Meritage Press seeks to expand fresh ways of featuring literary and other art forms. Meritage expects to publish a wide range of artists – poets, writers, visual artists, dancers, and performance artists. By acknowledging the multiplicity of aesthetic concerns, Meritage’s interests necessarily encompass a variety of disciplines – politics, culture, identity, science, humor, religion, history, technology, philosophy and wine.

Reflecting how poets make instead of inherit language, the press is named after "meritage," a word created to describe the Bordeaux-style of wine-making that uses California-grown grapes. Meritage style combines the grapes of cabernet, cabernet franc and merlot to create a wine characterized by robustness in flavor, bouquet, color and body – symbolizing the passion underlying the vision of Meritage’s artists.

Based in St. Helena and San Francisco, Ca., Meritage is published and edited by Eileen Tabios whose books include the unique anthology BLACK LIGHTNING: Poetry in Progress (Asian American Writers Workshop/Temple University, 1998). Her recent books include a collection of art essays and poems, My Romance (Giraffe Books, 2002); a selected prose poem collection (1996-2002), Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002); a short story collection Behind The Blue Canvas (Giraffe Books, 2004); a poetry collection Menage A Trois With the 21st Century (xPress(ed), 2004); and a multigenre collection I Take Thee, English, For My Beloved (Marsh Hawk Press, 2005).


Meritage includes an imprint BABAYLAN, which specializes in Filipino literature. The word "Babaylan" is a Bisayan word that can be translated to mean Poet-Priestess. As noted in the groundbreaking anthology BABAYLAN: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina American Writers (Aunt Lute Press, 1999) co-edited by Eileen Tabios and Nick Carbo, the Babaylans were storytellers, healers and community leaders in the Philippines whose positions were disrupted by the invasion of Spanish colonizers over four centuries ago. BABAYLAN resurrects itself in the 21st century to facilitate the dissemination of Filipino literature – a goal also addressed by Eileen Tabios when she edited The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings of Jose Garcia Villa (Kaya, 1999), recipient of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles National Literary Award.

Meritage Press is grateful to visual artist Theresa Chong for designing its organization’s logo. Meritage Press also thanks Meritage Association for permission to use a wine-related logo.

For queries, please contact: info@meritagepress.com