Global City Press was founded by Linsey Abrams with a small community of writers to share work dedicated to clarity of vision, empathy, and inclusiveness. For 25 years Global City Review has told unique, inspiring stories that have informed and connected readers from all over the world. With each issue, organized around a broad theme, Global City Review has showcased stories, memoirs, poems, drama, essays, and interviews on a variety of topics, as well as paintings, drawings, photo spreads, literary crossword puzzles, hybrid forms, and more.
After a brief hiatus, a new collective has formed to continue GCR, and we’ve gone digital. With Legacies, our first digital issue, we are reopening the door to a new generation of readers and writers, as well as to our ongoing fans.
We’ve made another big change, too: all of our content is now free. We’ve also made available all of our past print issues for digital viewing through our website. Please do take the time to explore and read from our backlist. You’ll find works by National Book Award winners such as Joan Silber and Jean Valentine, best-selling novelists such as Marilyn French, Mary Gordon, and Frederic Tuten, activist-writers such as Grace Paley and Eve Ensler, poets such as Mark Doty, Alfred Corn, Wang Ping, Kimiko Hahn, Cornelius Eady, Roberto Tejada, Cynthia Cruz, Wayne Koestenbaum, Elaine Sexton, Phillis Levin, Richard McCann, Robin Becker, Martha Rhodes, Jane Cooper, and Felice Picano, translators and essayists such as Eliot Weinberger and Felicia Bonaparte, nonfiction writers such as Meghan Daum, fiction writers such as Rebecca Chace and EM Broner, graduate students, established and beginning writers, and writers from Mexico, Bosnia and China, and elsewhere. You’ll find essays such as “Rediscovering Deaf-mute Existence in Film,” “Putting a New Dress on Derrida,” “Vampires, Conquerers, and Other Monster Selves,” and an early essay on Le Banlieu. You’ll find memoirs including one by a psychic and one by a man with AIDS, now lost, who wrote about the night he thought he contracted the virus. You’ll find an interview with a gay cop. You’ll find drawings, photographs, crossword puzzles, and a knitting pattern with the GC logo. You’ll find pieces on art from Gauguin to manga; on dance, both modern and ballet. You’ll find work by the Artists and Homeless Collaborative and a project by the New York Theological Society men’s group at Sing Sing.
We believe these important works should be read and seen by as many people as possible, and to keep it that way. With that said, we can’t do it alone. We need your support. If you share our vision, please do donate via our donation page. Please help keep our global city spinning.
Global City Press will continue to publish a select number of books and anthologies, in print and in digital format. Global City will publish a new collection of poetry by our Poetry Editor, Michelle Yasmine Valladares. And I am honored to have Global City publishing my debut novel, The Escapist, to be releasing later this year.
Over our long run in print, Linsey and the collective, writers too numerous to mention, though each unique, have left an indelible legacy. A new team of writers now continues that legacy as we take Global City, appropriately, into the digital universe. It seemed only right to make our first issue a look at Legacies. The contributing writers and artists herein, as with all former contributors, join the body of work that is Global City.
David Puretz, Managing Editor
Collective: Brian Brennan, Taylor Hibma, Patrice LoCicero, David Puretz, Michelle Valladares, Amy Veach
Consulting Editor: Linsey Abrams
Our deepest gratitude to Edith Chevat, a member of the collective, and the Editor’s right hand, from its beginnings, and to Charles Nix, who designed the original 4 1/2″ by 6 1/2″ pocket-sized Global City Review, our original logo, several covers, and the first half-dozen GCP books and covers. Also to Robin Blair, who, as Managing and Senior Editor, 2004 to 2012, literally saved the print issue from premature extinction, with her vision and intelligence.
Sincere thanks to the Simon H. Rifkind Center for the Humanities at The City College of New York for making it possible to start Global City. Our friends at the Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation generously funded GCR for years, after which kind individual donors and loyal subscribers kept us afloat.
And special thanks to Esther Canata for the cover art for Legacies. Check out more of her work on Instagram @canatacollect.
