ABOUT


As editor/publisher of Arambala Press, I wish to welcome you to our website. Arambala Press was founded in 2007 to publish grass roots, non-academic histories of social movements and to provide a forum for essay writing that packs a punch, and raises issues, without falling into polemics.  Arambala Press exists to plug holes that exist today in historical writing, and literary essays. 

Arambala Press will debut its first history this summer with the publication of my Democratizing Cleveland: The Rise and Fall of Community Organizing in Cleveland, Ohio 1975-85.  A second work, Little Green Groups: Stories from the Environmental Grass Roots is in the planning stage.

I have always been fascinated by the chapbook as a literary vehicle to get material out to the public.  The chapbook is an old and venerable vehicle.  It is usually around thirty pages in length, is inexpensively produced and is the forerunner of the paper back book as a popular way to get writing into the hands of general public.  During its heyday in the 18th and early 19th century chapbooks published potboiler novels, religious sermons and tracts, and political polemics.  Today, it is almost exclusively a vehicle for poetry.  “Why should poets have all the fun?” has always been my question.  So Arambala Press will produce a chapbook of my essays On the Road to the Last Mammoth Barbecue and Other Essays with the New Year.     

One of my goals in establishing Arambala Press is to promote essay writing that has some punch and gravitas to it.  My first effort in this direction will be to publish an anthology of essays called Blow the Doors Off the House.  We will solicit essays that are the equivalent of a professional wrestling smack down.  Essays that cause you to slap your forehead, walk around your house talking to yourself, or simply say “Wow! Now that was an essay!” 

So, welcome to Arambala Press.  I plan to have some fun with this venture, and hope that you do too. 

Randy Cunningham
Publisher/Editor
Arambala Press

About the Publisher

Randy Cunningham has worked in the housing advocacy field for over twenty five years in Cleveland, Ohio.  He has also been an activist in issues ranging from peace to the environment.  He lives on the west side of Cleveland, with his wife Tristine. 

Cunningham is an essayist who has been published in both on line and print literary journals, most recently in Under the Sun. He has also been published in paddling magazines such as Canoe & Kayak, and Paddler.  His letters to the editor have been renowned for years in Cleveland as a form of warfare carried on by literary means.

What is Arambala?

Arambala is a town in the Department of Morazon, in El Salvador.  The publisher visited the town in 1991 as part of a delegation that was in El Salvador to study the peace process as it was developing between the government and the rebels of the FMLN.