From Judy Hogan's personal essay: The roots of Carolina Wren were in Berkeley, California, though it was birthed on January 1, 1976, in Chapel Hill, as I sat in my living room in Chase Park Apartments, looking past the balcony, where I fed wintering birds, into the woods behind them.
Meanwhile, Thorp Springs Press had been publishing the writers I was finding and being found by: Virginia Long Rudder (After the Ifaluk), Miranda Cambanis (The Execution, a play), and Tom Huey (This Life: A Salutation, a poem broadside for Amon).
Hyperion 12 (1975) had in it Lance Jeffers, T. J. Reddy, Jaki and Sherman Shelton, Amon, Miranda, Mitchell Lyman, Roz Wolbarsht, Marion Phillips, and Mike Riggsby.
By the end of 1975, I had promised to publish Liner’s Chrome Grass, Bill Herron’s American Peasant, and Mike Riggsby’s Milky Way Poems.
In 1976 I was living on food stamps and in subsidized housing, plus receiving free daycare for Ginia under Title X as I made my way back into the job market.
It was a lively, warm, funny conference; I remember that we all broke up laughing when I described our new van project and told the assembled editors and writers that we’d all get to know each other better if we ate and slept together.
I also remember vividly Len Randolph holding up a copy of the cover of Chrome Grass, talking about this new press, Carolina Wren, and how strange that felt, and how good.
In even-numbered years, with a postmark deadline of February 15, the publisher reads submissions to the Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman.