The Esopus Foundation

Since its inception, the Foundation has been largely devoted to creating the publication ESOPUS, which features content from all creative disciplines presented in an unmediated format. Unmediated means that ESOPUS never contains advertisements or commercially driven editorial material and employs a purposefully neutral editorial voice in order to make the magazine a distributor, rather than interpreter, of its content. A typical issue offers contemporary artist projects, creative writing, critical essays, interviews, poetry, photography and more. Each issue features high-quality printing, removable inserts (fold-outs, posters, an audio CD), and dynamic designenhancing the uniqueness of each piece rather than forcing disparate material into a standard magazine grid.Our fundamental conviction is that contemporary creative expression deserves a larger audience than it often ends up reaching. By featuring a wide range of artistic expression, and avoiding the critical, specialized jargon often found in specialized art, film, and music journals, ESOPUS has attracted an unusually broad base of readers for an arts publication. ESOPUS has brought the work of more than 500 contributors to subscribers in all 50 states and 30+ countries, as well as bookstores and newsstands around the world. Our readership includes professionals from the art, film, theater, music, and publishing fields; public libraries, educational institutions, arts organizations, and general readers who have learned about the publication through features in The New York Times, NPR, and many other mainstream venues. We have further expanded our audience by pricing each issue at considerably less than its cost of production, making ESOPUS affordable and accessible to students and others with lower incomes. In addition, the Foundation offers free copies of each issue to public, school, and alternative libraries in rural and inner-city areas. In May of 2018, we published the 256-page ESOPUS 25, the largest and most dynamic ESOPUS ever. Following that, in September, we made the difficult decision to suspend the publication of ESOPUS, commemorating this decision with the publication of our Premium Subscribers Limited-Edition artwork Esopus Drawings, a series of drawings related to the history of ESOPUS.