Experimental Project Press

OK Stamp Press commissions & publishes collaborative projects, writing & miscellany.

All proceeds invested in reader communities.

Volume 5 MTL Logo

Upcoming

OK Stamp Press x Volume 5

OK Stamp Press will be at Volume 5 Montreal Art Book Fair this year! Find our name amongst a stellar and kindred list of exhibitors. And visit us on Sunday, 2 October between 11am – 6pm EST at SAT in Montreal.

Not in town? Busy on Sunday? Come along to our programmed event on Thursday 29 September at 7pm EST (on zoom)! Details on the Volume 5 website. We’d love to welcome you to our round-table about letter writing and mutual aid. Join us, bring a letter, and consider sharing it during a collective reading (sign up for reading encouraged but not required).

We will surely be posting book fair moments on our IG: @okstamppress

OK Stamp Press is a fluctuating collective of folks who believe in creating inclusive spaces for sharing language, ideas and creative energy. 

The baseline of this project is an annual publication conceived/or mentored by the core OK Stamp team and brought to dissemination-stage in exchange for evidence of donations to local charities in the reader-collector’s community. As such, OK Stamp always operates from a core of accountability for the land upon which it creates as well as that of its readers.

When time, energy, funding and desires align, OK Stamp is also a mentoring structure, a collective for words, and an education.

It focuses on supporting emerging writers, editors, writers, printers and designers gain experience in publishing and disseminating their work. Each project is a series of relationships that shape the final outcome to suit the needs of those involved and their constituencies. OK Stamp accomplishes a dual task: generating publishing records that open-up funding opportunities for contributors; bringing considered cultural work into your hands.


We work slowly and intently. Our pages are textured with care.

OK Stamp Press was initiated by maya rae oppenheimer in 2020.
M. Wright joined the press as co-director, in 2022. But really, she was involved all along.

Credit Roll

Our editors and content contributors

Our book designers, authors + editors
[see individual book projects for details and contact information]


Design Lab — Concordia University
For putting us in touch with our book designers, year after year.


maya rae oppenheimer (phd) is the founder and co-director of OK Stamp Press. She’s also a daughter, sister, aunt, plant-mother of Icelandic and Canary Islander descent who receives joy and financial remuneration as an arts writer/researcher/educator. She was born in Treaty 1 territory and spent over a decade living in London (UK). maya is now an uninvited guest on Kanien’kehá:ka territory where she preoccupies herself with writing as a social practice and the tangles of narratives that inform our worldviews. Experimental writing, performance, radical pedagogy, open-access publishing, DIY tactics and rogue archival gestures make up her tool-kit. maya joined the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in September 2017 as Assistant Professor in Art History and is now active in the Department of Studio Arts.

M. Wright is co-director of OK Stamp Press. As a book designer and typographer, she has built a creative practice over the past 20 years that is rooted in collaborations with artists and cultural institutions, including museums, galleries, and academic publishers. Her book design work has received awards from the Type Directors Club, Print magazine, the American Association of Museums, the New York Book Show, the Chicago Book Clinic, and AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers. She is co-founder, with Kate Jarboe, of the queer-feminist art & design collective AK/OK, whose socially engaged artwork has been exhibited internationally. She is currently an affiliate associate professor at Concordia University, and holds an MFA in Visual Communication Design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an AB in Comparative Literature from Princeton University with a concentration in French literary translation.

Stéphane Landry joined OK Stamp Press in 2022 as their occasional French-language editor and proofreader. In addition to helping initiatives with their grammar – using his former journalist and radio-host chops – he also works as an educator in labour protocols, gets his fingers dusty digging for records, and drops crunchy music write-ups on Instagram. You can look forward to a poetry collection coming from Stéphane in the not too distant future. Follow him @plasticpalaceperson.

Catherine Toews provides digital & design support to OK Stamp Press. Tulip Tree Creative is Catherine’s one-woman design studio & small business, specializing in websites, branding & digital marketing for small businesses, creators and nonprofits. FLORA editions is the artistic branch of Tulip Tree Creative, a collection of archival quality art cards featuring Catherine’s botanical & portrait drawings. In addition to art and design, Tulip Tree Creative also encompasses Catherine’s community-based yoga practice.

Publications

drifts

A limited edition artist/writers’ book, drifts is designed to support the very action named in its title. Hand bound with unique foldouts, page cuts and spacious typography, the creative and critical writing is an eponymous invitation. Published in a non-hierarchical format, each engagement is akin to an invitation to consider positionality, relationships to land and city, and writing as a gesture of physical or embodied drifting. Handbound.

Recommended minimum donation price:

$35 CAD

Send documentation of a donation to a local cause of your choice along with a shipping address, and we will mail you a copy.

  • Publication Date: May 2021
  • Book Designers: Kassandra Lévesque-Wong; Antua Handal; Daniel Cortes
  • Printer: Le groupe Quadriscan + handbound by designers and contributors
  • Contributing Editors + Project Coordinators: Georgia Philips-Amos; Stephanie Hornstein; María Castañeda-Delgado
  • Assistant Editor and Contributor: maya rae oppenheimer
  • Design Mentor: M. Wright
  • Contributors: Austin Henderson; Patricia Pérez Rabelo; Alexandra Nordstrom; Amelia Wong-Mersereau; Polina Lasenko; Jeanne Marceau; Jolee Smith; Laurence Charlebois; Noémie Fortin
  • Showcased in the group exhibition: “The Space-Between,” Department of Design and Computation Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University (June 2021)
  • Conceived and distributed by OK Stamp Press

Re-enactment Recipes

Re-enactment Recipes gathers essays, photographs, drawings and creative writing in the form of recipes. These are recipes in an expanded sense: imagined sets of instructions, lists, and conceptual ingredients enrich this book, which does more than cook your weekday meal. In its pages, twenty-two emerging writers and artists share instructions for meals remembered and commentary on food, community and nourishment.

Recommended minimum donation price:

$25 CAD

Send documentation of a donation to a local cause of your choice along with a shipping address, and we will mail you a copy.

  • Publication Date: January 2020
  • Book Designers: Lydia Carignan, Auguste Courvoisier, Justine Provost, Unna Regino
  • Printer: Le groupe Quadriscan
  • Editor and Contributor: maya rae oppenheimer
  • Design Mentor: M. Wright
  • Project Coordinator + Contributor: Elizabeth Sanders
  • Contributors: Davika Khurana; Jeanne Gourd; Francine Chimpen-Carrillo; Liyang Shi; Noel Madrid; Tania Marques; Jolen Maclean; Jack Paisley; Victoria Gray; Kate Nugent; Daisy Duncan; Alaina Perez; Catherine Leblanc; Pashka Paskulin; Morgane Lecocq-Lemieux; Sophie Wonfor; Allison Figueroa-Rojas; Jessica Turcotte; Sony Cody; Helen Park; Doug Dumais
  • 2019 winner of the Design + Community Engagement, Department of Design and Computation Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University
  • Conceived and distributed by OK Stamp Press.

Get in touch.

For questions, project ideas, and musings, please send us an email.

To request a copy of one of our publications, please fill out our book order form and include documentation of a donation to a local cause of your choice along with a shipping address.