Behind the Scenes

In addition to being a haven for books that matter, Lookout is also a teaching press, offering apprenticeships to students enrolled in the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s BFA and MFA publishing certificate programs. But the education we provide extends beyond our students—we pride ourselves on empowering our authors, too.  

The opacity of the publishing industry has long been a barrier to those trying to break into the industry. This is why education and transparency have been a part of Lookout’s mission since its founding in 2009. In that spirit, we want to use this month’s blog post to share how we approach acquiring a new manuscript. *Hint—we’re looking! 

As a boutique press, Lookout publishes one book a year. This means that when we acquire a manuscript, we spend a lot of time with it, so it’s important that the book is a good fit for our team.  

But what makes a book a good fit for Lookout? In general, we search for books that might otherwise be overlooked by traditional publishing, whether that means the work of emerging writers, historically underrepresented voices, or more experimental or overlooked works by established writers.  

There are also logistical factors that guide our search. For example, we publish fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and each season, we rotate which genre we’ll publish next. Our most recent release, A Love Tap by Bernardo Wade is a debut collection of poetry. The book prior, Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic, was an anthology that included both nonfiction and poetry. This means, we are currently looking to acquire a work of fiction for our next title; however, we are always open to agented submissions in any genre, with an eye toward publishing works in subsequent seasons.  

So how do we go about finding these books?Typically, the Lookout publishing practicum is made up of a mix of undergraduate and graduate students who serve as scouts for the imprint. So, in addition to agented submissions which are sent and responded to by our editor, KaToya Ellis Fleming, and our publisher, Emily Smith, on a rolling basis, our staff often searches for potential authors in our favorite literary magazines. This semester, for example, staff have searched for potential authors in lit mags like Ecotone, Electric Literature, and Foglifter, or among contest finalists for the Granum Prize and the Pen America Emerging Voices Fellowship, just to name a few.  

So, what does this mean for an author hoping to get discovered? Well, it means that publishing often and entering contests—even if you don’t win—can help your chances of being discovered. Sometimes, if a writer seems particularly promising, our editor may reach out to the writer (or their agent if they have one) directly to see if they’ve got a full-length manuscript in progress that they’d like Lookout to consider. So, if you have a website, be sure to include your publication history. And if you don’t have a website yet (and even if you do!), it’s helpful to keep your social media up to date with your publications and projects you may be working on.  

Each week during acquisitions, members of our student staff present exciting new authors and their works to our practicum (which functions as an internship) for the team to review and discuss. According to Lookout’s editor (and our professor) KaToya Ellis Fleming, we should be looking for “…writers who fit with our mission and align with our editorial ethos.” But each staff member’s personal preferences are different and as such, acquisitions can be a subjective process. This semester’s Lookout staffers have at turns presented to the class, stories that they found “vivid, engaging, and memorable”, “deliciously weird”, or which had “complex characters navigating unexpected situations.” And we had a blast discovering so much talent, so many new favorite writers. Who knows…we may have found our next title this semester! And we can’t wait to share it with you.  

For more information on Lookout Books, our staff, and our recent titles, make sure to check out our Instagram at @lookoutbooksuncw. 

Thank you to Lookout staffer Madison McCormack for your work on this blog post!  

With the release of Bernardo Wade’s A Love Tap this week, the Lookout team has been reflecting on how each book project affords us new opportunities to translate words on the page into artful and lasting conversations.

For us, promotional kits not only help generate excitement for a forthcoming book, but they also contextualize and enlarge the discussion around it. They include, of course, early reading copies and details about the book, but we always try to create fun items to remind recipients how deeply we invest in each author and title. Over the past few semesters, students in UNCW’s MFA and BFA publishing programs have worked with book practicum instructor and publisher Emily Smith to curate A Love Tap promotions with thoughtfulness and care. 

