Controversial American poet, novelist, and essayist Ishmael Reed once described Trace Publications’ co-founder Rodger Jacobs as a “shock jock journalist (and) a hack screenwriter … passing for white … posing as a feminist … (and) as a barrier between the Anglos and the barbarians.” If Anglos are defined as the traditional gatekeepers of publishing and literary academia, and the barbarians represent the teeming herds of talented but marginalized writers living on the fringes of society’s narrow edges, then Reed may have unintentionally defined the mission statement of Trace Publications, a POD imprint supporting writers and poets who have established their names and reputations “off the grid.” The original blueprints for Trace Publications were drawn on the back of an upturned apple cart in the front yard – such that it was – of a double-wide mobile home on a barren stretch of the Mojave, 50 miles east of the I-15 that cuts a path through the desert connecting Las Vegas, Nevada, with Los Angeles, California. Since the day of that rough-hewn arrangement, memorialized over stale coffee at a long-forgotten truck stop with Tex Ritter playing on the jukebox and the waitress looking so bored she could kill herself, Trace Publications has grown to acquire a really cool office in Las Vegas, right along the northwest edge of the city, where civilization meets the sand.