Miller is a local author, professor at San Diego City College, and vice president for the American Federation of Teachers, Local 1931. He lives in Golden Hill.
Nearly 20 years ago, a group of local writers and artists started the San Diego Writers Collective and San Diego City Works Press in an effort to highlight the work of writers from our region. Over the years we have published fiction, poetry and nonfiction that addresses the issues faced by those living in the borderlands, the struggles and triumphs of working-class San Diegans, and a wide range of other themes from the challenges of parenting and the politics of food, to the anticipatory grief of our era of catastrophic climate change and more.
City Works Press has featured the writing of prominent figures like Jimmy Santiago Baca, Sandra Alcosser, Marilyn Chin, Steve Kowit and Mike Davis, as well the work of established local and first-time scribes of all sorts. We have published novels, poetry collections and works of creative nonfiction by single authors as well as a good number of innovative anthologies.
Our “Reclaiming Our Stories” anthologies have featured the often-neglected voices from Southeast San Diego. “Wounded Border/Frontera Herida” featured cutting-edge research and analysis of the border region while “Sunshine/Noir I” and “Sunshine/Noir II” covered a wide range of creative and critical takes on life in the San Diego/Tijuana region.
What makes us stand out from other publishers is that San Diego City Works Press is an entirely nonprofit collective. As our mission statement elaborates: “We are a ‘collective’ in that we all contribute part of the funds and labor that go into each publication and the money made from our sales goes toward the publication of subsequent books. Hence the press is based on an ethic of reciprocity. Each manuscript that we receive is reviewed by a group of people other than the author and is chosen for publication based on its quality and whether or not it fits our mission of promoting innovative, progressive, ethnically diverse local writing.”
Thus, San Diego City Works Press has always been entirely a labor of love. Our mission continues to be to help create a space for writing that is not bound by commercial considerations or the pretenses of academic publishing. We are interested in being a vehicle for many who might never think of themselves as welcome in the world of the literary arts and a place where the worlds of professional and beginning writers, the arts world, and the community intersect in a city where no press dedicated to the publication of local literary writing exists other than our own.
This two-decade journey of San Diego City Works Press has not always been an easy one. While we are housed at City College, where we are proud to frequently provide students with free books, we receive no institutional funding from the college or the San Diego Community College District and have survived only by raising funds from the collective, in the community and, of course, by selling books. Over the years, we have lost a number of beloved friends and founding of this project, navigated a pandemic that eliminated many outfits like our own, and done our best to hustle our way to the next day.
In that spirit, we invite you to us if you have a story to tell about life in San Diego and/or Tijuana for our 20-year anniversary. San Diego City Works Press is currently accepting submissions of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, photography and art for our 20-year anniversary anthology of San Diego writing, “Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana,” due out in 2025.
If you have a poem, story, creative and/or documentary nonfiction, or a piece of art or photography that captures the realities of San Diego County or the Tijuana border region that lurk beneath the booster and tourist stereotypes of “America’s Finest City,” please submit. We are open to work from both professional and beginning writers as long as it is excellent and has a story to tell.
We want work that maps the endangered natural landscape and sniffs out grit, ecstasy and irony in the midst of the theme-park city. We seek writing that reveals buried histories, deals with the border, work, race, class, gender, sexuality, urban and natural environments, decadence, tragedy, sex, death, beauty, ugly beauty, and, yes, alienation under the sun. Everything from traditional realism to formal innovation is welcome in fiction and our tastes in poetry and nonfiction are equally eclectic.
Submit your best poems, fictions or nonfictions of 10 pages or less via email in a Word document or PDF file before June 7, to [email protected].
