Named after the line of an Emily Dickinson poem in which she exhorts her reader to “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” Slant Books publishes books that tell the truth “slant”—“books that avoid trends and bandwagons to tell the truth in bold, unexpected ways,” says Emily Kwilinski, the press’s managing editor. Established in 2013 by Greg Wolfe, who at the time was also working as the founding director of the Seattle Pacific University MFA in creative writing program, Slant Books was initially conceived as a “side gig.” But after a few years, Wolfe wanted to work on Slant full-time. Following a rocky period during the COVID-19 pandemic, Wolfe says, he decided to relaunch the press as a “haven for art that values craft and explores the ambiguities of the human heart.”
Based in Seattle, Slant publishes twelve books per year, spanning a wide variety of genres—poetry, literary fiction, creative nonfiction, and memoir, alongside philosophy, theology, and the occasional art criticism book or stage play. Recent titles include The Grand Valley: On Going to Hell, to France, and Back to Childhood (2025)—an experimental book of art criticism by Morgan Meis and the final volume of his Three Paintings Trilogy—and Baron Wormser’s posthumously published poetry collection, James Baldwin Smoking a Cigarette (2026). The press does not aspire to publish books with a single aesthetic. “We work very hard to avoid privileging one literary style over another,” Wolfe says. “We embrace the full spectrum, from traditional to experimental—with the proviso being that the work must be meticulously well-made. We’ve published books that would make Jane Austen sigh contentedly, and we’ve published books that would make Flannery O’Connor’s toes curl.” Submissions are open year-round with a $5 reading fee.
