Our Name
Yellow Bike Press founder Andrew Durkin began his book editing career at Portland’s Inkwater Press. Most days he commuted on his bicycle—a yellow 2006 Norco he still owns. He’d bring the bike into the office, park it next to his desk, and get to work on the latest manuscript. The bike became a literary good luck charm, and when the time came to start this new company, it seemed the ideal symbol.
If you’ve never been to Portland or the PNW, bikes are a way of life here. In the obviousness of their mechanism, which is both simple and complex, they suggest craftsmanship, excellence, and art. They foster engagement with the surrounding world, and other humans. They’re both retro and progressive. And they connote ease, motion, and capability.
Also, bikes were invented in the same century as the typewriter.
Staff
Andrew Durkin (Editor-in-Chief)
Originally from New Jersey, Andrew (he/him) has a PhD in English literature from the University of Southern California, where he also taught freshman writing for six years. He was a postdoctoral fellow at USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the Annenberg Center for Communication, where he worked with digital media pioneer Bob Stein. Andrew is now a professional editor, author, and musician based in Portland, OR. Before founding Yellow Bike Press, he was an editor at Inkwater Press, where he edited hundreds of books, including No God Like the Mother by Kesha Ajose Fisher, winner of the 2020 Ken Kesey Award for Fiction sponsored by the Oregon Book Awards. Andrew is the author of Decomposition: A Music Manifesto (Pantheon, 2014), one of Los Angeles magazine’s “Best Little Music Books” of 2014.
Christy Peterson (Director of Community Outreach, Associate Editor)
Christy (she/her) has written more than 30 nonfiction books and articles for young readers. She has written about a range of topics, from the history of Earth Day to famous rocks, but most often writes about science and technology.
Christy’s book Earth Day and the Environmental Movement: Standing Up for Earth (Twenty First Century Books 2020) was longlisted for the 2021 Green Earth Book Awards and received a starred review from Kirkus. Her most recent titles are four Secret Spy books from Lerner Publications (2021). Other recent books include Into the Deep: Science, Technology, and the Quest to Save the Ocean (Twenty First Century Books 2020), Cutting-Edge Hubble Telescope Data, and Breakthroughs in Stars Research (Lerner Publishing 2019).
Christy lives with her family in Washington State, where she is working hard to turn her backyard into a 5-star resort for wildlife. Her all-time favorite books to read are fairytale retellings, though a good fantasy or scifi novel will do as well. Her favorite punctuation mark is the em dash.
