Trace Press took root in a moment of upheaval: during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2019, publisher Nuzhat Abbas organized a collaborative work of translation about the massacre of political prisoners in Iran after the Iranian Revolution. An international effort between the poet Saeed Yousef, translator Ahad Bahadori, and illustrator Ava Raha, with a foreword by University of Toronto professor Shahrzad Mojab, the poem Lives Lost: In Search of a New Tomorrow was Abbas’s first foray into literary publishing.

“We published it. And then COVID happened,” Abbas says. “We had some sales and I ended up pretty much giving away some boxes. I also distributed some [books] at protests.”

While Lives Lost is the official beginning for the new press, Abbas sees the book as “a moment, an iteration, within a longer trajectory focused on conflict, exile, refugees, migration, the left, and feminist concerns.”

Trace Press emerged from Abbas “conceptualizing ‘trace’ and ‘translation’ as method and metaphor.” Translation, for Abbas, is a question about the relationship between writing, history, and memory that has been important to her throughout her life.

“While working on a name for the press, I started scribbling words with pencil on paper … I noticed that some words resisted erasure and left deep indentations on the page, and the word ‘trace’ came to mind. When I drew it out with the map logo I had in mind, I felt it resonated with the work I hoped the press would do.”

Thus, Trace Press, a small Toronto-based press focused on translation and community, was born. Abbas describes herself as a newcomer to the Canadian literary and publishing scene, but she has long been a community builder. In addition to teaching global literature and gender studies across the U.S. and Canada, she has hosted community-based writing workshops for immigrant and refugee women, and youth and seniors. Some of these workshops resulted in short-run publications, where Abbas developed her love for editing and publishing.

“I wanted to connect the collaborative process I enjoyed to the process of building books that could reach different communities of readers,” she says. During the COVID-19 lockdown, she decided to learn more about publishing, and developed a project with translation at its root. Initially called “Unsettling Translation,” that work ultimately took shape in the form of an anthology. The end result of a series of collaborations, workshops, and conversations that began in 2020, River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation was published in May 2023.

Featuring writers such as Canadian poets Otoniya J. Okot Bitek and Rahat Kurd, and London-based Indonesian writer Khairani Barokka, the book of essays describes “translation as a form of ethical and political love.” 

Abbas wanted to include voices of those for whom translation is an everyday task, making room for writers, even though they may not translate professionally.

“They live their lives conscious of their other languages. So I deliberately brought in writers as well, and not just active translators. I wanted people to think about how language is practiced. It’s not just consumption.”

For Abbas, the value of publishing extends beyond creating books: it is an effort to actively build “a different kind of public” by creating conversations between Canadian and international writers and translators that are about more than simply the tokenistic frameworks of multiculturalism and diversity.

Publishing is “a gathering where like-minded folks get to talk to each other,” she says.  “We’re interested in a larger conversation about literature.”

As a nonprofit endeavour, Trace Press is currently funded through sales, workshops, and donations. Two anthologies of poetry are forthcoming: a compilation of Tamil work, edited by Geetha Sukumaran and Nedra Rodrigo, and a collection of Arabic poetry edited by Yasmine Haj and Norah Alkharashi. Abbas welcomes support for this work.

“Funding is a serious challenge, but I’m extremely committed to the work we’re doing at Trace and determined to get through the inevitable obstacles we come across,” she says. Abbas’s immediate goal is to publish enough books so that Trace can qualify as a publisher under the Canada Council funding system.

While River in an Ocean sets a defining direction for the press, Trace Press is only just getting started. Abbas is “open to chance and whatever compelling texts authors and translators” may bring her way. Her welcoming and organic approach is reflected in the press’s guiding philosophy, which takes a cue from critic and theorist Gayatri Spivak, who reminds Abbas that “language belongs to so many others and that translating ‘is a simple miming of a responsibility to the trace of the other within the self.’”