History
Free River Press was founded in Nashville in 1990 by writer Robert Wolf and Steven Meinbresse, former Coordinator of Tennessee’s Department of Homeless Services. The press grew out of a writing workshop Wolf conducted at a Nashville homeless shelter between 1989 and 1991.
For one year during this period Free River Press ran a Great Books seminar funded by the Tennessee Humanities Council. One of the seminar’s purposes was to investigate what several traditional cultures said constituted full humanity. Wolf’s premise was that our culture has no shared adequate idea of what constitutes full humanity and therefore has created institutions, such as schools and work places, that are deforming us. This is the root of the drug and alcohol problem which in turn is major cause of homelessness. The seminar mixed homeless and non-homeless participants.
By 1991 Free River Press had published six slim volumes by the homeless, including Five Street Poets and Passing Thru. In 1991 Wolf moved to rural Iowa and began a writing workshop with neighboring farmers that ran for two winters. Their writings were issued in three books, Voices From the Land, Simple Times, and More Voices From the Land.
During the time he worked with Iowa farmers, Wolf was also traveling to west Tennessee to conduct writing workshops there. Subsequently, as part of the press’s mission to document life in the Mississippi Delta, it published two memoirs by west Tennessee farmers. Wolf later conducted a workshop in Helena, Arkansas. Subsequently Free River Press conducted more workshops in small Midwestern towns and cities, and in New Jersey, New York City, Chicago, west Texas, and Santa Fe.
In 1999, Oxford University Press published a sampling from the first nine years of Free River Press books, An American Mosaic: Prose and Poetry by Everyday Folk.
In 2009, Free River Press published a second edition of Heartland Portrait: Stories From the Rural Midwest, a large anthology incorporating 18 years of writings developed in workshops in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
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