a literary arts organization & small press based in HTX. 501c3.
Passing salt is a gesture of kindness. It's a sharing of resources, especially a resource important to human life. We preserve and continue craft with it. Civilizations used to pay with it. Wealth and health. And that is a metaphor for providing platforms to literary art and voices launched via a small press.
Under the auspices of pass the salt presse are table//FEAST Literary Magazine, bar//DRINK Reading Series, The Unbroken Wheat Project, The Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan First Book of Poetry Prize which launches this coming summer of 2026, Spices & Staples: Workshop Series, and more.
Our primary focus for our press is poetry.
To learn about our impact project where we work alongside unhoused youth to write and we pay them for their poetry, click the Donate page.
To learn more about what we offer, enter a query into the Contact page.
Board Members, Interns, & Volunteers
The individuals below are dedicated to the mission of pass the salt presse and the enrichment, preservation, and continuation of poetry in not only HTX’s culture within - but outside as well.
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Founder, Editor, President & TreasurerColin James Sturdevant is a poet and writer living in the melting pot city that is Houston, TX. His work has appeared in Crab Creek Review, Blue Stem, The Bayou Review, Peach Fuzz Magazine, and Mid/South Sonnets. He is an MFA in Creative Writing - Poetry candidate at the low residency program at Western Colorado University. He enjoys cookery and dining out, craft cocktails, and foolishness. He's more interested in your story.
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Vice PresidentStalina Emmanuelle Villarreal (she/they) sees, hears, feels, and communicates across mediums and cultures. She’s a deep-watching ekphrastic poet, a photographic eco-essayist, a broad-stroke sketch artist, a sonic improv performer, a sound-sensitive literary translator, and an assistant professor of English. Their bilingualism stems from her 1.5-generation experience being both Mexican and Xicanx.
Her debut collection of poetry called Watcha is out now from Deep Vellum Publishing. Their poetry can be found in the Rio Grande Review, Texas Review, The Acentos Review, Defunkt Magazine, and elsewhere. Her published translations of poetry include Enigmas by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Photograms of My Conceptual Heart Absolutely Blind by Minerva Reynosa, Kilimanjaro by Maricela Guerrero, and Postcards in Braille by Sergio Pérez Torres.
Stalina is the recipient of the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry and one of the BIPOC Arts Network and Fund 2025 Artist Awards. Their visual poetry—spanning queer erotica, interactive digital art, and video installation—was part of the Antena@Blaffer exhibit at University of Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum.
She is currently writing ekphrastic elegies about her interpretative drawings of portraits and a memoir about her photographs of nature—revealing her ability to look backward and within, to write new ways forward.
(Photograph by Lynn Lane)
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SecretaryDavid Leftwich grew up in urban Texas and rural Missouri and currently lives in Houston with his wife and daughter. Before returning to the Bayou City, he lived on the East Coast, where he worked at a grocery store, a bookstore, a book wholesaler, and a book publisher. While in Houston, he has worked in book publishing and as a stay-at-home parent, writer, and editor.
His poetry manuscript at dawn, the first of the first to sing won 2025 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Contest and will be published in Fall 2027. His chapbook The City was published by the Little Red Leaves Textile Series. He cofounded and was editor of Sugar & Rice, a Gulf Coast food and culture journal, and was editor of Edible Houston. His work on the intersection of food, culture, immigration, and history has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, Sugar & Rice, Edible Houston,Food+City, Houston Food Finder, and Cite.
