Cultivating literary Dallas
“It was not enough to publish books,” says Deep Vellum founder Will Evans. “We needed a place to invite people in, to put literature at the core of the cultural community.”
Publisher Will Evans (Photo by Mike Brooks)
Will Evans is the founder of Deep Vellum, a nonprofit publishing house in Dallas that seeks to put local and global authors in conversation. Founded in 2013, Deep Vellum has published seven of Nobel prize–winning writer Jon Fosse’s novels in translation and has made a name for itself as a literary translating powerhouse. But for Evans, the most important thing is building a literary community in Dallas, one reader at a time.
Tell us the story of how Deep Vellum came to be. What was your vision?
I grew up in rural North Carolina, and I was a reader from the youngest age. When I was 14 years old, I accidentally read Maxim Gorky’s The Life of a Useless Man, and it ignited a fascination with Russian culture that has driven every professional decision that I’ve made.
