Joseph Makkos

Joseph S. Makkos is a print historian and the founder and CEO of NOLA DNA, a business dedicated to the digital archiving and preservation of historic printed material. Through it he manages and curates a collection of some 30,000 historic New Orleans newspapers, a project covered by The Atlantic, the Columbia Journalism Review, Collectors Weekly and KCRW.

Based in New Orleans, he salvages letterpress printing equipment from defunct print shops and uses it for custom publishing projects that combine several printing processes into artful, small-run editions.

Before moving south he lived in Cleveland, where he co-founded The Language Foundry, an independent performance space and micro publishing house for local and touring poets and musicians. It published broadsides, audio works and books, including Charlotte Mann's Hotel Poem, a collection of film photographs of poets that Cleveland Scene named Book of the Year.

He has taught graduate-level writing at Tulane University and English at Delgado Community College, holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of New Orleans and a BA in literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and studied preservation at the Tulane School of Architecture.