Luke Hankins, senior editor of the Asheville Poetry Review, recently launched Orison Books, a new non-profit literary press.

Orison Books is a 501(c)(3) non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad range of perspectives. The new press will serve as a home for writers and readers of all backgrounds, religious and non-religious.

In addition to publishing spiritually-engaged poetry, fiction, and non-fiction books of exceptional literary merit, each year Orison Books will publish The Orison Anthology—a collection of the best spiritual writing in all genres published in periodicals the preceding year. Orison’s titles will be released in beautifully-designed hardcover and paperback formats, and many will also be released as e-books.

Additionally, Orison Books aims to contribute to the cultural conversations around spirituality and literature by hosting classes, readings, symposia, and other public events.

Orison Books is currently conducting a fundraiser through Indiegogo, an online crowdfunding platform: www.indiegogo.com/projects/orison-books. Through behind-the-scenes efforts, Orison Books initially raised $6,500, which allowed them to incorporate, apply for tax exemption with the IRS, and create a logo and website. Their goal is to raise an additional $40,000 to enable them to begin publishing books in early 2015.

“Today, a significant gap exists between literary publishers and strictly religious publishers. Literary publishers occasionally publish books of spiritual depth, but few, if any, set out to do so as a mission and raison d’être.

“Religious publishers, on the other hand, tend to publish work that offers little appeal to readers outside a particular ideological group. Orison Books, a new non-profit literary press, aims to address this gap through its focus on the life of the spirit from a non-ideological standpoint.” ~ Luke Hankins, Editor

“Orison” [awr-uh-zuhn] is an archaic word that means “prayer.” The founders at Orison Books believe that the best spiritual art and literature call us to meditate and contemplate, rather than asking us to adopt any ideology or set of propositions. As Simone Weil wrote, “The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation” (Gravity and Grace).

This type of art evokes the human experience of transcendence and explores the mysteries of being, and in so doing opens our minds and hearts to the divine and the possibility of becoming the fullest humans we can be. In their view, spiritual writing has little to do with subject matter. Rather, the kind of work they seek to publish has a transcendent aesthetic effect on the reader, and reading it can itself be a spiritual experience. Such work is not merely about spiritual contemplation, but itself leads the reader into profound contemplation. It is not merely about the sublime, but itself has a sublime effect on the reader. It is not merely about the mystery of being, but itself heightens the reader’s sense of the mystery underlying the fabric of our daily lives.

Orison Books will release its first title, I Scrape the Window of Nothingness: New & Selected Poems by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, on March 15, 2015. Radulescu has for decades been writing poetry in three languages (Romanian, French, and English), and while she has garnered much attention in France, winning numerous awards for her books, her work has received relatively little attention in the States.

Orison feels her work is a perfect fit for their mission, and they hope to help remedy the neglect her work has suffered in this country. I Scrape the Window of Nothingness is a compilation of the best selections from several decades of her English-language books, along with a substantial section of new, unpublished work.

Visit www.orisonbooks.com