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Omnidawn Publishing, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, seeks to support and expand our community of writers and readers through the work we choose to publish, which questions, in both form and content, the prevailing limits of convention. Our intent is to explore internal and external boundaries and push, with compassionate insight, the limits of risk. Just as our name suggests—“omni” (in all ways and places) and “dawn” (the first appearance of light)—we publish creative works that open readers anew to the myriad ways that language may bring new light, insight, awareness, as well as a heightened respect for, and appreciation of, differences. 

At Omnidawn, it is a significant part of our mission to celebrate and include authors of different races, ages, genders, LGBTQIA+, people with disabilities, and to include any/all those whose voices are underrepresented in publishing and in our culture at large.

We want this celebration and inclusion to be reflected at every level of our organization: authors, volunteers, staff, poetry and fiction editors, poetry and fiction contest judges, reviewers, board members, and advisory board members. 

It is also a significant part of our mission to give opportunities to be published to authors who do not have the financial means to apply to our poetry contests. We offer fee waivers to those who write to us to let us know about financial hardship.

In all of our publications, (books, our free online journal Omniverse.us, and more) we are committed to conversations which address equity, reparations, class, gender, and other issues of social justice.

As of October 2022, Omnidawn is a women-run press. Its co-publishers are Rusty Morrison & Laura Joakimson. All of us at Omnidawn have seen the numbers
(thanks in part to the work of VIDA) which tell us that women-run organizations are underrepresented in the US. Rusty and Laura bring to our work a culture of collaboration, an open invitation to positive life-affirming change, and a belief in the value of compassion.

All of us at Omnidawn believe that the best, and most resilient organizations and individuals are constantly re-attuning to the changing state of the present, while still honoring what remains important, which comes from our past.

Omnidawn was founded in 2001 by Ken Keegan & Rusty Morrison. Ken and Rusty began the press because of their belief that lively, culturally pertinent, emotionally and intellectually engaging literature can be of great value, and it is a privilege to participate in that work.

Ken Keegan passed away of cancer in October, 2022. Rusty & Laura have continued what is best from that legacy, while renewing Omnidawn’s focus on becoming a more modernized, resilient and sustainable press.

We at Omnidawn whole-heartedly believe that our society needs small presses so that widely diverse ideas and points-of-view are easily accessible to everyone. Italo Calvino: “… the function of literature is communication between things that are different… because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.”

Omnidawn books are frequently reviewed in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Rain Taxi, Lana Turner, The Journal, Jacket, and Pleiades, and have been reviewed in Chicago Review, American Book Review, The Village Voice, The Midwest Book Review, The Poetry Project Newsletter, HOW2, The New Review of Literature, Small Press Traffic Newsletter, Electronic Poetry Review, Interim, and ARC (Canada’s National Poetry Magazine), as well as many other publications and podcasts such as the On Being Project’s Poetry Unbound, Words on a Wire, Poets at Work, VS, Close Talking, For the Wild, and Art Heals All Wounds. 

Omnidawn books have received the following major awards and honors:

Omnidawn Publishing’s Board of Directors

(Board Chair) Tyrone Williams is the David Gray Chair of Poetry & Letters at SUNY Buffalo. He is the author of several chapbooks and seven books of poetry: c.c. (Krupskaya 2002), On Spec (Omnidawn 2008), The Hero Project of the Century (The Backwaters Press 2009), Adventures of Pi (Dos Madres Press 2011), Howell (Atelos Books 2011), As Iz (Omnidawn 2018), washpark (with Pat Clifford)(Delete Press, 2021)and stilettos in a rifle range (Wayne State University Press, 2022). A limited-edition art project, Trump l’oeil, was published by Hostile Books in 2017. He and Jeanne Heuving edited an anthology of critical essays, Inciting Poetics (University of New Mexico Press, 2019). His website is https://www.flummoxedpoet.com/

