We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kenia Hale and Isabella Escobar a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Kenia and Isabella, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

Barbara Smith, co-founder of Kitchen Table Press, named it so because the kitchen table is “the center of the home, the place where women in particular work and communicate with each other.” Porch Water Press honors the porch as a radical space of community meeting, where the home meets the world around us, meets the land, meets the many waters that connect us.

As Porch Water Press, our nia (purpose) is to create an archive of our lives, to honor interconnections between our political and artistic struggles, and the ways we find and build community despite the deluge. Our freedom and liberation requires us to know and honor our own stories and power. At the nexus of crises – climate change, political upheaval, rising fascism – and the amazing communities working to love, hope, and transform despite/amongst the noise, Porch Water Press is an archive of this time in history, proof that we been here, and will continue to be here. We are both somebody’s baby and future ancestors, finding, creating, and preparing a world better than the one we’ve been given.

Kenia, Isabella , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Ancestor Toni Morrison, when discussing her creative process of writing as a Black woman writer, said “I stood at the border, stood at the edge, and claimed it as central. Claimed it as central and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.” (Toni Morrison) Porch Water Press is inspired by this invocation – we publish books, zines, anthologies, and other artistic expression that takes seriously the necessity of placing our community – Black, Trans, Queer, Indigenous, Working Class, Disabled, further marginalized – in the absolute center, speaking for and amongst ourselves.

Like many Black artists and activists, Porch Water Press recognizes that our struggles are interconnected across borders. We’re working on building a network of other marginalized publishers internationally to share resources and work together to break down the imaginary barriers that divide us. We are based in New Brunswick, NJ, and Harlem , NY, however we accept submissions from anywhere in the world! Learn more about our work at at porchwaterpress.com, or @porchwaterpress on Instagram. Reach out to us at porchwaterpress@gmail.com

How’d you meet your business partner?

We, Kenia Hale and Isa Escobar, are Black queer young women artists and community workers based in Lenapehoking. We begin here because our identities and values shape the work that we breathe life into. We take our roles seriously, creating spaces that reflect the world we already live in, regardless of what the white-supremacist-cis-hetero-patriarchal systems we live under attempt to impose on us. In the work we create together, we center ourselves and our kinfolk (chosen and otherwise) – the friends we meet at drag shows and mosh pits, the neighbors we meet at the community garden and the dispensary. We see our work as tending to the gardens of our community. Porch Water Press, our revolutionary publishing press – is a manifestation of these visions.

Our origin story began in a “dirty, crowded basement,” (“Monogamy”, Speakeasy). Under the glow of streetlights and the moon overhead, we met at DIY punk show, as the only Black women in the room- besides the organizer of the show, Shalom, who had put her heart into creating safe spaces for punks to enjoy music. The two of us decided that night we would honor the legacy of Black women as the creators of rock music and musical counter-culture. From there we built our Black, queer punk-soul band, Speakeasy (@speakeasy.mp3), destroying the barriers of white male patriarchy between us and our long history of alternative music. As we built this world together, we began to think about the radical history of publishing and zines as methods of further uplifting our histories and future visions, to create spaces for our communities to tell our own stories.

In March of 2023, we had a vision. Here we were, with abundantly talented friends and comrades, all from communities that others describe as “under-resourced.” And still, our work was abundant, radiant, and full of life-giving power, scribbled on receipts and the backs of parking tickets. As full time workers from working class backgrounds, we’re no strangers to the power and particular magic of “making a way out of no way.” We wanted to create a formal space to publish and uplift these diverse creative worlds. It was here that Porch Water Press was formed.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

The legacy of Black feminist revolution was not built in luxury. It was not formed over expensive dinners and imported wines. The women of Black Feminist history met over hot stoves and summer porches – third spaces in which the personal meets the community. We serve the Queer Black Indigenous community, a community of angry riotgrrls and patient mothers. In the Black Feminist tradition, we share our earrings, our knowledge, our merit, our loyalties, our message, and we’re excited to share and exchange the valuable tools with other participants in the program, deepening our connections to other Black feminist community organizations and projects.

As a press whose contributors and audience are diverse working class people, we believe it is a human right to be able to eat, drink, be housed, and live freely. Our publications are full of people with a passion for boundless creation and the limiting pressure of being able to put food on the table. They should not have to choose between their next meal and their next masterpiece.

As Porch Water Press, we’re living proof of the power of making a way out of no way. Our aunties’ egyptian musk and gray sage concoctions that would bellow out from black leather couches and glass fixtures were the scents of revolution always accompanied by life lessons. This kind of Passion and spirit work exists and thrives outside the rules of capitalism. More than riches, we find wealth in the powerful legacies of Black publishing and storytelling that makes societal change and revolution irresistible.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://porchwaterpress.com
• Instagram: @porchwaterpress
• Youtube: speakeasy_nb
• Soundcloud: speakeasy_nb
• Other: Spotify: speakeasy
  Apple Music: speakeasy
  Single: “Monogamy”