First Matter Press Information

First Matter Press is a writers' collective in Portland, Oregon founded in 2018 to dissolve publication barriers for first-time publishing poets and genre-breaking writers. We amplify local voices while empowering authorial ownership. With 12 titles available or in production, our annual releases center community and craft by inviting authors into a creative cohort where they crystallize manuscripts in dialogue with editors and fellow writers and collaborate with featured artists on original cover art. First Matter Press is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and our authors maintain 100% copyrights and sales royalties of their published work. We are committed to actively practicing bias-awareness, inclusion and equity. We encourage submissions from BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ authors. While First Matter Press is a decentralized and often virtual community, we originated and many of our key members live in Portland, Oregon in Multnomah County. We offer reverence to the Indigenous people whose traditional and ancestral homelands we now sit on: the Multnomah, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla and many other tribes and bands of the Columbia and Willamette regions. We recognize we are here because this land was stolen from their communities.