A home for what might otherwise be lost.

Glenville House Press was not built as a business decision.
It was built as a personal one.

After a life of stories being told, shaped, interpreted, and circulated, I reached a moment where something inside me asked for a different relationship to language. Not performance. Not outcome. But care.

I had spent years learning how stories move in the world. How they are received. How they are framed. How they are used. But the work that was forming inside me—reflections, memories, interior passages of a life—did not want movement first. It wanted holding.

I built Glenville House Press because I needed a place that could listen before it spoke. A place where a book could take the time it required. Where silence was not a problem to solve. Where meaning was allowed to arrive slowly. Where the measure of a finished work was not readiness for market, but readiness in spirit.

I named the house after the neighborhood where my memory begins. Glenville. Not as a symbol, but as a grounding. A reminder that my first education was not literary. It was observational. It was emotional. It was human. That neighborhood taught me to listen, to notice, to respect what lives beneath what is said. This house is an extension of that early training.

Glenville House Press is small by intention. It does not seek to gather many titles. It seeks to tend carefully to the ones it accepts. Some of those works will be my own. Others, I hope, will one day come from writers whose inner lives are as considered as their sentences. 

Writers who are not chasing attention, but telling the truth as they experience it.

I did not build this house to claim authority over stories. I built it to offer them a home. If Glenville House Press endures, I hope it does so not because of what it produces, but because of how it treats what is given to it.

—Antwone Fisher
Founder, Glenville House Press

There are stories a family carries quietly—folded into drawers, tucked inside Bibles, passed hand to hand. This is one of ours.

It begins with a young Black woman in Mississippi named Ida Jolliff, born in the long shadow of slavery but never built for small places. She left Grenada for the Mississippi River, working aboard a riverboat where she crossed paths with Turnbow, an oilman who kept her close and sold her a share of his company—an extraordinary act in the Deep South.

When that company merged into Gulf, then Standard Oil, then Exxon, Ida’s share disappeared from the record. But she kept the certificate. It was the one document she guarded, and the one that started everything.

Ida passed the certificate to her son Horace, who carried it north to Cleveland during the Great Migration. He became the first true keeper of the papers—gathering letters, research, attorney correspondence, and a decades-long trail tracing the corporate mergers that swallowed Ida’s stake.

He passed that responsibility to his son, Spinoza, the family’s enforcer, who pushed the case as far as he could, even receiving a written response from Exxon in 1973. Before he died, Spinoza handed the responsibility to his son Joey. And Joey, knowing the road ahead, told him, “Give it to Antwone. He has the best chance of being heard.” And so it came to me.

When I found my father’s family as a grown man, I wasn’t searching for any inheritance. But when Joey placed that worn manila envelope in my hands—filled with Ida’s legacy and a century of persistence—I understood what Spinoza had seen. He believed I was the one the world would listen to.

And during the filming of Antwone Fisher in Glenville, Spinoza gave me his final blessing. He stopped on the sidewalk, looked at me with a pride I’ll never forget, and said, “Man… your granddaddy would sure be proud of you.”

This story is about restoration—of a woman erased from a table where she rightfully held a seat, and of a family who refused to let her be forgotten. Ida’s share was taken, but her story wasn’t.

Ours is not the only family with a story like this; history holds many such quiet losses. I carry it now. And through this page, so will the world.