§ ABOUT
We started in an Echo Park living room with three poets and a spreadsheet of venues that paid.
That was 2017. We were tired of watching poets — the ones we loved, the ones we'd just heard at Beyond Baroque — do the work of being a writer, an event producer, a tour manager, a publicist, and a contracts attorney all at once. None of those things pay. The actual writing, somehow, paid least of all.
The Speakeasy Project exists to collapse that into one job: poet. We do everything else. We don't do everything for everybody; we do everything for our poets, and we do it well. We're based in Los Angeles, and our poets read everywhere.
HOW WE THINK ABOUT THIS
01
Page is a career
We sell books, place poems, and build the slow, peer-reviewed work of literary citizenship.
02
Stage is a career
We book rooms, draft contracts, advance dates, and ride along on tour. Festival and venue, both.
03
Both is one career
We don't make our poets choose. Half our roster does both; we plan accordingly.
MASTHEAD · LOS ANGELES
OUR POETS HAVE APPEARED AT / IN
the New YorkerBAMthe ApolloCoachella PoetryWhitney BiennialREDCATHammerNEALambda LitYale YoungerTiny DeskCave CanemPoetry FoundationBread LoafSkylightMacDowell