To support A Love Tap, Lookout staff designed handmade bookmarks to accompany each galley. Beaded in Mardi Gras colors, the bookmark is adorned with a hand-illustrated acrylic fox charm, drawing inspiration from Wade’s poems and nodding to the beautiful custom pendants that often decorate the necklaces of Mardi Gras krewes.   

BFA alumna Nitya Budamagunta, who came up with the idea of the fox charm when taking the spring 2025 Lookout class, explains that landing on the fox was, in large part, a collaborative process among staff in the practicum. Possibilities for the charm included resonant images from the book: a crow inspired by “Another (Damn) Crow Poem,” an unlit match, and a silhouette honoring Lucille Clifton—one of Wade’s literary influences—but the team ultimately landed on the fox, an image that recurs in the poems “dear fox” and “the coming of fox.” Bookending the collection, the poems reflect on the speaker’s relationships with family.    

“Though Wade writes about all kinds of relationships—to New Orleans, to lovers and friends, to his mother—it’s his father he most returns to,” Ross Wade writes in his foreword to A Love Tap, “probably because it’s the most vexing of those relationships.” Gay says that “dear fox” and “the coming of fox” are the poems he returns to most. “The stories, what we’ve been told, what we’ve inherited, what we’ve been given, are illuminated, and transformed, by what is unknowable. In these cases, visitation by foxes who are, or at least invoke, the poet’s father and his grandmother. These poems shimmer in strange and yearning light. It’s beautiful and apt that Wade’s fox poems are after Lucille Clifton’s—of course they are—for who better to help us attend to the unknowable. To help us regard what we cannot understand. Which maybe is why we come to poems in the first place. And maybe why poetry comes to us.”   

As Nitya began designing, she first sought stock imagery of a fox but quickly realized that none captured the style and tone of Wade’s poems. The fox in his poems is unknowable, fleeting, while the clip art she found felt overly cute. She wanted the charm to evoke Mardi Gras, but she also needed to avoid cliché. The resulting charm draws inspiration from the detailed style of Mardi Gras masks, incorporating the fleur-de-lis and a few feathers in purple, green, and gold.  

Nitya’s personal history as an artist also inspired the process and materials. She’s been making jewelry since she was twelve, and over time, has experimented a lot. “Among my favorite things are bookmarks made out of fishing line and beads,” she says. “The string becomes an invisible marker inside the pages.” Although we ultimately opted for ribbon instead of fishing line, Nitya notes, “I love how it pops with the purple and green beads!” 

At the heart of the design is an image from “Faith or another way of being,” the opening poem in A Love Tap. In it, Wade writes of “a rosary strung together with Mardi Gras beads.” Nitya says, “I love how this line builds the initial sense of place in the collection.” It introduces Wade’s concerns and obsessions. It was a pivotal image the team kept coming back to as we brainstormed ideas for this project. “This bookmark is neither a rosary nor is it a representation of the festival, but I hope that readers continue to use the bookmark long after finishing the book,” she says, “thinking of A Love Tap along the way.”  

Stay tuned to our social media for ways that you could win your own fox charm bookmark!  We hope that you’ll order a copy of A Love Tap from us, or pick one up from your favorite bookshop. And if you’d like to be added to our media list for future ARC mailings, please reach out directly to Publisher Emily Smith. 

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference (better known as AWP) was held in Los Angeles this year, and if you’ve been keeping up with us here, you know that we were thrilled to bring a bit of UNCW to the West Coast. It’s my third year as a UNCW MFA candidate and my third AWP, and I was thrilled to help represent our literary imprints, including Ecotone and Lookout Books. I’m on Ecotone’s design team and started working as an intern with Lookout last spring. I returned to Lookout’s practicum for my final MFA semester to support Bernardo Wade’s forthcoming poetry collection, A Love Tap, and to assist in the acquisitions process for future Lookout titles. 

