promotion of writing workshops within prisons. To this end, Joseph Bruchac founded The COSMEP Prison Project Newsletter, which subsequently became The Prison Writing Review, both to distribute the work of inmates and to promote writing programs in prisons through workshops and poetry-related programs, including newspapers and prison-edited literary magazines. This publication existed from 1970 until 1984.