Hello, my name is Micaela McGregory and I’d like to introduce you to Big Sea Books and tell you more about myself and what I hope to accomplish here. 

Big Sea Books is a publishing house I launched in June 2024 after leaving my former company. Like many people of color, I found working in the industry incredibly difficult and at times hostile; so much so that the name of the press is derived from a negative experience I had with an old boss wherein I was told that “numbers” didn’t support putting a Langston Hughes’ title into production. No one reads Langston Hughes anymore, they said. 

In the words of Michael Jordan, I took that rather personally–and when I started my publishing house I knew that I had to name it after his autobiography, The Big Sea. 

I started this imprint because after years of working in the industry and seeing various complaints about it–both from the reader and worker side–I wanted to be the change I wanted to see rather than waiting for the rest of the publishing world to catch up. Big Sea Books isn’t here to do things the conventional way, we’re here to do things our way and hopefully put out some spectacular works of literary art. 

In my previous publishing life, I used my position to honor the philosophy of the late great Toni Morrison: “If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else,” by using my position as the head of a public domain imprint to put out relatively unknown works by people of color and LGBT authors, some of which you can see below. 

Projects I’ve Worked On

*While I decided which covers were chosen, I was working within a pre-determined color template. Books published by Big Sea books will not be utilizing this color template.