Launched earlier this year in Minneapolis, Lost Kite Editions aims to “publish literature that is trailblazing, paradigm-shifting, insurgent, and subversive—work that expands what literature can hold and who it can speak for,” says editor Mike Alberti. Lost Kite grew out of what Alberti calls “a simple but radical premise: that the people most often kept outside publishing’s institutions should help shape its future.” The press was also established in response to the publication of American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion (Coffee House Press, 2023), an anthology edited by incarcerated writers. The anthology demonstrated “what becomes possible when writers directly impacted by incarceration are treated not as subjects or symbols, but as serious literary thinkers—with the taste, judgment, and vision to help decide what literature can be,” says Alberti.
The inaugural titles of Lost Kite Editions, both released in March, are the poetry collection Disfigured Hours by B. Batchelor, which bears witness to the cruelties of America’s carceral system and contains twenty-four poems of sixty syllables each to represent the minutes in an hour, and the long-form essay Twenty-One Birthdays by Kennedy Amenya Gisege, which details the author’s experience celebrating a lifetime of his daughter’s birthdays while separated from her. Publishing poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, hybrid work, and literary ephemera, Lost Kite is intentionally starting small, publishing two or three titles per year. Agented submissions are open year-round, though the press hopes to welcome all submissions in the near future. The name of the press alludes to its mission. In prison, a “kite” is a message. It might be a formal request submitted through institutional channels or a handwritten note passed from person to person. “A kite can carry a need, a question, a story, a plan, or a matter of urgency,” Alberti says. “We were drawn to that image because publishing is, at its core, a way of transmitting messages across distance. Lost Kite Editions seeks to elevate messages—and messengers—that have yet to find their readers.”
