About
Born in the beautiful Huerfano Valley in southern Colorado, Orphan Press is the brainchild of writer Kristen Iversen and artist Greg Larson, who were then joined by the creative energies of Wendy Sumner Winter and the other members of our editorial board. We are interested in connections between art and language, image and text, and the vast landscape of uncharted possibilities in the expanding field of creative nonfiction.
Our goal is to publish books of high literary and artistic merit that stimulate the mind and the spirit and ignite new ways of thinking about language, image, self, and society.
Who We Are
Kristen Iversen is the author of Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Shadow of Rocky Flats (Crown 2012), selected by Barnes & Noble for their 2012 Great New Writers Program. Full Body Burden is described as “terrifyingly brilliant” (Simon Winchester), “as personal and powerful as Silkwood” (Rebecca Skloot), and “a hauntingly beautiful memoir that is a devastating investigation into the human costs of building and living with the atomic bomb” (Kai Bird). Kristen is also the author of the bestselling Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth, winner of the Colorado Book Award and the Barbara Sudler Award for Nonfiction. She holds a Ph.D from the University of Denver and currently directs the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Memphis.
Greg Larson is a writer, editor, and artist. He is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has traveled extensively around the world. He spent many years living and working in Japan. His edgy, seductive landscapes have been described as a “discovery, journey and spiritual epiphany.” He has been published in The Pinch, Art & The Nude, and ARTisSpectrum magazine. Influenced by American Modernism as well as lyrical abstraction, his process and images deal with light, infiniteness, and immediacy to arrive at conclusions that are both contemporary and dynamic.
Adam Braver is the author of four novels, most recently November 22, 1963. His books have been selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers program, Border’s Original Voices series, the IndieNext list, and twice for the Book Sense list; as well as having been translated into Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and French. He is on faculty and writer-in-residence at Roger Williams University in Bristol, RI. He also been a regular writer-in-residence at the NY State Summer Writers Institute. His forthcoming book, MISFIT, will be published in August 2012.
Marcia Aldrich teaches in the Department of English at Michigan State University. She is the author of Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton. She was the editor of Fourth Genre, Exploration in Nonfiction from 2007-2011. Her book Companion to an Untold Story was selected by Susan Orlean for the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize for 2011.
Wendy Sumner-Winter has been a chef, gallery owner, photographer, painter, curator and community organizer, among other things. She has served as an editor in various capacities, including managing editor for The Pinch. Her nonfiction, poetry and fiction have appeared, or are forthcoming, in The Missouri Review, Fourth Genre, Switchback, Swill, flashquake, The Pinch, Word Riot, and Monkeybicycle. She is the coordinator of alumni and constituent relations, and teaches writing, at The University of Memphis, and cooking wherever invited.
Steven Church is the author of The Day After The Day After: My Atomic Angst, Theoretical Killings: Essays and Accidents, and The Guinness Book of Me: a Memoir of Record. His essays and stories have been published widely and he’s a founding editor of the literary magazine, The Normal School.