With such a wealth of options when it comes to panels, bookfair offerings, and off-site events, AWP can be a bit overwhelming. I’m always grateful to have the UNCW table as my home base. When I arrived at the bookfair on the first morning, it was already bustling—with a full display of Lookout titles (including signed copies of Cameron Dezen-Hammon’s This Is My Body) and issues of the department’s journals, Chautauqua and Ecotone. The latest Ecotone was available, as were broadsides designed in the Publishing Lab to honor Ecotone’s twentieth anniversary. AWP always offers a great opportunity to connect with the authors we’ve had the honor of publishing.  

“Oxtail is one of those dishes where there’s really no right or wrong way to season it (although Jamaicans and Southerners might try to convince you otherwise), so the only thing I can tell you is that when someone makes it for you, or when you make it, and when you share it or eat it alone, it should make you feel like someone gathered the strength of their hands to make something for you that says love.”  

—Destiny O. Birdsong, from “Build Back a Body”

Destiny O. Birdsong’s essay “Build Back a Body” and Shay Youngblood’s “Feasting on Bread and Dry Bones” both feature oxtail—a staple of Southern U.S. comfort food. One of our favorite threads in Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic is the that way food enriches our lives and evokes memories. Birdsong prepares oxtail while exploring memories and the challenges of managing an autoimmune disease during a pandemic. Similarly, Shay Youngblood relies on cooking as a way to cope, while observing food insecurity in her community. These essays led us to ask: what exactly is oxtail, and how is it served? 

Oxtail is the tail of a cow, “a part of the animal that, traditionally, no one wanted,” as Birdsong reminds us in her essay. Once considered the animal’s scraps, oxtail is now a delicacy that sells for more than seven dollars per pound. 

Popular in Caribbean communities, particularly Jamaica, oxtail is often braised and served over rice with a rich, juicy sauce, or it may be cooked in a stew with butter beans. To find oxtail, just head to your local international market. 

Beginning in fall 2023, UNCW’s MFA program is offering students a complementary post-baccalaureate certificate in literary publishing. The 15-hour degree prepares graduates to work in publishing, editing, publicity, marketing, grant writing, and book and magazine design and production, among other areas. Students also learn skills beneficial in a variety of adjacent fields—from public relations to arts management. At the heart of the program are apprenticeships with the department’s award-winning literary entities: imprint Lookout Books and magazines Ecotone and Chautauqua.

As Lookout’s graduate publishing assistant, I’ve found hands-on experiences with the imprint to be invaluable. I chose UNCW’s MFA program because I wanted to explore professional options as I gained practical, real-world experience. I was uncertain about the exact career I wanted to pursue after graduation. Working at Lookout over the past two semesters has helped me fine-tune my goals and discover new skills.

After careful preparation, planning, and care, I helped launch the imprint’s latest title, Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic, in November. I helped design the anthology’s interior and cover, executed an accompanying social media campaign, and am now seeing my work pay off in the form of accolades and national media attention for the book. It’s come with satisfaction and excitement I’ve never felt before.

Lookout Practicum staff members Morissa Young, Tierra Ripley, and Felicia Rosemary Urso at the book launch

“It’s impossible not to learn from Emily Smith as she explains in real time why we’re taking each step in the publishing process. Instead of focusing on one area, students get to explore as many as we’d like. . . .  I’m actively developing new perspectives that will be crucial to my success post-MFA, in publishing and well beyond it.”

With Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic hurdling toward its November 15, 2022 pub date, the Lookout team has been working behind the scenes on creative promotions. It’s bittersweet to reach this milestone without Bigger Than Bravery’s editor, Valerie Boyd, here to help us usher her final book into reviewers’ and early readers’ hands, but we’re infusing every galley that leaves our offices with her incomparable spirit.

For Lookout, promotional kits are meant not only to generate excitement but to contextualize and enlarge the conversation around our books. They include, of course, early reading copies and details about the book, but we always add extras to remind recipients how deeply we invest in each project we acquire. Over the past two semesters, publishing students in UNCW’s MFA and BFA programs have worked with book practicum instructor and publisher Emily Smith, as well as editor KaToya Ellis Fleming, to curate Bigger Than Bravery promotions with all the dedication and care that Valerie Boyd brought to her curation of the anthology itself.

