Southern Publishing Spotlight: Iron Oak Editions Part 1

This post marks the start of a new series here at Loblolly Press: The Southern Publishing Spotlight, a chance to highlight a selected independent press and share a bit about them! In this first installment, the spotlight lands on Iron Oak Editions. This independent book publisher originally began as a literary journal, based out of Charlotte, North Carolina, titled West Trade Review (still active both online and in print if you would like to check it out). In 2024, along with the team that was working on the journal, Ken Harmon founded Iron Oak Editions. While planning this blog, I reached out to Ken to see if he would be open to an interview, and that conversation will be available to read next week! In his initial email back to me, Ken spoke about his own connection to the South, posing a series of questions, and writing, “Am I personally very Southern and have a strong connection to the land and place? Oh, hell, yeah. Do I like everything about the region? Absolutely not, but do I love it anyway? Yes.” And I thought that about summed up the complex love that is tied to one’s home, my own included.

Iron Oak Editions publishes a diverse array of literature. Fiction, poetry and nonfiction are all considered as long as the work conveys authenticity and humanity. In their own words, their mission is as follows:

Our mission is to perpetuate the work of artists both well known and yet-to-be-known, simultaneously enriching our world through the written word. We strive to reflect diversity in style, content and perspective throughout poetry and prose and seek to publish work that is authentically human, which for us means beautiful, messy, and complicated; work that is fearless, honest, and unafraid of judgment because that's where truth lies; work that is carefully crafted and takes artistic risks.

When I began looking into this press, I was initially drawn to the term “authentically human.” As I explored the work that they published I found that this trait was noticeably present throughout. In my own tastes, I have always been drawn to this same characteristic and find it to be lacking more often than one would think, especially in the realm of literature (a medium that is so tied to conveying the human experience). Yet, when reading something that has grasped the realest form of what it means to be human—of what it means to inhabit a body throughout love, grief, despair and hope—you can feel it, and it is not as easy to come across as it might seem.

While Iron Oak Editions does not exclusively publish work that is notably Southern, and is built up of a team of folks from all over as Ken pointed out in our exchange, there are two upcoming books that are, in fact, distinctly Southern.

The first is titled Permanence and Flux: Poems by Bill Griffin and will be published on March 30th, 2027. Griffin is a resident of the North Carolina foothills and a full time naturalist. For a taste of his writing, I found a quote from an artist statement he had posted that I enjoy quite a lot. He was responding to an Arthur Sze quote that regarded the idea of knowing and he wrote,

Knowing has been the false hare speeding in front of me, dragging my greyhound brain around and around this crazy dog track of a life. Learn another thing, cinch it down into the sack of knowing with all those other squirming things…

This is only a snippet, but it resonated enough for me that I now feel quite anxious to get my hands on his upcoming collection.

The second southern title that Ken pointed me towards was the upcoming poetry collection of Judy Jordan, What the Land Remembers, forthcoming in the fall of 2027. Raised near the border between the Carolinas on a small farm, Jordan has an undeniable connection to the American south that has seeped into her writing throughout her career. Her first poetry collection, relevantly named Carolina Ghost Woods, received the Walt Whitman Award as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. For a taste of the “authentically human” that Iron Oak Editions cultivates—the beautiful, the messy, and the complicated—read Judy Jordan’s 1999 poem, “Help Me to Salt, Help Me to Sorrow.” It is a poem that contains the impossible multitudes of a human life and it is a poem that, to me, will continue churning in my mind for days to come.

Make sure to stay tuned for the next installment in the Southern Publisher Spotlight series, where we’ll get to hear from Ken Harmon on the joys of founding a Press, and more on what it means to be “authentically human”!

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