Game-changing Publisher Will Evans of Deep Vellum Talks Editorial Greatness at Feraru Conferences

The next iteration of the Feraru Online Conferences puts front and center one of the most visionary publishers in the U.S., Will Evans, the CEO of maverick press Deep Vellum. Daring, eloquent, and indefatigable, Will Evans has built, against all odds, in a country where foreign fiction published every year counts for less than 0,5% of all publications, a most successful editorial platform devoted to literature in translation, which has become the welcoming home to legions of important authors from all corners of the world. The publisher of Mircea Cărtărescu and Magda Cârneci comes to Feraru Conferences to reveal how he has become the author of the biggest coups in editorial America of the past decade, how Deep Vellum has ended up, in 10 years and apparently from scratch, with a catalog of almost 2,000 foreign titles, and why publishing books in translation is not as crazy at it sounds on the cut-throat American book market.

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WILL EVANS is an award-winning publisher, writer, translator, bookstore owner, and literary arts advocate. In 2013, he moved to Dallas and founded Deep Vellum, a nonprofit publishing house and bookstore, dedicated to bringing the world into conversation through literature by publishing the world’s vital stories by underrepresented writers, and cultivating a lifelong love of reading through creative programming and outspoken advocacy for the literary arts. He was awarded CLMP's Golden Colophon Award for Paradigm Independent Publishing in 2019, was accepted to the Texas Institute of Letters in 2022, and became a Fellow of the Dallas Institute of Humanities & Culture in 2023. He received BA degrees in History and Russian Literature from Emory University, and an MA in Russian Culture from Duke University. His translation of Russian writer Oleg Kashin's novel Fardwor, Russia: A Fantastical Tale of Life Under Putin was published by Restless Books in 2016. A native of Wilmington, North Carolina, he lives in East Dallas with his wife and two children.

Photo credit: Mike Brooks/Dallas Observer