About Kenneth Wapner

KENNETH WAPNER has worked broadly in publishing. He is an editor, writer, co-writer (collaborator), publisher, author, ghost writer, book packager and literary agent. For a fuller view of his activities, please visit: www.KennethWapner.com

Recent projects include:

Collaborator: Unlocked by George Mumford, mindfulness coach to Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, cororate and educational consultant and author of The Mindful Athlete. Published 2023 by Harper One.

Publisher: Through the Ruins, essays by cutting-edge artists, published in conjunction with the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College, 2023.

Developer and Editor: Thinking on Your Feet, world-renowend neuroscientist Adrian Owen’s book on the operation of the brain’s frontal lobes, sold to Norton in 2023.

Publisher and editor: Eden Revisted, a novel reexaming the biblical story of the first family. Published in conjunction with Bard College and the Institute of Advanced Theology. Publication, fall 2022.

Agent: All for Love, popular author Matt Kahn’s (20 million YouTube views) new book of spiritual teachings. Published in 2022, Sounds True.

Publisher and Editor: With Different Eyes: A Covid Waltz, a collaboration between author Paul Smart and filmmaker artist Richard Kroehling documenting a year of covid, published summer 2022.

Proposal development and collaboration with economics professor Stephanie Kelton on the New York Times bestseller The Deficit Myth (Public Affairs, 2020).

Editing civil rights activist Peggy Kennedy Wallace’s memoir The Broken Road, about growing up as the daughter of Alabama’s infamous segregationist governor and presidential candidate George Wallace (Bloomsbury, 2019).

Proposal development and collaboration with renowned neuroscientist Adrian Owen on Into the Gray Zone, about Owen’s revolutionary research contacting patients thought to be in a vegetative state (Scribner, 2018).

Packaged Falling is Flying by renowned Buddhist teacher Ajahn Brahn, a bestselling author, and Guo Jun, a Chan Master. (Wisdom, 2019), a book about facing adversity with courage and equanimity that is an international bestseller.

Other notable editing, proposal writing and collaboration projects have included:

The New York Times bestseller War of the Whales by Joshua Horwitz, which won the Pen/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Award (Simon and Schuster, 2014); the national bestseller The Zen of Creativity with Zen master John Daido Loori (Ballantine, 2004); the cult classic Bones of the Master, a thrilling spiritual adventure story set in Inner Mongolia, with poet George Crane (Bantam, 2000); and The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain, which presents neurologist Kevin Nelson’s groundbreaking research on near death experience (Dutton, 2011). Rabbi Jesus: an Intimate Biography (Doubleday, 2000) was one of four collaborations with religion bestseller, scholar and Anglican priest Bruce Chilton. The Parrot Who Owns Me (Villard 2001), with biologist Joanna Burger, was called a “brilliantly observed memoir”by People Magazine. Too Much of a Good Thing (Miramax, 2001) was one of four collaborations with Harvard psychologist and New York Times bestselling author Dan Kindlon. Wapner worked with Israeli ambassador Asher Naim on Saving the Lost Tribe, the dramatic story of the airlift of 14,000 Ethiopian Jews from Addis Ababa to Israel in 1991 (Ballantine, 2003). Death and dying author Ira Byock’s The Four Things That Matter Most (Free Press, 2004) continues to sell and was reissued in a 10th Anniversary Edition (Atria, 2011).

Many of these books have sold in multiple foreign territories and some have been optioned and acquired for film.

SAM TRUITT is the president of the non-profit Institute for Publishing Arts and the director of Station Hill Press. An award-winning poet in print, performance and digital arts, he is also a veteran business and literary writer and editor, teacher, curator, festival-organizer, radio-show host and volunteer ambulance driver. (click here for a more detailed biography.)

Recent projects include:

Organizer: Co-founded the Woodstock Center for Awakening and executed in September ‘23 its first annual Woodstock Community Festival of Awakening, a weekend-long gathering of healers, artists, musicians, poets and musician throughout town with 600 people in attendance.

Publisher: As director of Station Hill since 2010 edited, managed, produced and saw into the world over 40 books. Forthcoming and recent projects include: Close Your Eyes, Vision (poetry book by Michael Ruby); The Poetics of Sensibility (literary theory and criticism by Jerome McGann); Piece of Cake (a prose-poetry collaboration by Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh); Doubletalking the Homophonic Sublime (literary criticism by Charles Bernstein); and Measure’s Measure: Poetry and Knowledge (literary criticism from Michael Boughn).

Curation: Host of Pete’s Poetry Series at the Pete’s Candy Store, a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn: each second Friday of every month, we bring together the best, local and international poets of an experimental bent. Also, founder and co-curator of the Station Hill Intermedia Project, dedicated to finding new surfaces for poetry.

Developer and Editor: Recent projects, among others, include “Cine Poems” by filmmaker Richard Khroehling; John Godfrey’s “Prettier Grit”; and Matthew Cooperman’s “Time, & Its Monument.”

Broadcast: Founder and co-host of the podcast Baffling Combustions (Pacifica Radio syndication) dedicated to plumbing the mundane and cosmic strange, mysterious and beguiling events of the human and natural worlds.

Publicist: Co-founder of Morse Partners (1997-2002), a public relations firm dedicated to literary publishing, representing, among others, Index on Censorship, Bloomsbury, Zone Books, Turtle Point Press, Granta Magazine, Harvill and the New York Review of Books.