ABOUT THE PRESS
Nervous Ghost Press was inspired by a group of writers and artists (the Citizen Poets) that all share one belief: writing saves lives.
Our Vision
All people deserve to experience the beauty of the arts.
Our Mission
Nervous Ghost Press is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit independent publisher committed to publishing quality work regardless of race, age, gender, sexuality, or education. We believe that writing has the power to save lives—we've witnessed it. Art and trauma, the human experience, and our ability to gather those things and create something powerful is what we live for. Writing transcends our identities and brings strangers together, silences hate, and proves that we can create beauty from the ugly and the scary. Nervous Ghost Press promotes writing from the heart, we advocate for our communities, and we will always strive to be a champion for positivity, growth, and lasting change. We stand unapologetically against all hate and injustice and will never silence or demonize anyone on the basis of their beliefs, origins, or identities.
Through literary excellence, music, education, art, and media, Nervous Ghost Press exists to bring all of our immediate and extended communities together. We're looking for poems and stories that were written to save the life of the writer; raw, unadulterated, fearless. We seek established and emerging voices and hope to become a place to inspire, motivate, and provide a platform for otherwise marginalized people. Nervous Ghost Press was created in 2019 by the community, for the community.
Nervous Ghost Press exists to make art accessible to those who need it most.
Our Programming
The Nervous Ghost Press Workshop Series
Community Literary Journals (coming soon)
The Nervous Ghost Press Open Mic
The Nervous Ghost Press Book Prize
*All acquisitions, editing, design & formatting, and distribution are conducted in-house by the Nervous Ghost Press staff.
MEET US
Nervous Ghost Press
Editor-in-Chief, Secretary
Born in New Jersey and raised in California, Dennis has spent most of his life traveling the world until settling down in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He is a lover of history, the arts, and people.
Audio/ Video Engineer
Growing up in Compton, California, while trying to find his place in the world, Bryan realized his passion was audio. There’s no better way to remember something than to listen to sounds and have the melody carry your mind away. Expressing himself through auditory senses is what he loves and working through audio files is his life. To Bryan, if you can feel something, there’s a sound for that.
Publisher, CEO
Matthew Mejia is an American poet and an award-winning professor whose work and research explores trauma, fear, grief, epistemology, pedagogy, and the self. He is driven and inspired by his Japanese, Mexican, and Indigenous ancestry. I am my ancestors' dream, and their bones are mine. Through art, he continues to heal generations of violence and abuse in order to unify his communities. In the classroom, he advocates for student success and truly believes that students are the foundation on which academia stands. Matthew began a 501c3 arts advocacy nonprofit, Nervous Ghost Press, with the fundamental idea that writing saves lives. All people deserve to experience the beauty and power of the arts, and I will always fight to illustrate that our voices carry power and strength.
Editor
Born with cerebral palsy and raised in an extremely toxic environment, James uses his experience under patriarchy as a means of uncovering its mechanisms and working to subvert them. Most of his writing centers around his work as a crip theorist, where he writes about subjects from the intersection of toxic masculinity and ableism, to the effects of being raised crippled in a hypermasculine household, to the interaction of American Evangelicalism with societal expectations of manhood. James finds great comfort and solidarity with the disabled community, as well as other marginalized peoples, through writing and reading activist poetry.