Small press specializing in New York School poets, writers, and artists.
We are a small press, a 501(c)-3 nonprofit. We have published titles in fiction and poetry, particularly by New York School poets and writers, often with covers by New York School artists, for half a century. Through our imprints—Gnosis Press and The Maximalist Press—and our affiliate press, Painted Leaf, we also publish and distribute many unusual and eclectic international works, from poetry to anthologies to memoir to fiction to autobiography-written-by-someone-else.
In 1974, Eugene Richie and Rosanne Wasserman, then MFA students in poetry, at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, founded The Groundwater Press, to publish an anthology of fiction entitled Writers Introduce Writers, with the late fiction writer F. B. Claire. We soon collaborated with another small press, Gnosis, run by the novelist and scholar Arkady Rovner and his wife, the poet Victoria Andreyeva, who had left Moscow for the freedom to study and write in New York.
In 1981, we joined the poets Marc Cohen and Susan Baran to create a chapbook series featuring poets who were reading at their venue, Intuflo, an Upper West Side hardware store. Like Writers Introduce Writers, the series offered work by younger poets, introduced by their teachers, mentors, and friends: John Ashbery wrote for Eugene Richie, Ruth Stone for Rosanne Wasserman, James Schuyler for Marc Cohen, and Kenneth Koch for the late British poet John Ash. These signed and numbered rare publications also featured covers created by noted New York School artists, including Jane Freilicher, Darragh Park, Bill Sullivan, Adele Alsop, Ellen Adler, and Michelle Spark.
Later Groundwater Press chapbooks included Every Question but One, poems by Pierre Martory, translated from the French by Ashbery; and Japanese poet Tomoyuki Iino’s History of Rain, introduced by William Corbett.
Our authors and our press have won awards and received funding from other organizations over these fifty years, as well as collaborated with other wonderful small presses and their publishers. Our latest imprint, The Maximalist Press, was founded by our son, the poet and translator Joseph Richie, and fellow Bard alumnus, the writer and musician Aida Riddle; they published zines, as well as a remarkable book of Sufi love poetry.
Some of our collaborators are no longer here: Painted Leaf Press no longer operates, but copies of some titles are available here. Our dear friend Bill Sullivan, the remarkable landscape and portrait painter, who ran it and won awards for his books, passed on in 2010. The Rovners are both gone, as well, but Gnosis Press is now part of our larger organization, operating in tandem with Arkady and Victoria’s son, Anton Rovner, an internationally noted micro-tonal composer and conductor.
Groundwater Press Associates, the nonprofit organization sponsoring all of our imprints, is providing online access to our titles in order to guide poets, artists, and researchers toward the books and other media that we’ve produced, to join the ongoing dialogues concerning the New York School and its place in the global community of writers and artists.