Norma Cole is a poet, visual artist and translator. Her books of poetry include FATE NEWS (Omnidawn 2018), Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside (Omnidawn 2012), Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988—2008 (City Lights 2009), Collective Memory (Granary Press 2006), Spinoza in Her Youth (Omnidawn 2002) and Actualities (Litmus 2015), a collaborationwith painter Marina Adams. TO BE AT MUSIC: Essays & Talks (Omnidawn) appeared in 2010. Her translations from the French include Danielle Collobert’s It Then, Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (edited and translated by Cole), andJean Daive’s White Decimal. She has work in anthologies such as Resist Much / Obey Little, American Hybrid: a Norton Anthology of New Poetry, Best American Experimental Writing and women: poetry: migration (an anthology). Cole has had poems in many literary magazines including Gramma, Posit, Brooklyn Rail, Art in America, Hambone, Sulfur, Conjunctions, HOW(ever), Talisman and Acts. Honors include Regents’ Lecturer at University of California, Berkeley, Fall 2008, the Fund for Poetry, Gertrude Stein Awards, the Richardson Award for Non-Fiction Prose and the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award for Poetry. She curated a show by Marina Adams at Cue Arts in NYC (2008) and collaborated with Adams in BOMB 114, Winter 2011. Her visual work has been shown at the Miami University Art Museum, [2nd floor projects] in San Francisco, “Way Bay,” at the Berkeley Art Museum and a film, “By the Turning Bridge,” at Arion Press, San Francisco, and NIAD, Richmond, California. A book of drawings, called DRAWINGS, with an introduction by Mary Ann Caws, appeared from Further Other Book Works (2020). Born in Toronto, Canada, she lives in San Francisco.

Peter Burghardt is the author of (no subject), published by Omnidawn in 2022. He spends his time in the Midwest and the SF Bay Area. He co-founded and edits speCt books with Gillian Olivia Blythe Hamel, Robert Andrew Perez, and Chris Philpot. His work has appeared in various magazines and journals online and in print. His chapbook, Cosmic American Music, is available from Old Gold Press.

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David Koehn won the May Sarton Poetry Prize with his first full-length manuscript, Twine (Bauhan Publishing, 2013). He released a collection analyzing Donald Justice’s approach to prosody titled Compendium (Omnidawn Publishing, 2017). Omnidawn Publishing also brought out his second full-length collection, Scatterplot, in 2020, and his latest book, SUR will be published by Omnidawn in 2024. Koehn has a forthcoming chapbook, intervals of, from a collaboration with Rebecca Resinski, which Ragged Lion Press is set to publish. Koehn’s writing has appeared in several chapbooks and across a wide range of literary magazines including distinguished publications such as Kenyon Review, New England Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Rhino, Volt, Carolina Quarterly, Diagram, McSweeney’s, The Greensboro Review, North American Review, The Rumpus, Smartish Pace, Hotel Amerika, Gargoyle, Zyzzva, and Prairie Schooner. He earned his BA in Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon and an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Florida.

Jeffrey Pethybridge is a poet, editor, curator, and sound artist; he is the author of Striven, The Bright Treatise (Noemi Press 2013), which was selected as one of ten best debuts of 2013 by Poets & Writers. His second collection Force Drift, an essay in the epic  is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2025.

His work appears internationally in journals such as diSonare (MX); White Wall Review (CA); Writing Utopia (UK); the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day; Chicago Review, Volt, Best American Experimental Writing, Manifold Criticism; The Iowa Review, New American Writing and others. 

He teaches in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University where he is Director of the Summer Writing Program. In 2025 he’ll serve as the curator of Enclave, a transdisciplinary poetry festival held in Mexico City each year.

He lives in so-called Denver with the poet Carolina Ebeid, and their son Patrick; together they edit the online zine Visible Binary.

Steven Rood was born in Los Angeles, attended Hollywood H.S. and U.C. Berkeley, and is a practicing trial lawyer. He has studied classical guitar for decades. For 15 years he was a friend and poetry student of Jack Gilbert, until Jack’s death. Steven Rood’s book, Naming the Wind, was published in 2022 by Omnidawn. An earlier iteration of Naming the Wind was a 2019 National Poetry Series Finalist. His poems appear in Periodicities, Sporklet, Quarterly West, Marin Poetry Center Anthology, Fugue, Lyric, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tar River Poetry, New Letters, The Marlboro Review, The Atlanta Review, The Southern Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere. His new book, Music From Behind a Stone Wall will be released by Omnidawn in 2024. He lives in Berkeley.

