Red Hen Press will celebrate its 30th anniversary as an independent publisher in 2024 and will mark the occasion at its annual benefit luncheon on October 6. Based in Pasadena, California, the indie press publishes 27 titles annually in fiction and poetry and is distributed by PGW. In its three decades, Red Hen has published more than 600 titles—many by LGBTQ, BIPOC, and disabled authors.
Red Hen is also the poetry publisher of the writer Percival Everett, whose works – including Delete (Gray Wolf) and James (Doubleday) – have given him a huge following. On August 20, the publisher released Everett’s sixth collection of poems, Sonnets for a missing key.
“Red Hen was wonderfully encouraging and receptive to my poetry,” said Everett PW“Your attention to quality and a larger mission of art is always an inspiration to me.”
CEO and publisher Kate Gale founded Red Hen in 1994 with Mark Cull, who now serves as artistic director and contracting officer. “We started as a poetry publisher,” Gale said, and after two years we added prose. Prose titles now make up two-thirds of Red Hen’s publications, and Gale is proud to be able to publish a variety of work outside the scope of corporate publishing. “I think of Red Hen as a little kayak, and if we change our minds about something, we can quickly change direction,” she said.
Lately, Red Hen has been leaning into the reading tastes of the younger generation, and the risk is paying off. “We have a young millennial team, and they read fantasy and a little bit more genre,” Gale said, which led to the success of LA author Madeleine Nakamura’s 2023 fantasy novel. CursebreakerRed Hen’s top titles this season include a thriller debut from journalist Aliah Wright, Now you owe me something (Sept.) and a crime novel by LA author DC Frost, A punishing breed.
“Five years ago, we moved from our core business of poetry and fiction to more sophisticated fiction,” Gale said. “I would say the publishing house has evolved.”
Red Hen’s seven imprints also offer flexibility. They include Boreal Books, an imprint Red Hen created to highlight Alaskan authors and topics, and Xeno Books, which Gale described as a “catch-all” for titles that fall outside Red Hen’s usual parameters.
“A Xeno book that sells well is The essential handbook for fundraisers” by philanthropist Lisa Greer, Gale explained. Although it is neither fiction nor poetry, “we thought, let’s make it a xeno book. It’s the kind of unusual publishing house where we can start with a small print run and see what happens. Jennifer Risher’s book, We Need to Talk: Memoirs of Wealthended up selling 3,000-4,000 copies as a Xeno title. It was our best-selling book that year, so sometimes it surprises you.”
Book series, awards and educational programs also signal the publisher’s values. In 2003, the publisher launched its Writing in the Schools program, a K-12 program that provides free creative writing workshops and books to more than 300 low-income students in Los Angeles each year. It offers five awards, each with a cash prize and a Red Hen contract, including—since 2023—a fiction award in memory of the late novelist Cai Emmons. As for its imprints and series, Letras Latinas, an imprint of the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies, invites Latin American poetry, while Quill, an LGBTQ-specific list edited by Tobi Harper, Red Hen’s deputy director, specializes in LGBTQ literature.
“When Quill launched, Red Hen published an LGBTQ title every year, and when Letras Latinas launched, it was a Latina title every two years,” Gale said. “But people know you’re excited about LGBTQ and Latina titles, so you get more of those titles. We ended up having winners of our Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award who are LGBTQ or Latina. Tobi believes the series changed everything at Red Hen because we advertised, ‘This is who we are. This is what we’re looking for.'”
Red Hen’s 12 employees are predominantly BIPOC and LGBTQ, and about half of the staff started as interns. Red Hen partners with the LA County Arts and Culture Commission and Occidental College’s internship program to provide paid and often remote internships. One former intern is media director Monica Fernandez, who was hired full-time in 2018.
“Right now, we’re a women-only, non-binary publishing house, and I’m proud to be one of the BIPOC members of the team,” Fernandez said. “The work environment fosters the enthusiasm, the fire that I think only BIPOC or LGBTQ people bring to the industry.”
As Red Hen enters its fourth decade, Gale is confident about growth. Although she doesn’t plan to publish more than 27 books a year yet, “I’m planning for higher print runs,” she said. “Right now, 5,000-7,000 copies would be a big print run for us. I’m planning for print runs of 10,000-25,000, and in five years I want to be at a point where our leading titles are selling 25,000-50,000 copies.” As an example of sustainable growth, she pointed to another PGW distribution client, Europa Editions.
“My other dream would be that sometime in the next five years we’d sell a book as a movie,” Gale added. “That would be so exciting for the team. I see Red Hen as one of the biggest publishers on the West Coast.”
