2025-2026: Poetics of the Handmade and Final Chapbooks
/When I took my first letterpress class in 2004, I don’t think I knew what I was getting into—I was just interested in books, and I wanted to learn how to make them. One thing led to another: I made a bunch of broadsides, and then some books, and then, one day in 2008, DoubleCross Press was born.
It happened without a plan, or a mission—I started making books and then I just kept going, falling in love with manuscripts, picking up collaborators along the way. DoubleCross Press has been a labor of love, an engine of friendship, and a home for me in the last seventeen (!!) years. It’s one of the few chapbook presses still around from its mid-oughts generation. It’s a consistent commitment in my life, though the time and energy I’m able to give to it waxes and wanes, and in some years we don’t manage to put out any books at all.
I’ve loved the time I’ve spent working on books with Anna and Jeff and with our authors, but as various pressures have shifted the nature of this work, it’s become clear that it’s time to wind up DoubleCross’s production.
But not without celebration! All three of us are so proud of what we’ve built, and want to take the time to end things right—to finish out our commitments, to get the books we’ve made into readers’ and libraries’ hands, and to celebrate our wonderful authors.
So for the next two years, we’ll be focusing primarily on the Poetics of the Handmade series (books on small press culture, written by writer-bookmakers), and on getting our books into the hands of readers who’ll appreciate them. We’ll be attending book fairs and zine fests and reaching out to libraries. And we hope to spend 2026 hosting readings and other celebratory events for our eighteenth and final year.
Thank you to every writer who sent us a manuscript, every person who came to chat with us at a bookfair, every reader, every small press editor who also commits to this work for the love of language. It is an honor to be in your company.
-MC
