The Mainstream Is Not the Only Stream
A Letter from the Founder, Connor Wolfe
A Letter from the Founder
I founded Wayfarer to give voice to what wasn’t being heard. At the time, I didn’t know that one day that would include me. Now, more than ever, the mission must evolve to meet the moment. This is the story of that shift.
What would one day become Wayfarer Books was born in a fair-trade café in Boston’s North End during the summer of 2009. I was 27 years old, the country was in recession, indie bookstores were closing, e-readers were surging, and people said print was dead.
I founded the press anyway.
Back then, we were called Homebound Publications. We formally launched in 2011, and in 2012 expanded to include Wayfarer Magazine. It was a slow, scrappy climb—publishing work rooted in spirituality and ecological consciousness, carving out space for reflection and stillness in a chaotic world.
But like all living things, the press evolved. In 2024, after years of internal change and outward transformation, Homebound Publications became Wayfarer Books—a name that more fully reflects who we are now, and who we serve. The work we publish today is different in tone, but not in soul. It still arises from the wild margins. It still believes in the power of literature to alter the course of culture.
Independent presses rarely survive past their third year. Somehow, this one did. Since launch, we’ve endured a global pandemic, a paper shortage, shipping disruptions, inflation, industry-wide contraction, and above all else Amazon. The toll has been real, but survival itself is a statement. We are still here. Still printing. Still refusing to look away.
When I founded Wayfarer Books and Wayfarer Magazine, I was publishing under another name—a name I no longer live by. At the time, our mission was to uplift, to inspire, to remind readers of their connection to the earth and to something greater than themselves. I believed in that work. It mattered.
But I hadn’t come out yet.
In 2022, after losing my brother to suicide, the life I’d known until then began to unravel. His death was the rupture; grief cracked the foundation and nothing held the same shape afterward. When I came out as nonbinary and trans the same year, the fractures widened. Friends, colleagues, and even family—all family—refused to respect my name, my pronouns, or my truth. I knew my worth, and I didn’t accept being diminished or offered only conditional belonging. I walked away from anyone who demanded I stay small to preserve their comfort. In this process, I was disowned and I was unhoused. And as if that rupture weren’t enough, the following year, I received a life-altering diagnosis that upended everything I thought I could plan for.
For a time, I was lost in the storm of my own becoming. The press reflects my life; when I fracture, it fractures and when I begin again, so does it.
Following this upheaval, the truth is, I couldn’t publish spiritual work anymore. Not the way we had been. It felt too polished, too privileged—too far removed from the kind of pain I was living through and the kind of pain so many of our readers were facing. I found myself editing essays on inner peace while reckoning with erasure. The soft-focus language of transcendence and light no longer rang true. I needed something grittier, more embodied, more defiant. Something that didn’t look away from suffering but stayed with it, spoke from it—burned through it. That’s where Wayfarer needed to go because that’s where I had gone.
Not long into this period, someone close to me said something that shifted everything: “You already have a platform. Why not use it to further amplify trans folks, queer voices, and other marginalized communities?” It was a simple truth, but it landed with force. It was a permission, a reaffirmation of borderless self-agency.
Just as I had the freedom to grow so did the press. That changed everything.
I began opening submissions exclusively to authors from marginalized communities—queer and trans writers, BIPOC writers, disabled writers, incarcerated writers, immigrant writers…survivors. The work that came in brought energy and purpose back into the press. These weren’t voices writing for trends or accolades. They were writing because they had something to say… because survival depends on expression.
The evolution Wayfarer has undergone in the last three years isn’t a rebrand. It’s a reckoning. As a trans-owned press publishing in a time of open censorship, book bans, fascism, and federally sanctioned erasure, we’ve had to sharpen our vision but in truth we are only becoming more ourselves. When I first launched the press and magazine, our mission was “to ensure the mainstream is not the only stream” and to encourage readers to be “agents for change.” That mission still holds. But now, we serve those the mainstream has tried to silence.
We publish poetry, essays, nonfiction, and work that resists easy categorization but our lens is clear: Wayfarer [still] exists to amplify voices from the margins. We believe literature is more than art—it’s an act of resistance, a way to reclaim space in a world that would rather we disappear. These are dangerous times, yes, but they are also sacred. And we are still here writing, publishing, and refusing to be erased.
Thank you to every reader, writer, and kindred spirit who has walked with us so far.
We’re still walking and we’re not alone.
In solidarity,
Connor Wolfe
They/Them, Founder and Publisher
Wayfarer Books
Connor Wolfe (they/them) is a writer, publisher, and advocate whose work spans over two decades and fourteen titles. Their literary contributions have earned six Pushcart Prize nominations, the Gold Nautilus Medal for Poetry, multiple Foreword Review Book Awards, and the Nautilus Silver Medal in 2022. Their innovative approach to independent publishing led to two terms on the Board of Directors for the Independent Book Publishers Association, a TEDx talk at Yale University, and a degree at Harvard University (through grant programs).
Wolfe is a lifelong advocate for mental health, trans rights, and radical authenticity—the act of breaking silence to reclaim agency. After their TEDx Talk in 2018, they stepped into national conversations on mental illness, trauma, and the intersection of art and survival. Holding a degree in Psychology, their work examines how creativity and mental illness shape one another. Their studies in Photojournalism under Samantha Appleton sharpened their ability to bear witness—to capture the unspoken, the unseen, the truths too often buried.
In 2024, Wolfe volunteered in the Collections Department at the Museum of Anthropology at Ghost Ranch, assisting in the preparation of sacred objects for repatriation under the newly revised Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. After wintering along the Rio Puerco beneath Cerro Pedernal, they are now traveling with their three-legged black cat, momo—documenting, writing, and staying in motion, as all beat poets must.
As you, Connor, would say. Onward.
❤️🏳️⚧️❤️