Balsamine Press publishes peer-reviewed scholarship in education and the humanities: the kind of work that takes teaching seriously, that attends to whose voices have been left out of the record, and that treats mentorship as intellectual labor rather than an afterthought. We’re drawn to projects that are useful to practitioners as well as rigorous for specialists, and to writers who are doing careful thinking about hard questions.
We are small on purpose. We take on a book because we believe in what it’s asking and in the people asking it, and we work to make what we publish as accessible as we can. Publications are open access wherever we can manage it, with print priced reasonably. We’d rather publish a few things well, and get them into the hands of the people who actually need them, than publish a great many things and reach no one.
On the Name
Balsamine is the French name for jewelweed–the orange, freckled, seed-flinging plant that crowds the creek banks and damp ditches of eastern North America, including in Québec, where my family’s roots are. I spent a good part of my childhood in Wisconsin pulling the blossoms and sucking the sweet out of the spur, which is the sort of knowledge you only get from being turned loose outdoors.
But the reason the name stuck is what jewelweed does for its neighbors. It grows alongside poison ivy–find one and you’ll usually find the other–and the crushed stem is the old remedy for the rash the ivy leaves behind. The plant doesn’t wait for better ground. It puts down roots in the disturbed, difficult places, and what it offers there is relief. That felt like the right thing to name a press after, in a season when so much of this work is being done under pressure: keep making the thing that helps, and make it right where it’s needed.
Balsamine Press 