Executive Director, Tupelo Press

Reports To: Board of Directors

Salary Range: $73,000 – $80,000 Base Salary (Commensurate with experience)

Lead one of America’s most distinctive independent literary presses into its next era.

Tupelo Press is seeking the person who will become the first Publisher of Tupelo’s next generation: an accomplished, imaginative, intellectually serious leader who understands books and writers, knows how organizations work, understands how books reach readers and how literary markets are made, and has both the ambition and judgment to inherit a successful literary institution without being constrained by its past.

Founded in 1999, Tupelo Press is an internationally respected independent nonprofit literary press with a catalog of more than 400 books and a community of more than 550 authors, editors, and translators. Our books are distributed and marketed by the University of Chicago Press. Tupelo also encompasses Tupelo Quarterly, competitions, workshops, conferences, fellowships, and an expanding residency program.

The opportunity

Founder and Publisher Jeffrey Levine will transition out of executive leadership through a planned one- to two-year succession period. The successful candidate will assume substantial authority from the beginning and progressively take responsibility for staff leadership, publishing strategy, sales and distribution, finances, fundraising, Board relations, partnerships, and the overall direction of the Press.

This is not a two-year apprenticeship followed by permission to lead. Leadership begins on arrival.

We are looking for a senior publishing professional with substantial responsibility already behind them—someone who combines:

Executive authority and judgment: You can lead talented people, invite disagreement, make difficult decisions, and move an organization forward. Publishing fluency: You understand the life cycle of a book from acquisition through production, positioning, sales, marketing, distribution, events, inventory, and backlist. Commercial imagination: You can find the memorable story inside a book and make authors, sales representatives, booksellers, partners, and readers care about it. Financial intelligence: You can read a budget and a sales report, draft an annual budget, allocate scarce resources, and distinguish an exciting idea from an affordable one. Managerial maturity: You can hire excellent people, develop them, give them room, hold them accountable, and address conflict directly. Board development:  You can lead the charge in improving the board of directors. Persuasive presence: Writers, staff, sales representatives, donors, trustees, and partners want to engage with you because of your intelligence, curiosity, preparation, generosity, and conviction. Entrepreneurial appetite: You can build, experiment, recognize possibility, and take intelligent risks. Direct book-publishing experience is strongly preferred. Competitive candidates will generally bring at least 8–10 years of progressively responsible experience in book publishing or a closely related literary organization, including meaningful senior-level responsibility.

We are not searching for a second founder, nor for someone to preserve Tupelo in amber. We want a leader capable of understanding what must be preserved, what should be strengthened, what can be relinquished, and what has not yet been imagined.

One measure of a successful transition will be straightforward:

Tupelo must become genuinely independent of its founder.

Compensation and benefits

• This is a senior executive position. Salary Range: $73,000 – $80,000 (Commensurate with experience)
• Benefits: Eligible for an annual board-approved performance bonus (up to 7%), remote work stipend, medical plan and generous paid time off.

Benefits include employer-funded health coverage; four weeks paid vacation; paid holidays and year-end office closure; paid sick leave; flexible remote work; employer-paid professional development and required travel; and participation in Tupelo’s retirement savings plan with an employer contribution.

The position requires periodic travel expected for University of Chicago Press sales meetings, AWP and other publishing-related events, Board meetings, donor cultivation, and literary programs.

How to apply:

Please send a résumé or CV to publisher@tupelopress.org along with a letter telling us something we cannot learn from your résumé.

We especially want to know:

Why Tupelo? No flattery required: maybe we could do things better or differently. Tell us about that. Or about what it is we do now that you find particularly interesting or exciting.

Why now?

What in your experience makes you ready not simply to work for a distinguished nonprofit literary press, but eventually to lead one?

We are interested in candidates whose backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives will broaden and deepen the leadership of Tupelo Press.

Read the complete position description → https://tupelopress.org/publisher-executive-director

The next Publisher of Tupelo Press will inherit nearly thirty years of history.

What interests us most is what they will do with the next thirty.