The Commemorative Pin

As we grieved and processed Valerie Boyd’s unexpected passing, we thought about items that might meaningfully honor her legacy. We wanted this commemorative piece of the kit to be solemn yet bold, representative of Valerie and her work on Bigger Than Bravery, as well as her life’s work as a mentor and friend to so many writers and editors of color. The enamel pin calls to mind memorial pins often worn to remember a loved one. Borrowing from the book’s subtitle, we selected the phrase “Black Resilience. Black Reclamation.” When finished pins arrived, we placed all two hundred of them by hand on a custom card-stock backing. Each is anchored by two small black hearts.

Letterpress Broadside

Lookout staffer and letterpress artist Ollie Loorz designed and typeset an excerpt from Valerie Boyd’s introduction to Bigger Than Bravery:

“I offer you a glimpse into your own bravery, your own greatness, your own transcendent freedom.”

Emily Smith’s book publishing practicum then took a field trip to Port City Letterpress here in Wilmington, where Ollie gave us a demonstration and let us each take a turn at the wheel of the studio’s Chandler & Price platen press. What a beautiful day, watching Valerie Boyd’s words kiss the paper again and again—in that bold magenta ink!

Students in the UNCW’s MFA and BFA publishing-certificate programs help power Lookout Books through their work in the Publishing Practicum, taught by faculty publisher Emily Smith. To introduce this semester’s staff, we asked each of them to share a book that offered comfort or served as a source of joy throughout remote learning due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Get to know our team below, and then visit your favorite local bookstore to pick up these titles. You can also follow the provided links; sales through our Bookshop storefront benefit both independent booksellers and the work of Lookout Books. Win-win!

Amanda Ake is a third-year MFA candidate in creative nonfiction and the graduate publishing assistant for Lookout Books. With a background in website and social media management, she’s particularly excited to help Lookout’s next title make its way into the hands of readers. 

Recently, she enjoyed the themes of inheritance, intimacy, and identity found within the essay collection Spilt Milk (McSweeney’s, 2021) by Courtney Zoffness.

Zoe Howard is a senior earning a BFA in creative writing and a Certificate in Publishing. She looks forward to lending a hand in the care and identity that a year of Lookout’s attention can cultivate for a debut author or underrepresented voice.

She keeps returning to the work of poet Gabrielle Grace Hogan, especially her debut digital micro-chapbook Sentimental Violence: Some Poems About Tonya Harding (Ghost City Press, 2020).  

At Ecotone, we carefully consider interior layout, text treatment, and design because we want the held object to be a pleasing vehicle for the written content. The Ecotone design team works to create an individualized design for each opening page of fiction and nonfiction. They are charged with creating a visual feel, considering images and type, to accompany and amplify the impact of the piece. In this blog department, staff designers highlight past Ecotone spread designs that inspire them, and discuss design principles they incorporate in their work.

Ecotone staffer Alexis Olson considers Talia Lakshmi Kolluri’s “What We Fed to the Manticore” spread from Issue 21, designed by Morgan Davis.

The blend of hand-lettering and photography really draws me to this design. “What We Fed to the Manticore” is grounded in place, much like the spread is grounded by the mangrove roots. I love how the shape of the letterforms mimic the flow of water or silt while acknowledging the playfulness of the story’s animal first-person point of view. The mangrove roots were designed by taking the original image via Flickr and using the magnetic lasso in Photoshop to eliminate the background. This isolates the creeping roots of the tree while leaving plenty of white space for the text to live in. The image, title, attribution, and text work together to communicate a fantastical tone, perfectly complementing the story.

