Metonymy Press was launched in August 2014, at a reading event following that year’s Queer Between the Covers book fair, part of the Pervers/Cité (the underside of Pride) program. Featuring a number of readers who would later be published by Metonymy, this event and its broader context remain at the root of what Metonymy does as a small press. Slow, community-based, and largely diy, Metonymy Press has published one to four books a year starting in 2015.

With a plan to publish queer, feminist literary fiction and nonfiction, we have assembled a catalogue that includes these forms and formats as well as poetry, a guidebook, and a children’s picture book. Metonymy’s critically recognized, award-winning catalogue of daring and unconventional genres is, as one author put it, replete with “authors and books that reframe power and affirm life.”

Metonymy’s choices of authors and genres arise from our commitment to aesthetic and editorial excellence, and we seek work that transgresses boundaries, undermines the status quo, and sustains those on the margins. We put significant thought and resources into acquisitions, design, editorial, and promotion. 
Metonymy was founded by old friends Ashley Fortier and Oliver Fugler, who have remained the owner-operators for the first 10 years. The press has no permanent staff, but many important tasks at the press have been done on contract with designers, editors, and artists, as well as an editorial and acquisitions committee from 2021 to 2024.