Iron Oak Editions

Iron Oak Editions seeks fearless, well-crafted, risk-adept writing. We look for books that are overlooked and under-appreciated by the traditional publishing marketplace, with an emphasis on literary fiction of supreme technical skill, narrative ambition, and artistic commitment. Contemporary mainstream publishing is a timid landscape of books written with very little appetite for taking chances in either content or style, and IOE aims to give a publication home to the excellent work such practices leave behind.

We are interested in work that explores the depths of the human experience and show appreciation for and commitment to the art of fiction. We admire books that have important stories to tell and fresh, bold methods of telling them. Character-driven, lyric, immersive work is likely to catch our eye.

We are interested in memoir and personal essay collections that blend style with substance and reach beyond the personal to tell us something new about the world.

We want nonfiction that make the reader think and feel, work that humbles us with its joy, humor, embarrassment, anger, hope, grief, or all of the above, and gravitate toward writing that has something important to teach us--something that readers really need to know, but might not have understood this was a need until the last word of the work.

We are looking for full-length collections of poems that perform Olympic feats with language that leave a reader in wonder while still referring back to the basic things that make us human. We want powerful imagery and enjoy the juxtaposition of images in interesting and unexpected ways.

We want poems that make the reader think and feel, work that humbles us with its joy, humor, embarrassment, anger, hope, grief, or all of the above, and gravitate toward writing that has something important to teach us--something that readers really need to know, but might not have understood this was a need until the last word of the work.