Lavender Ink was founded in 1995 in New Orleans by Bill Lavender, who is still the Director and Editor in Chief. The Press is a sole-proprietorship funded solely by revenues from book sales and some small grants and funding initiatives for individual books. Prior to 2012 the press published only poetry, but is now publishing fiction and nonfiction also. Diálogos is the official business name (registered as a sole proprietorship in Louisiana); Lavender Ink and Diálogos are the two imprints published by Diálogos. Most Lavender Ink titles are American poetry, fiction, or nonfiction. The Diálogos imprint is devoted to literatures which have cross-cultural significance, primarily but not exclusively literature in translation.

 

Our mission is change the world through poetry, as most of the fiction we publish could rightly be called poetic. We believe that great literature both chronicles the age and influences the future, and we also believe that it is inherently valuable to read and study the literatures of nations, languages and cultures other than one’s own, as well as forward-looking and socially engaged work from one’s own home town. Thus we publish poets from New Orleans but also California and New York, and we have published poetry and fiction in translation from more than twenty nations in Latin America, Europe, and Africa. We hope that the eclectic nature of our collection inspires dialogue, both literal and textual, across borders of all kinds.