Anyone paying close attention to Dallas culture will remember 2014 as the year a literary scene began to emerge. It was the year the city’s first independent bookstore, The Wild Detectives, opened; the year Will Evans launched a translation publishing house, Deep Vellum; the year hometown novelist Merritt Tierce earned critical acclaim with her debut novel, Love Me Back and the year the Dallas Public Library revived its book festival.
It also happens to be the year that Sebastián Hasani Páramo, Deep Vellum’s new poetry editor, moved back to North Texas.
“I was really optimistic about Dallas and my ability to make connections and be part of this community,” Páramo, 32, says. “And looking back now, it’s been really incredible to be part of this story because in some ways when I moved back it felt like we were writing on a blank slate.”
Páramo grew up in Garland and earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of North Texas. With an MFA in poetry under his belt from Sarah Lawrence College in 2012, he spent a few years in New York City before seeking cheaper rent back home. That Dallas readers and writers were building a literary community was serendipitous. In Páramo’s earliest visions of his life as a writer, he imagined being part of a literary-minded social circle, like the salons in Paris or the Algonquin Round Table in 1920s New York.
“Growing up, I would read a lot about authors and I was always attracted to their stories because they had these literary friends and were starting salons and magazines together,” Páramo says. “I think I’ve always romanticized the idea of writers within a community.”
Within weeks of arriving in town, he revived Dallas Literary One Night Stand, a reading series created by the editors of the quarterly literary publication Carve Magazine to bring together local and regional literary magazines. Before he even knew most local writers by name, he had hosted one of the city’s most popular literary events. The gathering filled The People’s Last Stand in Mockingbird Station wall-to-wall with poets, novelists, publishers and readers. In the following years, he founded several popular reading series and events, including Pegasus Reading Series, Deep Ellum Lit Hop and The Burning Plain Reading Series. In October, he founded Bandwidth, a series designed to highlight writers who published books during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This year has been really difficult for authors with new books,” Páramo says. “I wanted to fill what I saw as a gap for writers of both poetry and prose to do events to introduce people to their work.”
There are two reasons Páramo makes a great organizer of literary events. Firstly, he is a likable emcee: His soft-spoken confidence gives him a gentle yet generous presence. Secondly, and more importantly, he is a serious writer and editor. When he asks a colleague to participate in an event, the typical response is to be flattered. Páramo knows good writing.
“I’d say the key to Sebastian’s success as a literary organizer is that he genuinely appreciates other people’s work. You can feel that,” says Greg Brownderville, director of Southern Methodist University’s creative writing program and a friend of Páramo. “He hasn’t let the grind of a literary career steal his sense of wonder or his gratitude for beautiful writing.”
Páramo first started honing his literary taste as a high schooler on the internet. An elder millennial, he grew up devoted to the blogging community Xanga, where he met some of his first writing peers. On Xanga, he could publish poems, short stories or daily musings and find like-minded teens who were doing the same. It was the first time he tinkered with the idea of starting a literary journal.
In 2011, during graduate school, he founded The Boiler, which has since earned a reputation for discovering up-and-coming writers of all stripes. Most recently, an author the journal published in 2018, Anthony Cody, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award. Páramo remains its editor-in-chief.
It was his work with The Boiler that made Páramo top of mind when Deep Vellum Publishing began looking for a poetry editor earlier this year. Founded in 2014 as a publisher of work in translation, Deep Vellum has seen a surge of growth in the past few years, acquiring several publishing houses, including Dalkey Archive Press and Phoneme Media, a poetry-in-translation imprint with which Páramo will work closely.
Deep Vellum founder and publisher Will Evans says his five-year goal was always to start publishing original work, including poetry, in addition to translations. “We’re a literary publishing house,” Evans says. “We needed to publish poetry.”
Evans says he was hoping to find someone with a finger on the pulse of the entire field of poetry as a genre and an industry. It was a matter of luck that Páramo was also local.
“Sebastián fits Deep Vellum perfectly: His editorial taste and expertise is extraordinary, and he’s at a marvelous stage of his career where he’s still hungry, still growing and is excited about being a part of building something new,” Evans says. “He’s more than a reader, more than a writer, he is really all about community.”
In his role at Deep Vellum, Páramo will be responsible for the acquisition, development and marketing of five books of poetry each year. The demands of the work will vary. Sometimes, he might simply add a cover to a ready-to-publish collection of poems. Other times, he might take a talented writer and help them turn their work into a manuscript. In conjunction with Deep Vellum’s poetry-in-translation imprint, Phoneme, the goal is to eventually publish 10 poetry books each year.
Already, Páramo has acquired his first book from recent University of Arizona MFA graduate Sophia Terazawa, in which she uses war tribunals to explore the concept of love. It’s the kind of genre-bending, style-defying work Páramo wants for Deep Vellum.
“Some of the books that we’re interested in acquiring for Deep Vellum will be aiming to redefine poetry and will be able to comment on poetry in really exciting ways,” Páramo says. “The fact that this will be happening in Dallas makes it even more exciting to me.”
In a juggling act that’s typical for a writer, Páramo will add his job at Deep Vellum to an armful of teaching gigs, event planning obligations and the occasional writing day. Almost no one in his line of work fulfills the fantasy of full-time writing. The lives of the luckiest often look like that of Páramo, who earned his doctorate in August from UNT and is currently shopping around his first book of poetry.
In the spring, he’ll attend the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program, set in a Hill Country ranch house, where he’ll work on new ideas for poems, essays and even a second book.
“What I’ve found is that when I’m left to my own devices, I get too distracted,” Páramo says. “What really helped me focus was treating writing as a job, which is what you get to do at a residency.”
Much of his semi-autobiographical writing explores his identity and his family narrative. He writes in a lyrical style about his Mexican-immigrant parents, growing up in a working-class household and the American dream. Lately, he draws a lot of ideas from conversations with friends and the strange, stressful time we’re living through.
“I think my second book will be a little bit more apocalyptic, dealing with climate change and pandemics, of course,” Páramo says. “Poetry is one of our oldest literary art forms and many people will talk about it as a dying genre, but it feels more relevant than ever to me.”
