Building Without Asking
On Maroon House Press. Why I started it. Who it is for.
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When I named the press, I named it after people who did not wait to be freed.
The Maroons were escaped Africans who built free settlements in the Jamaican interior. From the 1600s onward, they refused to be enslaved, fought the British to a standstill, and forced the empire to negotiate with them as a sovereign power. They did not petition. They did not ask. They withdrew, organized, held ground, and outlasted the plantation system that had produced them.
That is what the name is doing. It is a claim about the kind of press this is and how it intends to operate.
Not asking. Building.
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I started Maroon House Press because I got tired of watching Caribbean and diaspora stories wait at the door of a house that would never open for them at scale.
Not because those stories are not selling. Not because there is no reader for them. Not because the writing is not there. The writing has always been there. Toni Morrison has been gone almost seven years, and the mainstream publishing industry still has not gotten serious about who comes next. Erna Brodber wrote Myal in 1988, and it is still treated like a specialty item. Marlon James won the Booker in 2015, and his own publisher took years to catch up to what he actually was.
The gate is not slow because the readers are not there. The gate is slow because it was built by people who do not consider Caribbean fiction the main event.
I did not want to argue with the gate anymore. Arguing with a gatekeeper keeps you standing at the gate. I wanted to build something on the other side of the fence and stop looking back.
So the press exists. About a year in. A working catalog across multiple genres: literary fiction, historical thriller, paranormal romance, dark comedy, prize-track literary, and YA Caribbean gothic. Every one of those titles is Black, Caribbean, or diaspora storytelling told from the inside, without waiting for a big-five imprint to decide it counts.
I write for the press under Nikki Woods but also Lorna Phillips: my birth name, my mother’s maiden name, my grandmother’s married name. That is the name my Caribbean literary work goes out under. The press publishes other writers and other names alongside mine, across the same range. Different rooms in the same house.
A Black woman writer should not have to pick a single lane and stay in it for a career. A Caribbean press should not only publish literary fiction. Our whole imagination is not literary fiction. Our whole imagination is everything: thriller, romance, comedy, horror, memoir, myth. A press for us should hold all of that. Not one shelf at the front of the store. A whole house.
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Who It Is For.
The writers first. Every Caribbean and diaspora writer who has been sitting on a manuscript that agents in New York and London do not know what to do with. Every writer who has been told her work is too specific, too regional, too small a market, too Black, too Jamaican, too much. Every writer who has been asked to translate herself for a reader she was not writing for in the first place.
The press exists to say: you do not have to translate yourself here. Write the book. We will find the reader. The reader has been there the whole time.
The readers second. Black readers. Diaspora readers. Caribbean readers. Anyone who has ever picked up a book set in the Caribbean and felt as if they were reading a report from a country rather than a letter from home. The press is for the ones who want the letter. Who want the story told from the inside, with the specificity that comes from someone who was actually there, in the body or in the lineage.
And under both of those, the press is for the record. The archive of what we have written and are writing and will write. Every title we publish stays in print. Every title adds to the record. Fifty years from now, when someone is trying to figure out what Caribbean and diaspora fiction looked like in this century, the record is going to have more in it because Maroon House Press existed than it would have otherwise.
That matters to me. That is the part I do not compromise on.
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What drives me now is different from what started me.
The press began as a way to publish books nobody else would publish. That is still what it is. But the vision has gotten bigger.
I am building toward a literary house on Jamaican soil. An actual building. Actual ground. A place where the press has its own address, a residency for Caribbean writers, a room for the community that gathers around this kind of writing. A place where a manuscript can arrive and be held and worked on and published and celebrated inside a house that belongs to us. Not rented. Not borrowed. Ours.
I am not going to tell you where yet. Readers who have been here for a while know what I mean. Every piece I have written about that ground has been getting me and the press closer to the door.
The press is the seed of that house. Every title I have published, every writer I have signed, has been quiet preparation for a physical place where Caribbean literary life can be tended year-round. Not as an event. As a home.
The press is the piece that already works. The house is the piece that is coming. Together, they are what I am actually building.
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Here is what I know now, a year in.
You do not have to wait. You do not have to petition. The gatekeepers will not decide it is time. It is never their timing. It is yours.
If you have a book, write it. If you have a press in you, start it. If you have a house you are meant to build, buy the ground. Every one of those things is being negotiated by people who are not going to negotiate on your behalf.
The Maroons did not wait for freedom to be granted.
I am not going to either.
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A small invitation.
If you have a manuscript, a project, or a piece of work that has been waiting for permission that is not coming, tell me what it is. I want to know what you are getting ready to build. The comments are open on Substack, or reply to the email when this lands in your inbox.
I read every reply.
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If you are new here.
Land & Legacy is where I write about land, lineage, and what we are still trying to claim. Maroon House Press is one of the things I am claiming. There are more.
Subscribe for free at thenikkiwoods.substack.com.