Channel Press, a new company dedicated to publishing the best local and international writing on nature, climate and ecological concern, has today announced its arrival on the Irish publishing scene with Cassia Gaden Gilmartin as Publisher/CEO.
The company has evolved from Channel, a biannual journal of eco-writing published by Gaden Gilmartin since 2019, and will take over the journal’s publication in additional to releasing a select list of standalone titles from spring 2027 onwards.
Its debut project, a poetry anthology titled Biophilia: Love Poems for the Living World, will launch in February 2027.
Submissions for this anthology are now open and book manuscript submissions to complete the new press’s 2027–2028 list will open later this year.
Channel Press will operate on a nonprofit basis as a company limited by guarantee, led by a volunteer board of directors with responsibility for ensuring all company resources are directed towards the aim enshrined in its constitution: to contribute towards the protection of the environment and of more-than-human life by promoting a literary culture that engages deeply with the question of how to live in healthier relation with the world around us.
In addition to publishing, the company says it will pursue this aim by offering a programme of writing courses and development opportunities for writers interested in exploring ecological themes through their work.
The first course on this programme, a six-week writing workshop titled Writing the Rural: Person, Place and Process with facilitator Ryan Dennis – author of The Beasts They Turned Away (époque press, 2021) and founder of The Milk House, an initiative to showcase writing on rural subjects – is now taking bookings and will run in October 2026.
Channel, founded by Gaden Gilmartin and poet Elizabeth Murtough in the midst of the global climate strikes of 2019, has now been publishing biannually for seven years.
Since 2023 each issue has included a selection of work in Irish, and this Irish-language strand of Channel’s publishing practice will continue at Channel Press under the leadership of Eagarthóir Gaeilge Simon Ó Faoláin.
A first standalone title, Annette Skade’s chapbook Holdfast – a poetic tribute to nineteenth-century botanist Ellen Hutchins – was published under the Channel name in 2024.
On the launch on the new press, Gaden Gilmartin says:
‘Channel‘s reason for being has always been to create community among writers, artists and readers around shared ecological concern and shared appreciation for the joys to be found in ecological entanglement. Becoming Channel Press allows us to grow that community further, and we can’t wait to meet the new writers and audiences we’ll be able to reach in the years ahead.
‘We take our name, Channel Press, from the multiple meanings of the word “channel” – whether referring to a body of water, a band of electromagnetic frequencies or the act of channelling a spirit, it always points to a conduit that creates the possibility of connection.
‘Our press’s mission is to nurture writing that acts in the same way – words that draw human beings and the living world closer together.’