The C-SPAN Cities Tour came right here to Wilmington to highlight our literary culture, including a segment focusing on the Pub Lab with the Lookout Practicum and director Emily Smith.

Check out the video here, and the rest of the segments too, including:

• Dana Sachs, “The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam”
• New Hanover County Library’s North Carolina History Room
• Literary Walking Tour of Wilmington with Old Books on Front Street Bookstore

I’ve worked at a local bookstore as long as I’ve known about UNCW’s Publishing Laboratory. They’re both small, independent, and full of people I want to be when I grow up. They both give loving homes to books that might be ignored at larger institutions.

But here’s the thing about being small: it takes big effort. Huge, in fact. Let’s just go ahead and call it a gigantic labor of love. Small presses like Lookout compete with larger publishers before the book even makes it to the shelf (if it does that). Most indie publishers have limited budgets from which to offer authors advances for their manuscripts, and it’s not surprising that big numbers consistently compel great writers to sign with the big houses and their imprints.

Even when indie publishers bring great titles into the world (or, like Lookout, only one per year), it’s especially difficult for bookstores to sell the books of small presses. At Pomegranate Books, where I work, we often receive boxes of press kits and advance reading copies for the big books that big publishers want us to stock. Sure, we’d love to shelve every novel by our favorite indie presses, but will those titles move as fast as the mass-marketed books that everyone and their cousin want to read?

Pomegranate Books is small, but even for larger independent stores with more shelf space and more customers, there are different challenges to selling indie books. Trade publishers often offer volume discounts, or additional in-store advertising money to incentivize stocking and prominently displaying their books. So big-publisher books get coveted window display and shelf space even if a bookseller would prefer to give attention to her new favorite by an indie press. The New York Times wrote about this back in 1996, and it’s still a tiresome obstacle.

Instead of advertising money, Lookout offers gratitude to indie bookstores in the form of author visits, signings, and readings in their stores. At Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, Lookout’s publisher and editors tagged along with authors Steve Almond and Matthew Neill Null to offer free publishing workshops and to serve on panels after the authors’ readings. And Lookout celebrates indie stories such as Brookline Booksmith, which to date has sold almost six hundred copies of its first title, Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories by Edith Pearlman! That collection found its way into the hands of hundreds more readers thanks to the generous support of booksellers at Harvard Book Store, Porter Square Books, and Politics & Prose, which hosted Edith Pearlman for one of her first public readings from Binocular Vision.

Millions of books exist in this world—in fact, I encourage everyone to purchase So Many Books by Gabriel Zaid, an exhilarating read published by another indie press, Paul Dry Books—but our store has fewer than five employees. Perhaps, if we had the time and human capital to dedicate regular hours to discovering new books by small presses, we’d be able to better hand sell their books. Instead, we struggle simply to stay up-to-date on the titles brought to our attention through large mailings and marketing budgets.

The better an independent press can convey its mission, purpose, and we-consider-every-little-detail attitude, the more inclined a bookstore’s owners and staff will be to share that appreciation for thoughtfully made books with their customers. It’s extremely difficult to verbalize or advertise that feeling, but Lookout serves as proof that it can work.

These five best practices from Lookout Books include things I wish I saw more of as a bookseller—from every press, big or small.

1.    Authors

Lookout seeks works by emerging and historically underrepresented writers, as well as overlooked gems. Unlike large trade publishers, they aren’t beholden to stockholders or corporate owners, so they tend to be less motivated by profit margins. Bookstores know that they consider their publications works of art by literary artists, not just best-selling retail items (though they hope for that too!).

2.    Marketing

In developing media kits, Lookout makes or buys materials, when they can, from local or independent sellers. If a bookstore receives a promotional kit that includes unique, handmade materials, they’ll be more likely to give it attention. When Lookout staffer Anna Coe created coasters to celebrate the recent release of Matthew Neill Null’s Honey From the Lion, she ordered the wood slices from a supplier on Etsy and personally stamped and sealed every coaster!