Discover the World of Glenville House Press Publishing

I didn’t start Glenville House Press because I wanted to be a publisher. 

I started it because there are stories that don’t survive systems. 

They disappear in offices. They get softened in meetings. They get reshaped into something easier to market, easier to explain, easier to digest. And somewhere in that process, the living thing inside them is lost. 

Glenville House Press was born from the opposite instinct: preservation. 

Glenville is the neighborhood in Cleveland where my memory begins. It is not a brand. It is not an aesthetic. It is the place my life first spoke to me. Long before I knew what writing was, I was listening there — to porches, to arguments through thin walls, to laughter drifting out of windows, to the sound of my own footsteps learning where they belonged. That neighborhood formed my emotional language. It taught me rhythm. It taught me watchfulness. It taught me what silence carries. 

Years later, when my life entered public view, something strange happened. My story became known, but my memory remained private. The industry is good at narrative. It is not always good at interior life. It knows how to shape a journey. It is less comfortable holding a human being. 

Glenville House Press exists to hold human beings. 

It exists for the parts of a life that don’t fit loglines. For the moments that don’t resolve. For the sentences that don’t perform. For the memories that whisper instead of announce themselves. 

The first book under this imprint, Reflections Beneath the Buckeye Trees: Notes from a Life, did not begin as a book. It began as something closer to survival. I started writing short reflections not to publish them, but to understand what had lived inside me. A street. A voice. A social worker. A night on the sidewalk. A kindness that interrupted despair. Over time, these pieces became a map of consciousness — not of events, but of meaning. 

When it became clear that these reflections wanted to live together, I also knew something else: I did not want to hand them away. Not out of fear. Out of responsibility Some work requires a home that understands it before it enters the world. I wanted a house built from the same material as the book. A place shaped by memory, not market urgency. A press that would not rush the language or sand down its silences. A press that could say: this is finished when the spirit says it’s finished. 

So I built Glenville House Press 

It is a small house by design. A listening house. A house that honors authorship as stewardship. Here, writing is not treated as content. It is treated as record, inheritance, and offering. 

This press is devoted to voices shaped by memory, survival, imagination, and truth. Some of those voices will be my own. Others, in time, will belong to writers whose work does not easily pass through commercial gates, but whose inner lives carry architecture. Writers who are not trying to impress history, but to speak honestly inside it. 

I am not interested in volume. I am interested in depth. 

I am not interested in trends. I am interested in what remains. 

Glenville House Press is not separate from my life. It is a continuation of it. It is the same instinct that made a boy listen closely. The same instinct that later learned to write scenes. The same instinct that now knows the difference between being published and being preserved. 

If these books find their way into your hands, I hope they feel less like products and more like conversations someone trusted you with. That is what this house was built for. 

A place for what might otherwise be lost. A place for what America often rushes past. A place for the human record.

—Antwone Fisher

Founder, Glenville House Press

There are stories a family carries quietly—folded into drawers, tucked inside Bibles, passed hand to hand. This is one of ours.

It begins with a young Black woman in Mississippi named Ida Jolliff, born in the long shadow of slavery but never built for small places. She left Grenada for the Mississippi River, working aboard a riverboat where she crossed paths with Turnbow, an oilman who kept her close and sold her a share of his company—an extraordinary act in the Deep South.

When that company merged into Gulf, then Standard Oil, then Exxon, Ida’s share disappeared from the record. But she kept the certificate. It was the one document she guarded, and the one that started everything.

Ida passed the certificate to her son Horace, who carried it north to Cleveland during the Great Migration. He became the first true keeper of the papers—gathering letters, research, attorney correspondence, and a decades-long trail tracing the corporate mergers that swallowed Ida’s stake.

He passed that responsibility to his son, Spinoza, the family’s enforcer, who pushed the case as far as he could, even receiving a written response from Exxon in 1973. Before he died, Spinoza handed the responsibility to his son Joey. And Joey, knowing the road ahead, told him, “Give it to Antwone. He has the best chance of being heard.” And so it came to me.

When I found my father’s family as a grown man, I wasn’t searching for any inheritance. But when Joey placed that worn manila envelope in my hands—filled with Ida’s legacy and a century of persistence—I understood what Spinoza had seen. He believed I was the one the world would listen to.

And during the filming of Antwone Fisher in Glenville, Spinoza gave me his final blessing. He stopped on the sidewalk, looked at me with a pride I’ll never forget, and said, “Man… your granddaddy would sure be proud of you.”

This story is about restoration—of a woman erased from a table where she rightfully held a seat, and of a family who refused to let her be forgotten. Ida’s share was taken, but her story wasn’t.

Ours is not the only family with a story like this; history holds many such quiet losses. I carry it now. And through this page, so will the world.