Focus on Dye Hard Press by the Centre for African Poetry

This issue of African Poetry focuses on Gary Cummiskey’s Dye Hard Press, as part of a planned regular feature highlighting the work of book traders, agencies, educational institutions, publishers and bloggers with a notable commitment to African poetry. Since 1994 Dye Hard Press in South Africa has published not just Cummiskey’s own books but also work from such significant recent poets as Gail Dendy, Kobus Moolman, Gus Ferguson, Arja Salafranca, Alan Finlay, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Khulile Nxumalo and Phillip Zhuwao. Dye Hard has publishing credits too for The Edge of Things, a selection of South African short fiction edited by Arja Salafranca, and other fiction and non-fiction work mostly by authors who are primarily poets. His own bibliography of about fifteen books, mostly poetry collections and chapbooks, also helps to identify him as a significant name in recent South African writing. In celebrating the work of Dye Hard Press, the Centre for African Poetry spoke to Cummiskey on the experience of owning his own press as a poet, the challenges of poetry publishing in Africa, especially in his own country, and about what should be the correct contemporary attitude towards self-publishing, especially in the developing world....Read more here