Mary Catherine (M.C.) Kinniburgh

Mary Catherine (M.C.) Kinniburgh has a decade of experience working with rare books and manuscripts, as well as editing and publishing. As co-director of Granary Books, she specializes in placing literary archives and artists’ books at research institutions, and manages the editorial and design work of the press. Prior to Granary Books, she was a literary manuscripts specialist and curatorial associate at The New York Public Library in the Berg Collection of English and American Literature. She honed her appreciation of archival research and processing during her Ph.D. in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where she worked with Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, on facilitating and editing archival research projects related to twentieth-century and contemporary poetry. In that context, she developed and taught collaborative primary source literacy seminars with The New York Public Library, and also taught at Brooklyn College.

She is the co-editor with Steve Clay of After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960–2025 (Granary Books, 2025), author of Wild Intelligence: The Politics of Knowledge and Postwar American Poets' Libraries (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022), and editor of bibliographies, histories, and works related to Telephone Books (Maureen Owen), Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Mary Korte, and other poets. She has published dozens of works with her own small press imprints, TKS Books and Subseries, and is a member of the Grolier Club, the Bibliographical Society of America (Publications Committee), and CBAA (the Association for Book Art Education).

Kinniburgh was named a "Bright Young Bookseller" in 2020 by Fine Books & Collections magazine, and her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Brooklyn Rail, ArtForum, Literary Hub, and other publications.