Madville Publishing was founded by Kimberly Davis in 2018. The press grew out of Davis’ rich relationships with authors, editors, and agents within the literary community. Madville was incorporated as a nonprofit in 2019 in the State of Texas, and attained federal nonprofit 501(c)3 status as of June, 2020. Madville is not an academic press, but adheres to the same rigorous standards when evaluating manuscripts. Madville’s reviewers hold advanced degrees in literature and creative writing.
This 7-minute video shows Kim Davis, Madville’s founder and director, talking about the origins of the press and the current state of the press. She concludes with a description of the press’s current needs as it plows into a growth spurt thanks to a bunch of really good titles.
Mission Statement:
The mission of Madville Publishing is to produce, publish, and market literary works of the highest quality that reflect the diversity of the modern English-speaking world. We seek to publish poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction by notable and emerging authors who display diversity in ethnicity, gender, age, and worldview, and whose work exhibits the full range of this diversity. Our goal is to discover and showcase works that might otherwise be overlooked, to provide opportunity for voices that might otherwise be unheard.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Statement of Purpose:
Madville Publishing affirms and supports the importance of diversity in race, religion, age, gender, and sexual orientation. Our publishing program actively seeks to include authors and other writers and poets representing the widest possible representation of all these perspectives.
What we like:
We love language, dialect, and regionalisms. We yearn to know other cultures and other worlds. From poets’ philosophies and introspections, to essayists examinations of the world and all its foibles, to imaginary worlds, our authors deal in snapshots of time, slivers of memory, and flashes of inspiration. English is our first language, but we adore code switching and idioms from around the world. We publish poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that straddles borders. While our authors generally hail from English-speaking communities, our audience extends beyond those narrow confines.
A caution here, because there is an art to subtly depicting regionalisms in literature, we read all such dialog with a critical eye.
Conferences we attend:
We attend various writers conferences. You’ll find us on the panels and in the book fairs. Come say hello and tell us what you’re working on!
- January: The Pulpwood Queens and Timber Guys Girlfriend Weekend
- February: AWP
- March: Appalachian Studies Association Conference
- April: Las Vegas Writers Conference
- September: Mississippi Book Festival
- September: TACWT
- October: Southern Festival of Books
Submissions Guidelines:
We are a tiny publisher, and only accept between 12 and 24 manuscripts per year. We publish largely unagented work, and we run several competitions per year, including a couple of anthologies. When we have any open submission periods, you will find all the information on our submissions page. (use the button below)
All manuscripts published by Madville Publishing undergo a rigorous vetting process before they are accepted for publication. While we do not accept unsolicited manuscripts, we do accept queries by email and we also sometimes solicit manuscripts from those authors whose work fits our catalog. We send promising manuscripts out for review to published authors and professional editors who write reports detailing each given work’s strengths and weaknesses. We base our decision about whether or not to offer an author a contract on that report. We sometimes send a manuscript out to more than more than one reviewer.