Jeff Shotts grew up in rural central Kansas and earned his BA from Macalester College and MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. After college and graduate school, Shotts worked at Graywolf Press, first as an editorial assistant and then as an editor for poetry and nonfiction; he is currently executive editor at Graywolf. Shotts has discussed the role of the editor and the similarities between editing poetry and nonfiction. In LitHub, he notes, “I am struck how editing poetry and editing nonfiction are complementary endeavors. Editing them both should be an act of immersing yourself in music—the music of the line and the music of the sentence, and the larger structures of a score. Both are genres of persuasion, where content and style are, at their best, essentially the same thing.”
Shotts has taught or lectured on poetry and editing at many institutions, including the University of Houston, the University of Iowa, Sarah Lawrence College, and others. He is on faculty at the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference.
Kristina Marie Darling: What has been the greatest reward of your role at Graywolf? The greatest challenge?
Jeff Shotts: The greatest reward—and the greatest challenge—is to bring readers the exact right book at the exact right time they need to read it. Those life-giving intersections are what we strive for: writers and readers in intimate conversation on the page, on the lips, in the ears, in the mind and imagination, in the thoughts and actions that follow. The reward is for all of us to allow ourselves to be open and willing to change, and to make that openness and willingness available and possible for others.
KMD: Tell us more about your approach to course adoption. With so many educators privileging historical poetry and fiction, why is it important to ensure that contemporary writers are taught in the classroom?
JS: I hope that classrooms and workshops are spaces where the literature of the past is in conversation with the literature of our present. Those connections across time, cultures, and languages are essential to understanding ourselves and our historical moment—and what might be our future. Graywolf takes that kind of view into our approach to course adoption, and so we cast a wide net in ensuring our books are part of classroom conversations and syllabi, first year experience programs, and campus-wide book events.
KMD: It’s been thrilling to see Graywolf enter multimedia spaces, particularly with the launch of a new podcast, The Graywolf Lab. What inspired the launch of this new podcast? Why now?
JS: Graywolf Lab has been something we have been talking about for a very long time, and it’s terrific to have launched it, at last, during Graywolf’s fiftieth-anniversary year in 2024. Carmen Giménez, Graywolf’s director, curates and hosts the podcast conversations, and Yuka Igarashi, executive editor, oversees and edits the digital “magazine” content. These components allow for wider access on the airwaves and online to content and conversation beyond the pages of Graywolf books. Our hope is to have two or three launches of Graywolf Lab each year as a way to explore various threads that come up organically as we put together our seasonal lists of books and authors.
KMD: Can you share an anecdote that encapsulates Graywolf’s vision and mission?
JS: One that comes to mind is the longstanding publishing relationship Graywolf has had with genius writer Percival Everett. For nearly thirty years, Graywolf published Percival’s brilliant and challenging novels and story collections—sixteen innovative and genre-defying works. In fact, Graywolf has published more books by Percival than any other writer in our fifty-year history. Across those books and years, Percival’s star kept gradually rising, gaining more attention and accolades, being named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Telephone (a novel that Graywolf published in three different versions simultaneously as part of Percival’s vision) and for the Booker Prize for The Trees, and he won the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2023, his novel Erasure, originally published twenty years ago, was adapted into the Academy Award-winning movie American Fiction, and in the last year, his novel James (published by Doubleday) has become one of the biggest books of 2024 and won the National Book Award. It finally feels like the world is catching up to Percival Everett. But that happened over a long and sustained career, not an immediate meteoric rise. This speaks to Graywolf’s vision and mission for publishing challenging works and staying loyal to writers that we believe in over a long haul. It’s that kind of attention, care, and patience that feels at the heart of what independent publishers can provide to writers, and the kind of collaboration that writers are seeking out for their publishing relationships.
KMD: What is one thing that as a publisher you wish you could change about today’s literary landscape and arts culture?
JS: I wish for a culture that can hold many things at once, with complexity, instead of the homogenous culture that seems to be able to see only one thing, or maybe a few things, at a time. This myopia is a result of American capitalism, the conglomeration of publishing corporations and media companies, and an unwillingness to look beyond commercial and celebrity interest. We see this reflected, for instance, in the pervasive lists (“bestseller,” “most anticipated,” “best of,” etc.) that have often replaced more in-depth literary criticism and conversation. We see this reflected in publishers’ narrow offerings that, for example, largely ignore literature in translation. We see this reflected in the preponderance of books that are only intended to “sell units” and that risk so little. We see this reflected in bookstores and online booksellers that more and more seem to face forward anything but actual books. I don’t want contemporary literature to be reduced to a competition. I don’t want contemporary publishing dominated by five corporations. I don’t want books continually and increasingly banned from our schools and libraries. I don’t want a culture that just falls in line. I celebrate and am heartened by those writers, publishers, booksellers, critics, reviewers, organizations, foundations, librarians, and readers who strive toward building communities and toward serving new and challenging voices that deserve and need to be heard. We read so that we can resist.
KMD: What’s next for Graywolf? What can readers look forward to?
JS: It has been meaningful to celebrate Graywolf’s fiftieth anniversary in 2024, and while it’s important to raise up what came before and support a growing backlist, it is a time to look forward to important books and new directions. Readers will in the next couple of years get to experience amazing new works by returning Graywolf writers such as Deborah Baker, Fanny Howe, Donika Kelly, Layli Long Soldier, Harryette Mullen, Mai Der Vang, Kevin Young, and others. And there are extraordinary and incendiary books by writers new to the Graywolf list, including by Chloé Caldwell, Carolina Ebeid, Cristina Rivera Garza, Paul Preciado, Ariana Reines, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, Shubha Sunder, Brandon Taylor, Karen Tei Yamashita, and many more.