Over the years, both Writ Large Projects, the Los Angeles and Pittsburgh based indie press, and Chiwan Choi, poet and partner at WLP (and, of course, our Editor) have been known for their experiments. Whether it’s ridiculously ambitious literary festivals such as #90X90LA, an ongoing public publishing project called PUBLISH!, a live drunken writing workshop in Drunken Masters, Writ Large has been defining and redefining the role of a publisher within a community.
And Chiwan has been pushing the rules and boundaries of his own work over the years with groundbreaking work such as Ghostmaker, a novel that was written, presented and destroyed, and even retiring from poetry to write tattoos.
Writ Large Projects is releasing his sixth poetry collection, birthdays, in mid-April. It’s poetry as live reporting of a life in crisis and the coming losses.
And this is the project that felt right to be the FIRST Kickstarter project for WLP. Well, not the book itself, but—
A birthdays EP on vinyl. Featuring a dozen poems read by Chiwan himself, recorded on his phone while curled up in his back room.
From the campaign page:
Once I realized that birthdays was on track to be released in the first quarter of 2026, I started thinking about what cool thing I could do for the book that I hadn’t done before.
It didn’t take long for me to think of two young Carnegie Mellon University engineering students I’d met in 2024. They had designed and built a print-on-demand vinyl machine and had started a company called Lead-In Record Co.
We connected and talked about making vinyls for poets, referencing all the old comedy records our parents generation had listened to back in the day. With vinyl production not only unreachable financially for most, with minimum orders and such, but also the scarcity of vinyl manufacturers around the country that makes months-long waits the norm, we thought poets who are already used to selling their book as print-on-demand the ideal match for their new machines.
We decided to use my book as a pilot project to see if it’s something other poets can explore.
Follow the campaign and support it when it launches!