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. We 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.
In this 7-minute video, Madville founder, Kim Davis, talks about the origins of the press. She concludes with a description of the press’s current needs.
Mission Statement
The mission of Madville Publishing is to produce, publish, and market literary works of the highest quality. These works reflect the entire modern English-speaking world, with poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction by notable and emerging authors. Our goal is to discover and showcase works that might otherwise be overlooked. We seek to provide opportunity for voices that might otherwise be unheard.
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 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! (But maybe not every conversation should be a pitch? We don’t hear anything after “I’ve got this manuscript…”)
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)
A note about what happens to submissions
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. Published authors and professional editors read them and write reports. These reports detail 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.