photo credit: Lauren Vallese June 2009

photo credit: Lauren Vallese June 2009

Press Release

Middletown, NJ — Punk rock-spirited independent publisher Word Riot Press will release What’s Your Exit?: A Literary Detour through New Jersey in May 2010.

The anthology, edited by Alicia A. Beale and Joe Vallese, will include feature new and previously published work from over 40 writers.  Among the book’s contributors are Joyce Carol Oates , Tom Perrotta, Robert Pinsky, Jason Biggs, J. Robert Lennon, Alicia Ostriker,  Paul Lisicky , Louise de Salvo, Donna Steiner, Joe Weil, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Lee Klein, Suzanne Paola, James Richardson, Susan Fox Rogers, Gerald Stern, JC Todd, BJ Ward, and Sung J. Woo.

What’s Your Exit? will be comprised of contemporary literary fiction, memoir, and poetry about, inspired by, and representative of the Garden State.  Themes of family, friendship, travel, culture, sexuality, love, fear, violence, nostalgia, and longing populate the anthology, which features writers and styles as eclectic and beautiful, and as unnerving and mysterious and bold as the place that unites them in this work.

An index in the back of the anthology will list the collected works by Parkway and Turnpike exits, an homage to the traditional way Jersey folk identify and relate to one another—the simple but loaded inquiry, “What exit?”

“We want What’s Your Exit? to be our gift to New Jersey,” said Vallese, a Palisades Park native and undergraduate writing teacher at New York University.

After developing their vision for the anthology, Beale and Vallese sought a New Jersey-based publisher equally enthusiastic about the scope of the project.

“We believe Word Riot Press is a company with the passion and literary aesthetics to propel this book in both a profitable and artistic direction,” said Beale, a Long Branch native.

Word Riot Press publisher Jackie Corley, a New Jersey resident, sees the book’s publication as a milestone for the company.  “Up until this point, we have mainly published small paperbacks by rising literary notables, such as Nick Antosca, Kevin Sampsell and David Barringer,” Corley said. “An anthology of this range, with such an impressive collection of established and up-and-coming authors represents an exciting step in our growth.”