Who we are
Clarinda Harriss became the editor and director of New Poets Series (BrickHouse Books’ previous incarnation) after her predecessor left that position. An accomplished poet in her own right, Harriss is a professor emerita and former chair of the English department at Towson University. In addition to editing some of BrickHouse’s most successful books, she is the author of Forms of Verse: British and American; The Night Parrot; License Renewal for the Blind; Dirty Blue Voice, Air Travel, and Mortmain, as well as co-translator of THE PEARL from Middle English to modern English. With poet Moira Egan, she is co-editor of Hot Sonnets: an anthology of erotic sonnets of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Harriss Poetry Prize, awarded annually by Baltimore’s City Lit Project, was named in her honor. Her many-decades long work with prison writers continues.
Staff & Author Stories
Tyson Koska, Editor
Doritt Carroll, Poetry Editor
Doritt Carroll is an attorney living and working in Washington, DC. Her collection of poems, In Caves, was published by BrickHouse Books in 2010. Her poems have appeared in Coal City Review, Poet Lore, Nimrod, Slipstream, Rattle, Plainsongs, Poetry Depth Quarterly, Maryland Poetry Review, Explorations, Negative Capability, Poet’s Canvas, Illuminations, The Baltimore Review, Journal of Formal Poetry, and Harlequin Creature.
Learn more about Doritt at her website, dorittcarroll.com, or head over to her BrickHouse Books’ author page.
Clarinda Harriss, Director and Editor-in-Chief
At Brickhouse Books, each of our employees has a unique background that ultimately led them to where they are today. All answer one fundamental question: How did I get here? Here are just a few of our stories, plus some from other fantastic writers! What is yours?
Tyson wears several well‑inked hats at BrickHouse Books as both the press’s Media Editor as well as one of their latest authors with his book "All Things Crack: Some Endure," now in its 2nd-printing. Tyson's talents were shaped by his literary mentor -- Baltimore poet and BrickHouse founder Clarinda Harriss, who he first met as an awestruck undergraduate in the early 1990s.
Beyond the press, Tyson is an adjunct professor at Towson University where he teaches Generative AI, promoting its capabilities as a companion to the creative process. His classroom is a bit like the publishing niche of BrickHouse -- equal parts curiosity cabinet and laboratory, fueled by the conviction that words are engines of empathy and change.
Today, Tyson moves fluidly between campus, personal writing desk, and on-line press office, helping to forge connections among Baltimore’s literary community, emerging writers, and the legacy he's received from Ms. Harriss. Tyson champions her mission: that vibrant, fearless poetry and prose can still shake the walls and light the way forward.
Doritt Carroll
Adrian Koesters, Author of Many Parishes
Tyson Koska
I was born in Bon Secours Hospital in Southwest Baltimore, and most of my childhood was spent back and forth living either with my grandmother in her house on South Stricker, just off Lemmon in the Union Square neighborhood, or with other relatives. At sixteen I moved to Washington State, and then at 19 to Nebraska where I have lived most of my adult life. Nebraska is now my home, but “Home” is Union Square, also the title of my first novel (not yet published). I also lived in the Govens area and on Roland Avenue.
My first book of poems, which I was delighted to have published in 2013 by BrickHouseBooks, details the Many Parishes of my childhood and adult life, and features a number of Baltimore locations and experiences, with a section of persona poems called “The Nuns Who Never Existed.” My second book, also under consideration at BrickHouse, is titled Three Days with the Long Moon. Both volumes are often poems of place, and how place has shaped my perhaps more than unusually odd and mixed perspective as a poet. In that sense, I feel I am still a true daughter of Baltimore, where everything always looks the same, and nothing seems the same way twice.