We celebrated our 6th year with a collection of lyric essays by Barbara Jane Reyes. It is a work of reclamation and reckoning that we feel also articulates the many ways in which we continue to navigate, negotiate, and fortify this curious space we find ourselves in as immigrant women in the U.S. publishing industry. In October, we announced our partnership with Independent Arts & Media as our fiscal sponsor to help us build capacity and focus on cultural strategy. The Philippine American Writers & Artists also hosted events to celebrate Barbara Jane Reyes’ Wanna Peek Into My Notebook? Notes on Pinay Liminality and Lara Stapleton’s The Ruin of Everything at the 6th Filipino American International Book Festival in San Francisco.
We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that this year, we released our 25th book, a debut poetry collection by Cynthia Buiza, which was officially launched in Bicol on December 3rd hosted by Savage Mind: Arts, Books, Cinema and the Albay Arts Foundation. Additionally, between 2021 and 2022, we made it to Kirkus’ Best Indie Books (thanks to Jeanne-Marie Osterman’s Shellback), Politico, and The New York Times (thanks to Lara Stapleton’s The Ruin of Everything) for the first time! We are grateful for the support of our readers, reviewers, and the literary ecosystem that has helped bring visibility to our press.
We are grateful, most especially, to the authors who made us possible. What motivates us at Paloma Press is the opportunity to be a conduit of stories, and to be transformative and intentional in curating these stories. When someone reads our books, we would like for them to see a diverse and, hopefully, more balanced narrative of our lived contexts, to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, ask questions, and arrive at their own conclusions. What moves us most are moments that bear witness to how narratives are changed, and we continue to marvel at possibilities.
May 2023 roar like a river, lovelier with ease and laughter.
