The managing editor of the Pasadena, California–based Red Hen Press is a busy woman. She is a poet and fiction writer whose publishing credits include several books issued by her own press, and the poetry collections Mating Season (Tupelo Press, 2004), and Goldilocks Zone, forthcoming in March from the University of New Mexico Press. But what keeps Kate Gale busiest is leading Red Hen, the nonprofit she cofounded with Mark E. Cull in 1994, and planning events to mark its big anniversary year.

Red Hen Press was founded nineteen years ago this month, right?
Yes, we’ll be going into our twentieth year. Since we’re in Los Angeles, we’re amazed to still be around. [Laughs.]

Why amazed?
Well, publishing has traditionally thrived in New York City and Minneapolis, and to some extent in the Northwest. Los Angeles is difficult for publishing for a couple of reasons. One is that creative work is overshadowed by the film industry, and also architecture and music at this point. So when you think of Los Angeles, you don’t think of publishing. Having a [successful] publishing company in a city that’s as expensive as Los Angeles, and where there isn’t a general feeling that this is what the city does best, is extraordinary.

So how is it that you’ve managed to survive for almost two decades?
Ray Bradbury spoke at our first fundraising event and said, “It’s great to have a publishing company in Los Angeles, because people are always doing crazy things here.” I’ve always liked that, because L.A. is both a place where you go to reinvent yourself and a place to try out your wildest ideas. If we’d been in New York or Chicago, someone would have sat us down in the early years and said, “This is impossible, given this city, given how expensive it is to live here, given how much money you’re going to have to raise.” But in Los Angeles, it’s all about making the impossible possible.

What led to the founding of the press?
I came to L.A. in 1987 to get a master’s and then a PhD at Claremont Graduate University. I was in a writing group, and felt that everyone in our group deserved to be published. One person in our group started a small press called Garden Street Press; it published my first book, and also published some other people in the group. Then he started to fall apart as a publisher, and that was that. And I thought, “If this guy can start a press”—he didn’t even own a computer; he was renting computers from Kinko’s—I thought, “I know that I can do this.” I liked the idea of being a collective, and I thought everybody in our group would help out. But collectives are very hard to run, especially in L.A., where people don’t want to get off work and then have to drive another two hours to wherever you are. And we weren’t even sending e-mail attachments back then. In the end, there were just two of us doing all the work. Everybody wanted to be published, but they weren’t as engaged in the work part. And so when we decided to start a nonprofit, I thought of the story of the Little Red Hen.

Refresh our memories, would you?
There was this bunch of farmyard animals, all of whom wanted to have bread. So the Little Red Hen said, “Who’s going to plant the wheat?” And they all said, “Not I! Not I!” So the Little Red Hen planted the wheat. But then she asked who was going to take care of the wheat, who’s going to harvest it? “Not I! Not I!” At the end, when she’s made the bread, she says, “Who’s going to eat the bread?” And everyone’s like, “I will!” And the Little Red Hen says, “No, I’m going to eat it myself!” [Laughs.] The story for us was a good image for getting going on something. Fortunately it didn’t keep on that way. Now we have a great staff, a great board, great shareholders, so the burden is not just on one or two people.

You have a whole flock of Red Hens.
Exactly. Otherwise we’d still be a micro-press. I love micro-presses, but that wasn’t the direction we wanted to go.

What’s the scope and size of the press today?
There are five parts to the press. There’s the Los Angeles Review, which comes out twice a year. We have a writing-in-the-schools program in Los Angeles and Pasadena, an awards program, and a reading series in L.A. and New York City. And of course the biggest part of the organization is the press itself, which publishes twenty titles a year. We’ve always been heavier on poetry, but we have more and more prose writers. That growth, I think, has come about because the middle has sort of dropped out of commercial publishing, and we’ve picked up several prose writers who would otherwise have been with bigger publishers. In general, in fact, I think independent publishing is going to pick up the mid-list.

Diversity has also been part of your mission; you have an imprint that publishes lesbian books, I see.
Yes. Arktoi Books publishes a lesbian writer every year. Sometimes it’s poetry, sometimes prose. One of our bestselling books is Kelly Barth’s My Almost Certainly Real Imaginary Jesus (2012), a memoir that came out through the Arktoi imprint. My favorite quote from that is when she’s talking to her minister and says, “I want to be a lesbian but I also want to be a Christian.” And he says, “That’s Satan talking.” [Laughs.]

Are there upcoming Red Hen books you’re especially excited about?
Absolutely. We’ve got another Ron Carlson book coming out. We also have more books by Ellen Meeropol, Brian Doyle, and David Mason. So I feel like what we’ve built toward these past twenty years is having a strong list of core authors. I don’t think anybody gets to be a press that’s going to last many decades without really building on authors, not books. It’s all about the relationships with authors, and they’ve helped stabilize us.

What was the original budget of the press, and what is it now?
The first year we filed with the IRS, I believe we were at $38,000. The next year we were at $68,000. Then we went to $125,000, then finally to $250,000. It took an extraordinarily long time to get from $250,000 to $500,000, and we’re now at about $600,000. And we’re doing a lot with $600,000.

What percentage of that comes from contributions as opposed to earned income?
Just under 50 percent of that is earned income. We also get foundation grants, we get money from the NEA, we get local government funding. But a significant portion is from sales, in part because of our distribution agreement with the University of Chicago Press, which started about six years ago, and that’s continuing to grow.

Will the press continue to grow, or do you envision it staying at its current size?
We don’t plan to grow beyond publishing twenty books a year for the foreseeable future. What we plan to do, as we continue to build our fundraising efforts, is to do a better marketing and publicity job on the books that we’re currently publishing. And I think over the next ten years, I’d like to see us build as strong a list of prose writers as we have of poets.

What kind of events do you have planned for the anniversary?
We’re going to have an anniversary event at AWP in Seattle in February, an event in Chicago, and special readings in different venues around the country. One of the keys to our success has been our strategic relationships with venues like Poets House in New York City, because if you’re from someplace that feels a little marginalized in terms of publishing, you have to build relationships to places that have strong publishing connections.

Kevin Nance is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.