Writer and artist Steven Seidenberg’s literary work uniquely occupies the interstices between philosophical, diegetic, and poetic discursive timbres. He is the author of Anon (Omnidawn, 2022), plain sight (Roof Books, 2020), Situ (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Null Set (Spooky Actions, 2015), Itch (RAW ArT Press, 2014), and numerous chapbooks of poetry and aphorism. His books have been published in Swedish, Italian, and Portuguese translation, and his collections of photographs include The Architecture of Silence: Abandoned Lives of the Italian South (Contrasto, 2023) and Pipevalve: Berlin (Lodima Press, 2017). He has had exhibitions of his visual work in various venues in Japan, North America, and Europe.



Non-voting members: Rusty Morrison and Laura Joakimson

Community Partners
 The MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of CA 
speCt! books 
The Studio One Reading Series

Advisory Board

Jason Bayani is the author of Locus (Omnidawn Publishing 2019) and Amulet (Write Bloody Publishing 2013). He’s an MFA graduate from Saint Mary’s College, a Kundiman fellow, and works as the Artistic Director for Kearny Street Workshop. Jason performs regularly around the country and debuted his solo theater show “Locus of Control” in 2016 with theatrical runs in San Francisco, New York, and Austin. As Artistic Director for Kearny Street Workshop, Jason is able to collaborate with Omnidawn on projects and programs that benefit both organizations. And he offers the insights and expertise to Omnidawn that he has gained as KSW’s Artistic Director. 

Jennifer Kulbeck is always looking at the Farallon Islands. In addition to her work as an administrator at a small liberal arts college, she is a writer, letterpress printer, collector, and interdisciplinary collaborator with an MFA from San Francisco State University. She edited Crux, a small press anthology, and her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared most recently in West Marin Review, Storm Cellar, and Pittsburgh Poetry Houses. Jen serves on the advisory board for Omnidawn Publishing, where she applies her experience working with nonprofit higher education and arts organizations to the needs of a nonprofit literary press. 

Brenna Kupferman is the Business Development Director for the Liriodendron Foundation, an organization responsible for managing the historic Liriodendron Mansion in Bel Air, Maryland. Ms. Kupferman has worked with a wide variety of charitable organizations as Development Director, including at for Free Speech for People, GoodWeave International, and ActionAid USA, and as an independent consultant. She specializes in fundraising, strategic planning, and helping organizations to grow sustainably. A native of Washington, PA, Ms. Kupferman received her BA from Bennington College and a University Certificate in Teaching English as a Second Language from Akron University. Brenna provides pro bono fundraising consulting services for a handful of local, national, and international organizations, is a piano instructor, a songwriter, and a singer with several bands. 

Claire Marie Stancek is the author of Oil Spell (Omnidawn, 2018) and MOUTHS (Noemi, 2017). Having earned her PhD in English from UC Berkeley in 2018, Stancek unites both academic and creative interest in the ecopoetics of noise—from her academic book project on nineteenth-century sonic experiments to her recent poetry which has appeared in Apogee, Berkeley Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Oversound, Puerto del Sol, Spoon River Poetry Review, and the Berkeley Art Museum’s recent exhibit Way Bay, among other venues. At Berkeley, she has taught an advanced research seminar on mysticism in Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins; an American Cultures class on issues of race, gender, and class in the writing of 21st Century poets; poetry writing workshops; introductory composition classes; and discussion groups for large lectures. She has also taught a poetry workshop in the larger Bay Area community. Stancek has worked as a Berkeley Connect mentor to advise and support students—especially junior transfers and freshmen—as they adjust to life at Berkeley. She has also volunteered extensively both on and off the Berkeley campus to host poetry readings, facilitate working groups, and organize conferences. With Lyn Hejinian and Jane Gregory, she edits Nion Editions, a chapbook press. Her third book, wyrd]bird—which moves between poetry and prose, essay and journal, fragment and photograph—was published by Omnidawn in 2020. 

Writer, poet, and visual artist Truong Tran earned his MFA from San Francisco State and is the author of a number of collections, including: The Book of Perceptions (1999), a finalist for a Kiriyama Prize; placing the accents (1999), a finalist for a Western States Book Award; dust and conscience (2000), winner of a San Francisco State Poetry Center Prize; within the margin (2004); and four letter words (2008). He is also the author of the children’s book Going Home, Coming Home (2003). Omnidawn published 100 Words, his first collaboration with the poet Damon Potter, in Spring 2021. And their second collaboration, Looking and Seeing/Seeing and Looking was published in 2023 by Omnidawn. Tran’s book, Book of the Other: small in comparison was published by Kaya Press in 2021.