HIBF Exhibitor Spotlight: The Cupboard

A short interview with The Cupboard, one of this year’s Houston Indie Book Festival exhibitors:

HIBF: What’s your organization? What do you do?

TC: The Cupboard is a quarterly prose chapbook series. Every three months we publish a volume of prose by a single author (wait, our most recent volume, Bully/Bullied is by two, James Scott and B…ook Fest reader Ryan Call, which makes us infinitely harder to explain).

Us is Dave Madden, Adam Peterson, and now Emily Danforth, our new co-editor. We used to all live somewhere. Now we all live somewhere else.

HIBF: What will you have for sale at the Indie Book Fest?

TC: We’ll have our newest volume and all of our back volumes–great work by Andrew Borgstrom, Joshua Cohen, Amanda Goldblatt, Mathias Svalina, Caia Hagel, and Michael Stewart. Most peopl…e subscribe to The Cupboard and get a new volume in the mail every 12 weeks or so, and you’ll certainly be able to sign up during the Book Fest.

HIBF: What type of writing are you looking for in terms of submissions (manuscript, journal submissions, etc.)?

TC: Well, at the moment we’re having a contest judged by Michael Martone. Anyone can submit by March 31st right here. We’re also havi…ng an open reading period in May, and generally we’re looking for prose–short stories, essays, prose poems, short shorts, recipes, whatever–between 4k and 10k words. So far our favorite part of doing The Cupboard is the variety of things we get sent, many of which don’t fit neatly into any of those categories. We like that.

The Houston Indie Book Festival (HIBF) is hosted by NANO Fiction and Gulf Coast through a collaboration with The Menil Community Arts Festival, and the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses at Menil Park. The 2011 festival will be on Saturday, April 2, 2011 from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.. The event is completely free and open to the public and remains the only one of its kind in the Houston and Austin areas.